Last week, Case-Shiller released January data for its closely watched national housing index. Nationally, things are looking up – well, make that flat. And that’s good news. In the wonderfully backward language of the report, the index’s year over year rate of decline “improved.” Basically, we are back to where housing values were a year ago.
Since for most of us our homes represent our biggest asset, that’s pretty good news when you consider how bleak things looked back in March of 2009. Just think of how you were feeling about your 401(k)s. ...Additional Details
At long last, here’s the promised data on Noe Valley condos and TIC’s.
First, a look back (in anger?) at the make-up of Noe Valley sales in 2009.
Note that there were more than twice as many condos sold as TICs, and more homes sold than condos and TICs put together. (What’s a TIC? — Check out my series of posts on Tenancy-In-Common Interests, starting here.)
Also, that absurdly long DOM for TICs was distorted by 3 TICs at 201 Hoffman that took 410 days to sell. Still, without those sales, DOM for TICs (tired of the acronyms yet?) was still 99 days. And I’d be somewhat skeptical of the whopping difference in price between TICs and condos as well: TICs sales often don’t have a price per square foot listed, so there are very few data points — and there are very few sales to begin with. ...Additional Details
In an article entitled Great Time to Buy (Famous Last Words), last Sunday’s New York Times took a swipe at perennially optimistic real estate agents who have never seen a time that wasn’t a good time to buy a house. Fair enough. Self-interest and magical thinking are not limited to the real estate profession.
For the record, I’ve never suggested to anyone that buying a home is a good “investment.” You can do much better in the stock market and probably even in bonds. ...Additional Details
Author: Jack French -- Used under Creative Commons Permission 2.0
Back in May 2009, I showed that Noe Valley was not immune from the slump in prices affecting the rest of the city, despite suggestions to the contrary from real estate agents, mavens and media.
Have things gotten any better? Well, no. And maybe.
Here’s a chart showing percentage change in single family home prices for the last 14 months, relative to their all-time highs (click to enlarge). (All figures are 3 month moving averages.)
After reaching an all time high in March 2008, prices plummeted. Just a year later, in the midst of fears of a global Depression, home prices were down 30%. Did things get better? No, they got substantially worse. Despite an impressive city-wide recovery in 2009, with prices going from 30% down to around 18% down for single family homes at year’s end (see more detail here) , Noe Valley home prices continued to retreat. In October and November 2009, prices were down 35%. At year’s end, they’d barely clawed back two percentage points. Not surprisingly, days on market (DOM) remained stubbornly high for all of 2009. ...Additional Details
Pretty much everything I said about how single family homes fared in 2009 also applies to the condo/TIC market. (TIC’s, aka Tenancy In Commons are similar to condos. For more information on TICs, see my three-part series starting here.)
Condo/TICs hit their all-time highs about a year later than homes did — in July 2008. But they’ve fallen from their highs almost exactly as much as homes have. Condos/TICs were down 17%, just one percent better than single family homes.
Less than two months into the new year and a brand new decade and already 2009 may seem as far away as a bad dream – assuming you still have a job.
It’s hard to remember just how close to the brink of catastrophe we seemed to be just a year ago. Major financial institutions – failed. Credit – impossible to get. Sales—anemic.
With the benefit of hindsight, not to mention survival, some are now criticizing Paulsen, Bernanke, et al., for their haste in rescuing the financial system, but I, for one, will reserve my scorn for the appalling judgment of the likes of Morgan and Goldman and their obscene bonuses. ...Additional Details
Catching up on the endless paper-work the other night, I came across that rare thing: a property that sells twice in a relatively short time with no major renovations performed in the interim.
This “sales matching” technique is what the folks at Case-Shiller use to create their Indexes of property values across the country. Part of the reason they can is that their indexes are generated for large Metropolitan Statistical Areas with lots of house sales. And even so, they use a lot of fancy foot-work to “match up” properties. ...Additional Details
Ken Rosen is a smart guy. He’s the co-chair of the Fisher Center of Real Estate and Urban Economics at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and the investment adviser of choice to some of the biggest players in real estate, from banks to insurance companies to REITS. Ken might not be able to appraise your house, but he could tell you how each sector of the real estate economy has fared anywhere in the country, and probably in many parts of the world.
Once or twice a year I spend the day in a windowless hotel conference room listening to Ken and some of the biggest heads in the real estate biz expounding on the state of real estate. These guys (and they are mostly guys) look at real estate through the lens of global macro-economics and finances. Want to know where interest rates are going? They study yield curves on T-Bills and monetary policy in the capitals of Europe. This is “the view from space.” ...Additional Details
