According to the San Mateo Association of Realtors, in January of 2012 there were 1,172 single family homes on market in San Mateo County as compared to January of 2013 there were only 545. This shows that the market has significantly shifted from a buyers market towards a sellers market including a jump in average sales price of 20% for San Mateo County.

“For the past several months I have experienced buyers confronted with multiple offers resulting in homes selling for substantially over listing price.” says Teixeira. “I really feel that the strength of silicon valley and the increase in jobs growth and stability is what we’re seeing reflected in the boost in the mid-peninsula housing market.”

This trend is shown nationally in the SP/Case Shiller composite index’s numbers of their metropolitan survey of 20 cities that show the largest improvement in residential home prices in December since July of 2006 as well as a significant and moral boosting increase in consumer confidence.

For additional information about the Bay Area real estate or San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula real estate and relocation, call Mary Ann Teixeira at (650) 241-0318, or visit her website at http://www.maryannt.com.

About Mary Ann Teixeira

Mary Ann Teixeira is a licensed REALTOR with McGuire Real Estate in Burlingame, California who specializes in relocation services, homes for sale and luxury homes.  She is a seasoned buyer’s agent who serves the San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula communities of Atherton, Burlingame, Cupertino, Hillsborough, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Portola Valley, Redwood City, San Carlos, San Jose, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Woodside.

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/2/prweb10486539.htm

Article source: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1101611

Mansions that had languished on San Francisco’s Billionaire’s Row were finally snapped up last year. Well-known moguls from tech and finance poured money into real estate. Expansive estates in Silicon Valley drew publicity-shy billionaires who set up shell companies to shroud their identities.

In the nine-county Bay Area, 11,041 properties changed hands in 2012 with sales prices above $1 million, up 29 percent from 2011, according to real estate service DataQuick of San Diego.

Of course, around here, a million dollars doesn’t necessarily buy a mansion. That price tag can easily adorn a two-bedroom condo in San Francisco, a run-down ranch in Palo Alto, or a suburban tract house in Moraga.

“Virtually all home sales in some communities were in the $1 million-plus category,” DataQuick said, listing Ross, Los Altos, Atherton and Hillsborough as Bay Area towns where that was the case. Hillsborough had 422 million-dollar-plus sales in 2012.

Overseas cash

The real action was at the even higher end – 162 Bay Area homes sold for north of $5 million, DataQuick said. California notched an all-time high of 697 homes selling for over $5 million.

“In the prestige market (some sales) may have to do with where to park assets relative to other areas like the stock market and mutual funds,” said DataQuick analyst John Karevoll.

“One clear portion of the market that’s very active is buyers from abroad,” he said. “They’re coming here, they’ve got money and that money is in cash.”

The recovering economy, especially the tech sector, definitely has played a role in the luxury boom.

“The technology industry has done very well recently, which has created a wealthier pool of buyers,” said Jed Kolko, chief economist with real-estate site Trulia.com. “At the same time, with prices rising, there are more million-dollar homes than a year ago simply because of appreciation.”

Inventory of high-end homes is just as tight as at other price points.

Malin Giddings, a Coldwell Banker agent who focuses on luxury real estate, said: “2012 was an incredible year because there was very low inventory and very high demand.”

Just as with the regular market, high-end homes sold for less than their bubble-fueled heights. “For sellers who understand that values have taken a 25 percent hit, those properties are moving,” she said. “We are not back to pre-2008 prices.”

Who’s buying

Another impetus for sellers: A Jan. 1 hike in the capital gains tax.

“In Palo Alto there were quite a few sales of homes over $3 million by people whose cost basis was $50,000 to $200,000, who were motivated to close before the end of the year because of the tax bump,” said Steve Niethammer, a Realtor with Zane MacGregor Co.

Who buys trophy homes?

David Bellings of Coldwell Banker, who specializes in luxury properties, said his current listing for an $18.5 million, seven-bedroom home in Sea Cliff, as well as other high-end homes he sold last year, drew interest from “CEOs from around the world” as well as “celebrity types from L.A. thinking of moving here to escape the crazy paparazzi and to have more of a normal life.”

Several well-known tech moguls went on shopping sprees in San Francisco. Yammer founder David Sacks bought 2845 Broadway for $20 million, a fraction of the $65 million it once commanded. Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square paid $9.9 million for a two-bedroom in Sea Cliff. Zynga’s Mark Pincus paid $16 million for the Newhall mansion on Pacific Avenue. Apple’s Jonathan Ive, the mastermind behind the design of the iPod and iPhone, paid $17 million for 2808 Broadway.

