A report from the San Francisco Chronicle in California. "Despite a surge in inventory and price cuts, the median price paid for a Bay Area home in October was $845,000, up 3.7 percent from September and up 9.3 percent from October of last year, CoreLogic said. That’s a healthy increase considering that new listings, active listings and price reductions in September and October were way up on a year-over-year basis throughout the Bay Area, according to data from Patrick Carlisle of the Compass real estate brokerage."

"Part of that is seasonal, said D.J. Grubb, president of Grubb Co. Realtors in the East Bay. 'The jet takes off in February, levels off in spring, and we sit at that level through the year. Sellers don’t realize that,' Grubb said. 'They think they can get the trajectory in October and November (that they got in the spring). They can’t.'"

"He added that the surge in price cuts 'is not value reduction, that’s overambitious seller reduction.'"

"The price increase over last year represents somewhat of a slowdown for the Bay Area’s frenetic real estate market. On a year-over-year basis, prices have risen for 79 consecutive months, and had been rising in the double digits for 13 consecutive months until September, when the median price also rose 9.3 percent, CoreLogic said."

"That may be, and October is always a big month for price cuts as sellers try to close deals before the market slows down from Thanksgiving until Super Bowl Sunday. But the number and percentage of homes with a price cut in October was the highest for the month of October in the Bay Area since at least 2012."

"Karen Yang, a Coldwell Banker agent in Los Altos, said the market 'is a little more buyer-friendly' than the CoreLogic numbers would indicate."

"One of her clients, Lisa Smith, is about to close on a condo in San Mateo. Smith said she is buying the condo to rent out to her daughter. Smith was hoping to be the only bidder on the two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo — and she was. She offered less than the $950,000 asking price and got it for $922,000. 'In July (the seller) she would have had multiple offers. She probably would have gotten slightly over asking price,' Smith said."

"Yang said the price Smith is paying is what comparable condos in that complex were selling for in early 2017."

"She has another client who purchased a home in Sunnyvale (with a different agent) in March for about $2.35 million. It was the 16th offer they had made, Yang said. The home was intended for multigenerational use, but turned out to be not right for anyone in the family so they put it on the market. After getting only one serious offer they sold it for about $2.1 million in July. 'We were worried if they didn’t take that $2.1 million the market was going to slip further. I believe it did,' Yang said."

"Lower-end homes are selling much more slowly. In Santa Clara County, 'our inventory is about three times what we had available this week last year,' Yang said. 'Our single-family homes are up about double, our condos and town houses are up 400 percent. I think the absolute cost of getting into housing has gone up so dramatically here that first-time home buyers may be getting priced out of the market.'"