Why not start looking right away and when you find the right house, buy it? If you’re buying to live in long-term, then it’s more important to find the right house than trying to save a little bit of money. Especially as it seems rates will keep increasing.
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Ditto what @marcus335 said. You should start looking right away without regards to rental terms. It might take forever to find your ideal place, which was what I meant in my initial post.
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November/December is historically the best time to buy. If I were you I would start looking and be open to lowballing. You may get lucky and catch a desperate seller mid-December.
I am with Marcus esp if you are looking at these areas. You are looking at competitive cash rich area, down turns rarely affect these areas as people are there to look out for homes through out the year.
If you still need to look out for buy-low opportunity, just buy now before Dec 2018 or next time when the stock market is at low ebb like happening now.
The simple reason is most of the buyers do not like to sell their stocks at low price even though they were profitable over years.
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Did you already accept the offer? Since the market is slow now, I am curious whether you had any challenge to sell for a decent price.
In terms of buying, I think it’s a good idea to start looking now and buy whenever you find a really good house. It’s hard to guess the market now, rate is up but job market is strong. It could stay relatively flat with seasonal ebbs.
I would say buy immediately. I think there will be more and more people that get frustrated with the stock market and will start buying local real estate. It’s just a matter of months for the sentiment to change in stock market. That may happen in the next few months. Housing is not like that as we have seen even during times like 2009 in Cupertino etc. After the dotcom bubble, people piled on into real estate. I am expecting something similar to happen in the next few years. Economy is still great and job market is also very strong. As long as there is no recession, people will not get into cash. Also unlike in 2009, as you may be very well aware as a seller, mortgage loans are still quite strict. So there won’t be any distress selling in real estate. You will see that or already seeing that in stocks.
Try not to extrapolate from past experiences. Things may not happen the same way. What is the reason for people to pile into RE during dotcom bust? Are they the same guys whose shares are plummeted? In that case, where do they get the cash? Or are they cash rich investors who happen to be lucky? Or are they those guys who can’t buy RE but with tons of cash waiting and finally jump in? These details could alter the course of events. I want to know the profile of the people piling into RE shortly (about 3-6 months) after the dotcom crash.
I know people who are holding millions of dollars of RSUs in Nutanix, FB, Apple, Nvidia. The current stock market is making them think. If they sell some RSUs they don’t want to be holding cash because they don’t see a recession in near term. Real estate outside and within the bay area (east bay primarily) is the main topic of discussion for them now a days. They all have primary homes in South bay.
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Sound like I need to short NTNX, FB, AAPL and NVDA.
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You can get burned with Apple. 
Charts of NTNX, FB and NVDA continues to be ugly. Especially NVDA, it didn’t drop much when other semi are dropping, some catch up actions there. I have placed many stink bids for NVDA.
With NVDA, I am thinking that it will shoot up Thursday after hours.
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What, Kidding? It is 31.92% now down from peak, from 292.76 to 176.01
I have been waiting for NVDA results to spike like TSLA !
That is why I like the volatility, that gives me opportunity to get COST, BA, TSLA, AMZN, GOOGL, NFLX, TEVA, AAPL and NVDA at throwaway price!
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I think I confused y’all. 
We definitely will start looking right away, but currently there aren’t many coming on the market, making finding the perfect house harder. Yes, timing the market to save a few 10k’s would be fools errand - but if I could find a prettier home at a good location, I’m willing to wait around while renting, even if that means the price could go up few $10k higher from now.
But sounds like it’ll be slim picking since the demand will be higher too.
While this is a plausible scenario, I suspect the reverse is much more abundant: most folks (esp in South Bay) max out on their loan + down payment to meet the current price level, so when RSU takes a 10% hit, that impacts the home prices fairly shortly.
To hold millions of FB RSU, you gotta be at least ~5 yrs into their job without buying a home. What da heck have they been doing for so long, sitting on that much of single asset?
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Yes, I think the current price level is actually pretty sweet.
They already have primary homes and some of them have rentals too. FB stock did really well in the last 5 years even with the latest drop. They had no reason to sell it until now.
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I wont be touching RE in this market. Not till next May when trends are clearer. Willing to pay 5-10% higher if the trends are positive. But wont bet on it.
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They waited last 3 months for the trends to get clear. Look what happened. Some of their stocks are down by 25% already. Real estate has not gone down that much. So they would have been better off buying homes in August.
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Your assumption is that Stock and RE investments (primary, rental) are comparable. Its not the case.