Walking my dog, yesterday afternoon and I was brought up short by this beautiful wreck around the corner from where we live.
Light and shadow from the rafters seemed to make the windows glow like cardboard cut-outs.
Here’s the scoop: Listed in mid-May for $799,000, sold on June 25 for $700,000. 1360 square feet of original detail. $515 bucks a foot.
I quote from the listing: “All inside doors, most hardware, some light fixtures appear original and possibly pre-1900.” ...
Back in February I posted about two $2.1 million homes offered for sale in my ‘hood. 731 Douglass had 3,000 square feet of good, livable space and the sorts of finishes and flourishes you’d expect. But it had no back yard and was located on the fairly busy corner of 24th Street and Douglass, with a Muni stop and Noe Valley Courts’ sand-pit within spitting distance of the front windows.
Meanwhile 110 Hoffman, offered at just $2,000 less than Douglass, had a little less space and a vertical, less user-friendly lay-out. But, location it had in spades, on one of Noe’s best and quietest streets. Plus it had a spacious back yard with a lovely mature tree. ...
Every time there’s a housing slump, there’s discussion about whether the top end or the bottom end is fairing better or worse. Here’s a June 2009 article from The Examiner, declaring that luxury home prices in SF are picking up. And here’s a report published by First Republic Bank, which puts out a so-called “prestige home index,” for various cities in California, stating that luxury home prices in San Francisco continue to fall. Here’s the accompanying chart from First Republic. ...
Recently, I blogged about the fact that condominiums seemed to be holding up better than single family homes in terms of their decline from their all-time highs.
At the same time, I noted that there was only about $100,000 difference in median value between condos and homes. That seemed like a small delta and I was interested to see whether it was, historically speaking. Turns out that it is.
Since, until recently (ahem!), home prices along with everything else have tended to go up, I decided not to look simply at the difference in price between condos and homes. Instead, I converted the price difference to a percentage of the median value of condos sales for the given period. This represents the “premium” for owning a home rather than a condo. Here’s the result. ...
There’s been a fair bit of discussion on various real estate blogs about the state of foreclosures in San Francisco. Here’s a picture of SF, courtesy of Hotpads, on our little patch of heaven.
Core SF neighborhoods seem to be doing OK, though worse than “average” — not defined by Hotpads as best as I could tell. Outer neighborhoods are not doing so well.
The big surprise is the amount of red over in Marin, including toney areas like Sausalito and Mill Valley. Frankly, I’m skeptical; it just doesn’t add up. There’s not a lot of information on the free part of their website on their methodology though I believe they’re using data from Realtytrac, which has its own fee-based foreclosure radar website. If I come up with better information I’ll update this posting. ...
Ken Rosen, Chair of the Fisher School For Urban Economics over at UC Berkeley, has good news for San Francisco home owners. “The recent rise in home prices and sales activity lead us to believe that the worst part of the correction in home prices is behind us and that housing market conditions are showing signs of improvement.”
This report, based on June results, is the first of what will be a monthly analysis of the San Francisco real estate market undertaken by The Rosen Consulting Group on behalf of The San Francisco Association of Realtors. You can download it here. ...
Case-Shiller published its closely watched indices yesterday. Hooray! The broadest CS index shows that the rate of decline in the nation’s largest housing markets has reversed in recent months. Now we’re only going down 16% year over year instead of 20%.
They also point out that we are now back to 2003 values, which also holds true of San Francisco. Here’s my chart from an April blog:
Before you go out and celebrate, Case-Shiller has “San Francisco” down a whopping 26.1% year over year. Why the quotes? Because it’s really the “San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area” and it includes ALL of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo, and … San Francisco County. That’s 5 counties folks, a factoid often omitted even by such august publications as the New York Times (see today’s front page article). ...
For the quarter century (gulp!) that I’ve been involved in real estate, the conventional wisdom has always been that condo values generally do worse in down markets than homes. Why? To be honest, I’m not sure, but I think it’s because it’s easier to overbuild the condo market than the single family home market. It goes back to that famous quote: “Buy land – they aren’t making any more of it.” Just take a look at Miami, Chicago – or downtown San Francisco. One new high-rise can hold hundreds of condos in the sky. Try building just one new home in SF, let alone hundreds – it aint happening.Of course, more supply + less demand in a down market means prices fall. Has that been the case in San Francisco? ...