“Many of those properties had been on the market for over three years, especially on Billionaire’s Row,” said Sally Kuchar, San Francisco editor of the real-estate website Curbed.com. “The influx of tech money has really helped those big estates sell.”

Tech money reportedly fueled the blockbuster sale of a 9-acre hilltop estate in Woodside that sold in November for $117.5 million, setting an all-time U.S. record. Although public records don’t show who ponied up that amount, the Los Angeles Times said the new owner may be Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, the second-richest man in Japan.

The seller is no secret: It was Tully Friedman, CEO of San Francisco private equity firm Friedman, Fleischer and Lowe.

Record-setting sums

“That sale just blows my mind,” Niethammer said. “It looks like (the buyer) overpaid by $100 million. Property in Woodside generally goes for about a million bucks an acre; with the house, it should have been about a $20 million deal.”

The previous record-setting sale quickly ended up losing half its value, at least for tax purposes. Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, an early Facebook investor, paid $100 million in 2011 for a Los Altos Hills mansion, but a year later got the county to chop its assessed value to $50 million.

Niethammer is listing a 150-acre former llama ranch estate for $15.5 million in Bonny Doon, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. “I told the seller, ‘You might want to add $100 million to it so it will sell,’ ” he joked.

The historic Flood estate in Woodside, 92 oak-studded acres listed for $85 million in September, has drawn a lot of interest, said Mary Gullixson of Alain Pinel Realtors.

Showing just how coveted open space is, she’s listing a 3-acre parcel – no house – in the Menlo Circus Club area of Atherton for $19.8 million. “It’s a diamond in the rough,” she said.

Another mega-estate in Silicon Valley just hit the market for a cool $100 million with an unusual caveat – the buyer must agree to let the current owner live out his days there.

Located in Hillsborough, the 47.4-acre estate features hiking trails, streams, wildlife and gardens designed by Thomas Church. It comes with a 16,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style home designed by the same firm that designed the St. Francis Hotel. The house has a ballroom, pavilion, library and swimming pool, according to court records of the owner’s divorce.

Lifetime resident

The house’s inhabitant – Christian de Guigne IV, 75, the current owner – plans to remain in residence there for the rest of his life.

Isn’t that a rare request? “It’s as unusual as the size of the land that’s available in such an exclusive area,” said listing agent Gregg Lynn of Sotheby’s International Realty.

The de Guigne family – the patriarch emigrated from France and co-founded Stauffer Chemical Co. in Gold Rush-era San Francisco – has owned the land for 150 years. The house construction started in 1914 and was delayed when Christian de Guigne II went off to serve in World War I, Lynn said.

Million-dollar-plus home sales surge

The number of homes selling for more than $1 million was up 29 percent in the Bay Area in 2012.

Source: DataQuick

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Bay-Area-luxury-home-sales-boom-in-2012-4244363.php

This week the social media giant is expected to open its doors to the general public. Overnight, Facebook will become a publicly traded company and a plethora of 20-somethings will see their personal wealth skyrocket.

In April, Facebook estimated its value at $77 billion, but since then the Palo Alto-based company’s worth has been assumed to be somewhere in the $100 billion range. This influx of cash will have a number of impacts, one of which could be the increase in property value.

Using a conservative analysis, Movoto — a real estate brokerage in the San Mateo — estimated that Facebook’s coming out party could increase property value in trendy Bay Area neighborhoods and cities by $1 to 2 billion.

“Competition to buy listed homes in desirable Bay Area zip codes is already discouraging for the average home buyer.” said Mark Brandemuehl, VP Marketing Business Development at Movoto. “The Facebook IPO will only add to the millionaires competing to buy a small number of homes, and it seems inevitable that prices will be driven up.”

To make this analysis Movoto spoke with Carole Rodoni, president of Bamboo Consulting, a Bay Area real estate agent. Rodoni expected overall property value to rise.

She estimated that property value in fashionable areas will increase anywhere from five to 10 percent. This is on top of the area’s typical appreciation. She expected this mini housing bubble to last between a year and 18 months.

Those trendy areas are:

• Pacific Heights;
• Noe Valley;
• South of Market Area in San Francisco;
• Hillsborough;
• Atherton; and
• Palo Alto.

