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Home-Spotting: Second Time Around, 285 Douglass sells for $250,000 over asking

Explain this one to me please.   Elegant if dowdy Victorian lists for $2.349 million in September 2010 and sits there for three months with no takers.  Relists in April at $2.3 million and in contract seven days later at $250,000 over asking price. Calls to the no-doubt-jubilant listing agent for some clarification were not returned, but the only thing I can think of to explain it is a brief and bloody bidding war.

[Ed. Update:  4/14/11: Thanks to John Farnham, the listing agent, for getting back to me.  There was indeed a bidding war.  Won by the guy with the all-cash offer and a promise to close in 7 days. And the extra $250,000 in cash.]  ...  Additional Details

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Who to Believe? Case Shiller or Ken Rosen

Case Shiller may be talking about double dip but Ken Rosen sees a somewhat brighter future for San Francisco’s residential real estate market.

Here’s the doom and gloom at the national level from the recently released Case Shiller Report for January 2011:

These data confirm what we have seen with recent housing starts and sales reports. The housing market recession is not yet over, and none of the statistics are indicating any form of sustained recovery. At most, we have seen all statistics bounce along their troughs; at worst, the feared double-dip recession may be materializing. ...  Additional Details

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Noe Valley Back Smartly in 2010

Author: Jack French -- Used under Creative Commons Permission 2.0

After nearly two years of sharp declines, Noe Valley single family home prices recovered smartly in 2010.  Not enough, however, for anyone to claim that Noe Valley is somehow immune from market forces affecting the rest of San Francisco.  As of December 2010, Noe Valley home prices were still down 20% from their all-time highs, almost exactly the same as prices for homes city-wide.

Here’s the chart (double click):

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What’s A Better Value in San Francisco, A Condo or a Home? (Part 2)

In my last post, I included a chart that showed both single family homes and condos stuck in relatively narrow price ranges over the last 18 months or so.  At the end of 2010 the median price of a single family home ($744,000) was about $80,000 more than that for a condo/TIC.

But that doesn’t tell us anything about “value.”  Now, let me count the ways we could argue about what “value” means, but I think we’d agree that how each property type has weathered the market battering over the last few years has to be relevant.   Take a look at this table: ...  Additional Details

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2010 San Francisco Residential Wrap-Up: Why condo owners may not be celebrating.

Given the amount of bad news coming out of the housing market these days, you’d think that San Francisco condo and TIC owners would be celebrating the fact that values increased 4.5% in 2010.

If no one feels like popping corks, it may be because prices have been stuck in a narrow range since they hit their post-bubble bottom two years ago.  Take a look (click to enlarge):