James and Ashley Harvey made a bid to buy a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath house near Windsor's Foothill Regional Park in October shortly before the Kincade fire rushed over the Mayacamas Mountains, swept across Alexander Valley and came within a few hundred yards of their "dream home."
Even worse, the Harveys lived in a much smaller home in the same Windsor neighborhood. They wondered if the county's latest destructive wildfire would ruin their plans to sell their existing home to help pay for the new one.
"We put an offer in right before the fire started," James Harvey said this week. "I ordered an appraisal while I was looking at the flames off in the distance."
As firefighters waged a valiant stand against Kincade, preventing it from devouring hundreds of homes in northeast Windsor and other populated areas, local real estate experts wondered whether the second inferno in two years to reach the Sonoma County flatlands would again upend the county housing market.
It didn't. Windsor, Healdsburg and neighborhoods in and near Santa Rosa were saved this time from the flames.
In Windsor, Kincade, for the most part, was stopped at the Foothill park boundary. The Harveys bought their dream home and Windsor's housing market ended 2019 with a 16% increase in the average single-family home sale price of $702,100, according to The Press Democrat's latest monthly housing report, compiled by Rick Laws of Compass real estate brokerage in Santa Rosa.
The end-of-year report for Sonoma County, which tallies home sales, monthly median prices and inventory during the 12 months, shows how the local housing market performed throughout 2019.
Local real estate experts say the market continues to regain its footing after the turmoil caused by the 2017 North Bay wildfires, which destroyed about 5,300 houses in the county. After those October fires, prices inflated in 2018 as the destruction strongly stoked demand for homes. Last year, the housing market cooled and balanced itself.
Countywide, housing sales activity finished 2019 strong and that helped make up for a slow start, Laws said. The 4,441 total homes sold were only 1% fewer than the 4,453 sold in 2018.
The county's median single-family home sale price of $635,000 in December was 2% less than the median of $650,000 at the beginning of 2019. The county's average median sale price for the entire year was $650,000 compared with $665,000 in 2018.
Real estate agent David Rendino, who co-owns Remax Marketplace in Cotati with his wife, Erika, said the housing market in some communities experienced significant "ups and downs" last year before finishing on a positive note. Windsor was a prime example, he said.
"For most of the year, it was hairy in Windsor," he said. "We were having to make reductions on properties and they were sitting for a while."
Across the county last year, Laws said east Petaluma saw the biggest increase in the number of homes sold: 321 vs. 271 in 2018, an 18.5% jump. On the other hand, Oakmont community in Santa Rosa, saw the biggest decrease, 16.5%, with 152 homes sold in 2019 after 182 were sold the year before.
Changes in the annual median sales price were less dramatic last year, Laws said. With the exception of Oakmont, where the median dropped from $700,000 in 2018 to $613,750 in 2019, fluctuations in median price in other cities and towns in the county were under 10%.