Rodoni called these new renters and homebuyers “shuttle babies” because they prefer to move back and forth between areas. It also means these shuttle babies are looking to move to areas where “you can walk, and within four blocks, you get your whole life.”

How the Math Works:

To figure out how Rodoni’s estimate would translate into a dollar amount, the Movoto team divided the trendy Bay Area locations into two parts: cities such as Hillsborough and neighborhoods in San Francisco.

For the cities, Movoto used Census data to calculate the number of owner-occupied households in the area. After learning this figure, we used housing data to calculate the 75th percentile of current home list prices-or, the most valuable homes on the market, which the wealthy are more likely to purchase. We then applied the estimated five to 10 percent price increase to homes priced at the 75th percentile and above.

Movoto used a similar process for the San Francisco neighborhoods.

A Second Opinion

But like most things, there’s a difference in opinion.

Kathy Krize, a real estate agent in the Menlo Park area, called the local housing market “quirky” and suggested there was a small housing bubble in high-end areas. Nonetheless, Krize was hesitant to attribute the increase in home prices in the Bay Area to Facebook.

“I think all this media hype going on isn’t necessarily true; it may have an impact, but not the impact everyone is talking about,” she said.

She did note that some potential homebuyers believe they need to purchase a home before the newly minted rich do so, and at the same time there are buyers who want to wait to put their homes on the market in the hopes of gaining value.

“The fact is, a lot of them already have the ability to purchase,” she said about Facebook employees. “I think the impact would have been seen already. I’m not seeing a lot of people from Facebook coming into the open houses.”

From her experiences, Krize said that she’s seen an increase in the number of cash offers and noted homes are regularly selling above the asking price. She noted that buyers using more traditional financing are losing out to cash offers.

“It’s a quirky market,” Krize added. “It’s not to say that every home on the market is getting picked up. What I’m saying is that there are a lot of buyers who want to have prime property and there isn’t a lot of prime property on the market.”

Krize offered this example to explain the market trend: She recently listed a two-bedroom, one-bath home in a marginal neighborhood — what she called a great starter house — for $368,000. After five offers the house sold for $420,000.

“There is something going on with the market,” Krize said. “We are seeing it across the board.”

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-j-cross/san-francisco-real-estate_b_1527172.html

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

Gagan and Jasmin Arneja in their 1,800-square-foot home, which attracted 22 bids and sold for $1.5 million, 40% over asking price.

San Francisco

A bidding war broke out in November when a small house in San Francisco’s tightly packed Noe Valley came on the market.

Twenty-two people, including employees of Facebook, Zynga, Google and Pixar, battled for the home. The winning offer was $1.5 million—40% higher than the asking price. The house had a great view, but it was only 1,800 square feet and came with an old kitchen which, like most of the interior, was covered in 1970s plywood paneling. Seen from the curb, there’s hardly any house at all—just a one-car garage and gate leading to small front courtyard.

View Slideshow

Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

Dolores Park, with a view of the Mission District and skyline of downtown San Francisco in the background, is a popular hangout for the new generation of tech entrepreneurs.

The inconspicuousness was part of the attraction, said Jasmin Arneja, 42, who bought the two-bedroom house with her husband Gagan, 40, a software engineer at a networking start-up. “It’s the antithesis to these outrageous bizarre Gordon Gekko-esque houses. It just incorporates so much of our values,” said Ms. Arneja, who runs a philanthropic advisory firm.

Housing prices in the San Francisco Bay area are once again soaring, thanks to an infusion of cash from the rising shares of Apple and Google and the initial public offerings by Zynga, LinkedIn, Yelp and soon Facebook, expected to be the largest in Internet history. But while a previous generation of dot-com executives opted for mansions in wealthy San Francisco neighborhoods like Pacific Heights and tony Silicon Valley suburbs like Atherton, this generation is gravitating to modest homes and condos in grittier parts of the city.

Ground zero of the current tech-fueled real-estate boom is the Mission, formerly a majority Hispanic neighborhood on the southern edge of San Francisco that’s close to the main arteries that link San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Median home prices in the Mission grew 44% in December compared with a year earlier. Adjacent Noe Valley had a rise of 31% over that same period, according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors. The average number of days homes sat on the market in both neighborhoods has almost halved over the past year.

That’s in sharp contrast to what’s happening nationally, where the housing market continues to flounder, with the Case-Shiller 20-City index down for the fourth straight month in a row. It’s even an aberration from the San Francisco area (including Oakland), which saw a 5.4% drop in home prices in December from a year earlier.

