The problem sellers are the ones who haven't owned their home very long. The values are now back to where they paid for them, in some cases even lower.
July 2022 was the top. The three-month median in San Francisco reached roughly $2.15 million that spring, and it would not see that level again for years. What I said at the time about how abruptly this market turns was not a warning about the future, it was a description of what was already happening that week.
The part I would underline now is the bit about tenure, because it is the most useful thing I know about downturns here and it gets discussed the least.
A correction does not hurt sellers evenly. Someone who bought in 2012 and sold in 2022 was fine, because a fifteen percent decline from a peak is noise against a decade of appreciation. Someone who bought in early 2022 and needed to sell eighteen months later was in trouble, because they had no cushion, they had paid peak pricing, and transaction costs alone can consume years of gains. Same market, same month, entirely different outcomes.
Which means the question that actually determines your exposure is not where prices are going. Nobody knows that. It is how long you can hold. If your honest answer is under five years, you are buying a timing bet whether or not you intended to, and you should size it accordingly. If your answer is fifteen years, the shape of any single cycle matters far less than people assume.
The market did recover, and by late 2025 it was setting new highs on the back of AI wealth. The sellers who could wait were rewarded for waiting. The ones who could not are the reason I ask, early and directly, how long someone plans to stay before we talk about anything else.
