San Francisco Bay Area Home Sales Below Average

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Real estate agent Paul Barbagelata, left, talks with a client during an open house in San Francisco.

Real estate agent Paul Barbagelata, left, talks with a client during an open house in San Francisco. Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Home sales in the San Francisco Bay
Area were 22 percent below average last month as buyers waited
for better mortgage availability, DataQuick said today.

A total of 6,749 houses and condominiums sold in the nine-
county region, below the average of 8,644 property deals for
September since 1988, the San Diego-based data seller said in a
statement. Last month’s total was down 10 percent from August
and up 6.6 percent from a year earlier.

“Demand continues to accumulate,” DataQuick President
John Walsh said in the statement. “Empty-nesters want something
smaller, growing families want something bigger. People still
die, they get married, retire — all of this generates demand.
And only a fraction of that demand is being met in today’s
market.”

The number of transactions financed with adjustable-rate
loans, an indicator of mortgage availability, fell to 13 percent
in September from 16 percent in August, according to DataQuick.
Such loans were used in 45 percent of Bay Area sales over the
past decade. Jumbo mortgages, or those higher than $417,000,
were used in almost a third of all deals, little changed from
August and about half 2007’s tally.

The median home price in the Bay Area fell to $365,000,
down 1.4 percent from August and 7.6 percent from a year
earlier, DataQuick said. All nine counties had price declines
from a year earlier, led by a 13 percent decrease to $252,000 in
Contra Costa. Santa Clara fell 6 percent to $470,000 and San
Francisco fell 1 percent to $613,750.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Dan Levy in San Francisco at
dlevy13@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Kara Wetzel at
kwetzel@bloomberg.net

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Article source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-14/san-francisco-bay-area-home-sales-below-average-as-buyers-wait.html