Newly minted tech millionaires in San Francisco are shunning mansions in wealthy neighborhoods and leafy suburbs in favor of modest homes and condos in grittier parts of the city. Geoffrey Fowler has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Jason Henry for WSJ

Real-estate agents say it’s a cultural shift. The new generation of Internet executives—younger than the last generation of dot-commers—eschews the trappings and responsibilities of expensive properties. They want to bicycle, walk or take public transportation. They like living near food trucks and dive bars.

“You can spend a lot of money on a great restaurant here or just $5 on a burrito,” said Christian Niles, 31, who bought a two-bedroom apartment for $585,000 in the Mission with his wife in August because he saw real estate as a good place to store the cash he’d made from selling his app called TrackerBot to Pivotal Labs last summer. He plans to never own a car.

StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp bought a 2,900-square-foot loft penthouse with four bathrooms and a patio for $3 million this past summer in the South of Market area. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams bought a $2.4 million house in Noe Valley in 2009.

The hottest properties are near corporate shuttle bus stops—where employees for companies like Google, Facebook, Genentech, LinkedIn and Apple line up daily for the ride to Silicon Valley. Real-estate agent Amanda Jones calls it the “Shuttle Effect” and said proximity can command as much as a 20% premium. Some real-estate agents said they’re dying for a map of where the buses pick up. “When a listing gets deluged with people—that tells me it’s close to a stop,” said Ms. Jones.

Some companies share a few of the same stops, occasionally leading to employees getting on the wrong bus. Discussions can get animated about adding or moving a stop, said Jessica Herrera, Facebook’s transportation coordinator who controls the stop locations for Facebook’s eight shuttle busses, including a new glass-topped double-decker the company rented to make space for the growing crowds. “Everybody wants a stop that’s next to their house that comes every five minutes,” she said, adding that discussions have remained civil.

Enlarge Image

Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

The Mission apartment building where investor Michael Barton bought a condo: ‘You can tell there is an upsurge going on here.’

Stephanie Pocino, 28, makes the 45-minute trip to Facebook every day from her rented apartment building in the Mission. She has no garbage disposal and no dishwasher, but the Victorian building has lots of charm and bay windows. She carries a wireless Internet card, which she uses to answer emails and work on presentations while on the commute, and her laundry, which she gets done free at the company’s headquarters.

Soaring rental prices—up more than 10% in the Mission and Noe Valley in the past six months alone—are also making buying more competitive, said Vanguard Properties broker Craig Waddle. He’s seen bidding competitions for rentals and rental offers coming in higher than the asking prices. At an open house for a one-bedroom offered for $1,400 a month, 40 people were filling out applications on the spot. One person walked up to the owner, offered $1,700 and got the place.

“It’s been kind of shocking,” said Raj Gajwani, 36, who has been looking for a house in Noe Valley for around $1.5 million for the past few months. A founder of two online companies, he and his wife are expecting twins and want a house close to a shuttle-bus stop for his wife’s commute but with “culture, interesting people and activities.” They also want something they will be able to sell for more money in five years, when they might have to move to the suburbs for better schools.

Mike Shaw, a real-estate agent who has worked for 15 years in the San Francisco market, said buyers often want something already renovated or vintage because they don’t have the time or the interest to hire designers and architects. “That person in jeans and a sweatshirt could be low on the totem pole or a multibillionaire. They haven’t realized the value of good design either in architecture or fashion,” said Suzanne Tucker, a San Francisco designer who has remodeled many of the most lavish homes in the Bay Area.

Buyers argue they have a different sensibility. Ms. Arneja, who snagged the sought-after house in Noe Valley, said she was drawn to the interior, which is covered almost entirely by dark redwood and brick, lending it a feel that lands somewhere between a den and a tree house. “This is clearly a ’70s house,” said Ms. Arneja. “I would like to think of it as a shining example of good architecture during a bad period of design.”

Pop-up restaurants with long lines, coffee shops that brew one cup at a time and shops selling curiosities like local honey have followed the influx of cash. Apple employee Amandeep Jawa, who takes the company bus to work, covered the driveway of his Victorian with a “parklet,” a public space registered with the city featuring seating and greenery. His crowning achievement: a topiary triceratops, dubbed Trixie, made of succulent plants.

But the gentrification is far from complete. A surge in violence between feuding gangs called the Norteños and Sureños claimed two lives in less than 24 hours in the Mission in August, and there was a shooting in front of a coffee shop. Noe Valley saw a rash of sexual assaults; residents there have also reported attempted carjackings and armed robberies.

