April closed and the spring surge that started building in late March confirmed itself in the data. Inventory expanded across most Silicon Valley submarkets for the first sustained month in roughly a year. Sale-to-list ratios held above asking in the core luxury corridor. Median price per square foot ticked up again. Days on market stayed compressed in the most desirable pockets and stretched modestly in the secondary markets — exactly the divergence that defines a maturing seller’s market rather than a peak one.

I am Brad Bell, a Silicon Valley native and top 1% real estate agent nationally with Coldwell Banker Global Luxury. The numbers below are the working April read I share with my own seller and buyer clients — sourced from MLSListings county-wide pulls, organized by what actually changed month over month, and translated into the decisions you have to make in May.

Inventory expanded in April for the first sustained month in roughly a year — but the luxury tier in Cupertino, Los Gatos, Saratoga, and Palo Alto stayed tight.

The Headline Numbers

Across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, April produced the highest active inventory count of the spring so far. New listings outpaced new pendings for the first time since last summer. That sounds bearish on the surface, but the absorption math tells a different story: pending sales also climbed, just at a slightly slower pace than new listings hit the market. The result is a market that is finally giving buyers something to look at without giving up seller pricing power.

What Actually Shifted From March

The most important shift in the April data is not any single metric — it is the alignment of three trends moving together for the first time in a year. New listings climbed. Pending sales climbed. And median price per square foot still pushed higher. That combination is the textbook signature of a healthy, expanding market: more supply, more transactions, and pricing power that does not require artificial scarcity to hold.

Closed sales climbed alongside new listings in April — the alignment that separates a healthy expansion from a peak.

The second shift worth flagging: the gap between the most desirable pockets and everything else widened again. A well-prepared single-family home in central Cupertino, downtown Los Gatos, north Palo Alto, or the better Saratoga neighborhoods is still seeing five to fifteen offers in the first weekend. Move two ZIP codes over into a less-targeted submarket and that same property profile is now getting two to four offers and pricing closer to list. Both are seller’s markets — but the strategy for each is meaningfully different.

The Luxury Tier Held Up Best

The $3M and up segment turned in the strongest April of the spring. New luxury inventory came on the market in steady volume, but the pending-to-active ratio in this tier actually tightened compared to March. Tech equity events, year-end bonus deployments, and the persistent migration of high-net-worth families into Atherton, Los Altos Hills, Old Palo Alto, and the better Saratoga and Los Gatos neighborhoods kept the buyer pool deep.

Two specific patterns stood out. First, off-market and pre-MLS activity in the $5M and up range continued to absorb a meaningful share of the highest-end transactions before they ever hit the public feed — a structural reality of the trophy market that does not show up in published data. Second, condition mattered more in April than at any point in the prior six months. Move-in-ready, properly staged, professionally marketed homes outperformed comparable homes that were brought to market unprepared by margins that genuinely matter.

Move-in-ready, professionally prepared luxury homes outperformed comparable unprepared inventory by meaningful margins in April.

What April Means For Sellers In May

What April Means For Buyers In May

For buyers, April delivered the first real opportunity to be selective in over a year. More inventory, longer effective list-to-pending windows in secondary markets, and slightly tempered urgency at the very top of price ranges all create a window where a thoughtful, prepared buyer can win without overbidding by twenty percent.

The buyers winning in May are doing three things differently. They have a fully underwritten pre-approval letter from a local lender who answers their phone on weekends. They have a clear short list of three to five target submarkets — not a wishlist of every desirable city in the region. And they are running comps on every property they tour the same week they tour it, so when the right home appears they can write a strong, well-supported offer inside 48 hours.

In the most competitive submarkets — downtown Los Gatos, central Cupertino, north Palo Alto — multiple-offer activity remained the norm through April.

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