California has spent years passing land-use reforms aimed at making it easier to build more housing, but the state’s housing market looks anything but unified.
The new Market Clock from Realtor.com® shows California’s biggest metros are scattered across multiple phases of the buyer-seller cycle: San Francisco is an early seller’s market at 11 o’clock, San Jose is a late seller’s market at 1, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Diego sit at 2 in early balanced territory, and Riverside has moved all the way to 5, into early buyer territory.
That spread mirrors a broader national pattern. Across the top 50 metros, the Market Clock now spans 9 of its 12 positions, the widest distribution since the data begins in 2018.
In a state that has passed over 180 land use reforms since 2017, you might expect the market to be moving in one direction.
But California’s reforms were never going to put San Francisco, Riverside, and San Diego on the same housing timeline. The state can rewrite building rules, but buyer-seller leverage is still shaped locally.
California is fragmented because leverage is local, not statewide
The Market Clock offers “an ‘at a glance’ diagnostic tool for understanding whether buyers or sellers hold the upper hand in a local housing market,” explains Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com.
It’s not a way to measure land use reform, but it does offer a useful window into the market conditions people feel on the ground—and the kinds of frustrations that can shape politics and voting.
Across the country, the recent wave of land use reforms have in large part been driven by the extreme housing shortage that the country faces. Today, that shortage is estimated at 4.03 million homes—a gap that has driven up home prices and risked pricing entire generations out of homeownership and the wealth building powers that come with it.
California offers an extreme example. Only about 45% of California households would likely qualify for a mortgage on a bottom-tier home (those with values in the 5th to 35th percentile) in 2025, down from about 60% in 2019, according to a recent report from California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.
For mid-tier homes (those with values in the 35th to 65th percentile of the market), only 23% would likely qualify in 2025, down from about 35% in 2019.
But affordability is just one sticking point, and the Market Clock helps illustrate this by measuring local housing cycles and leverage.
“It’s based on indicators for available inventory, how quickly homes are selling at asking prices, and whether sellers or buyers are gaining more leverage during home sale transactions,” says Krimmel. “What it’s not for is saying whether a market is cheap or expensive, or whether homes are affordable relative to local incomes.”
The housing gap has also kept the national market stuck in seller’s territory—a dynamic clearly reflected on the Market Clock. In 2018, 52% of metros were in seller’s territory and by 2021, that share had swelled to 98%.
Land use reforms also accelerated in this timeline. Data from the NYU Furman Center’s Land Use Reform Tracker shows national reforms rising from 35 laws enacted in 2020 to 105 in 2021, 69 in 2022, 138 in 2023, and 131 in 2024.
Since 2017, California has enacted 182 land-use reforms, with activity accelerating in the early 2020s and peaking at 31 laws in 2024.
Why land-use reform doesn’t automatically show up in buyer-seller dynamics
It’s a significant finding given how land-use and affordable housing reforms have become the rallying cry for politicians and ballot measures nationwide—even if this may in part be a response to a stuck market, these reforms aren’t meant to alter those dynamics directly.
“Supply side land use reforms are meant to solve housing shortages via new construction,” says Krimmel. And while the hope is that those reforms eventually work their way into greater affordability, they don’t ensure anything about buyer-seller leverage.
Again, a look at California’s markets helps explain this. Krimmel points to the AI boom and return to office push as the factors tipping San Francisco to an early seller’s market and San Jose to a late seller’s market.
Meanwhile, “a market like Riverside is moving in a more buyer friendly direction, as high mortgage rates and low immigration rates are likely weighing more on local housing demand there than in the affluent Bay Area,” he says.
So how should California judge whether reform is working?
Not by looking at the Market Clock alone, says Krimmel—and perhaps not by looking at the sheer number of reforms passed, either.
Instead, he points to the housing pipeline: permit applications, housing starts, certificates of occupancy, new housing unit data, and household formations. Those are the clearer indicators of whether pro-supply reform is actually translating into more homes.
When looking at California from that perspective, the market splits once again. California housing permits ranged from a high of 120,780 units in 2022 to 101,546 the following year—well below the 180,000 homes per year the state says it needs.
On the household formation front, IRS data points to a sustained outbound migration with one California resident leaving every 1 minute, 44 seconds.
It helps explain why California’s housing politics have echoed far beyond the state.
Austin housing advocate Nicole Nosek, who moved to Texas from California in 2019, says she immediately recognized the same forces that had helped push Bay Area housing out of reach. She went on to organize and testify for pro-housing changes in Texas, using California as a warning about what happens when supply constraints are allowed to harden for too long.
And while Texas has passed far fewer land-use reform laws than California—the Furman tracker counts 13 enacted measures there since 2017—it has gone much further to bring more units online.
The difference shows. In Austin, median asking rent fell 7.3% year over year in January 2026, marking 33 straight months of annual declines, and by February 2026 rents were 18.2% below their local peak—the deepest drop among the nation’s 50 largest metros. Austin also sits at 5 o’clock on the Market Clock, in early buyer territory.