“The key word is coexistence,” said David Campos, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors representing the Mission and Bernal Heights.

Blogs popular with tech workers keep track of the violence, and one UC Berkeley student produced a map called “Gangs and Cupcakes,” which overlaid Norteño and Sureño territory with the Mission’s most popular cupcake cafes. In recent years, somebody spray-painted “cafe gentrification” on the sidewalk in front of popular coffee shops.

The high prices and the changes in the neighborhood are only going to intensify, predicted Lawrence Coburn, 42, who first moved to the Mission in 1999 to found a start-up and has lived in an 1,100-foot rental loft there since 2003. “A lot of my friends are trying to hustle to buy a place before all the Facebook people get liquid,” he said.

Investor Michael Barton, 48, recently decided to buy because he wanted to lock in his investment before Facebook’s IPO money hits town. The area around his 950-square-foot, two-story loft is “kind of funky, and gritty and dodgy,” said Mr. Barton. But an industrial building next door has been taken over by Internet start-ups. “You can tell there is an upsurge going on here,” he said.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 16, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Hot Spot for the Rising Tech Generation.

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204781804577271491070580960.html

Burlingame, CA (PRWEB) October 06, 2011

By definition, a “deficiency judgments” is a court decision against former homeowners when the sale of the house does not sell for enough money to cover the amount owed to the lender. In essence the lender can still hold the seller financial responsible after the close of the sale in attempt to satisfy the remaining balance on a loan. However, in California, all first mortgages on a property of 1 to 4 units are protected from deficiency judgements by Senate Bill 931, (SB931) and Civil Code Procedure 580 (e).

Mary Ann Teixeira says “I hear a lot of fear from homeowners, as they examine choices, they fear that the house may sell but that the debt will live on.”

In many situations where the homeowners are in a short sale or foreclosure the idea of a debt living past the transaction is haunting. Homeowners in danger of this situation need to consult with a professional to find out exactly how this may affect them in the future.

For additional information about the conforming or jumbo loan impacts on your home buying, reasons to use a Bay Area real estate agent or San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula real estate and relocation, call Mary Ann Teixeira at (650) 241-0318, or visit her website at www.maryannt.com.

About Mary Ann Teixeira

Mary Ann Teixeira is a licensed REALTOR with McGuire Real Estate in Burlingame, California who specializes in relocation services, homes for sale and luxury homes. She is a seasoned buyer’s agent who serves the San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula communities of Atherton, Burlingame, Cupertino, Hillsborough, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Portola Valley, Redwood City, San Carlos, San Jose, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Woodside.

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For the original version on PRWeb visit: www.prweb.com/releases/prwebburlingame_foreclosures/peninsula_real_estate/prweb8858144.htm

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/10/06/prweb8858144.DTL

Burlingame, CA (Vocus/PRWEB) March 30, 2011

While looking for a new home in the Peninsula area it’s important to look beyond just your neighborhood to the cultural and event centers as well, says Mary Ann Teixeira. As a Bay Area REALTOR® and resident Teixeira stays up-to-date and in touch with the plethora of events that take place across the Peninsula.

“People just moving to the area are not always fully aware of the activities that can enrich their lives and expand their cultural awareness. I like to be sure my clients are as informed as possible about all aspects of their relocation especially the opportunities that let them explore the outdoors – like the SF Flower and Garden Show,” said Teixeira.

The 2011 SF Flower Garden Show was held March 23-27th at the San Mateo Event Center. It’s known for bringing the best in gardening, outdoor living, design, and cooking together into a large hands-on event the whole family can enjoy.

For additional information about reasons to use a Bay Area real estate agent or San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula real estate and relocation, call Mary Ann Teixeira at (650) 241-0318, or visit her website at www.maryannt.com.

About Mary Ann Teixeira Mary Ann Teixeira is a licensed REALTOR® with McGuire Real Estate in Burlingame, California who specializes in relocation services, homes for sale, and luxury homes. She is a seasoned buyer’s agent who serves the San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula communities of Atherton, Burlingame, Cupertino, Hillsborough, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Portola Valley, Redwood City, San Carlos, San Jose, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Woodside

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For the original version on PRWeb visit: www.prweb.com/releases/prwebreal-estate/Burlingame/prweb8247667.htm

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/03/30/prweb8247667.DTL