Photo courtesy of  loicphoto.com

San Francisco Bubbles

Happy New Year one and all!  While much of the rest of the country was just beginning to come out of its long recessionary swoon, our little piece of heaven enjoyed its second full year of a booming sellers’ market, fueled in no small part by what appears to be a decisive shift in venture capital to our local zip codes.  Those much-despised Goo-hoo buses are no accident.  Take a look at this instructive chart from an August 2013 piece in The Atlantic entitled “Why San Francisco May Be the New Silicon Valley”: ...  Additional Details

Own or Rent? Your Home as an Investment

This month I want to bring together two recent analyses we’ve done on home ownership. The first looks at whether homes are good long-term investments. During the heart of the economic winter, in April 2010, I argued in this post that there are better investments than buying a home. Rather, the almost universal urge to own a home is about satisfying our hard-wired need for “shelter” – a cave that’s secure from marauding creatures (and humans), where we can paint our dreams on the walls without worrying about the landlord. ...  Additional Details

San Francisco Median Home Sales Prices
It’s not unusual for median prices to fall in the first and third quarters (affected by winter and summer holidays) and rise in the second and fourth quarters (prime spring and autumn selling seasons). This is what happened in this past third quarter and it typically has more to do with seasonal factors than changes in market values. One has to look at the longer term trend, not monthly or quarterly fluctuations, to determine what’s really happening in the market. For the last 6 quarters, the overall trend in home prices has been upward. ...  Additional Details