Home News Case-Shiller: San Francisco Home Prices Rose Again in March, Climbing 22% YOY

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By Brandon Cornett | Housing Market News
June 14, 2013 | © 2013, All rights reserved

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By Brandon Cornett | June 14, 2013 | 2013, All rights reserved

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The housing market in San Francisco continues to be a standout, where prices are concerned. According to the latest release of the SP/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, house values in San Francisco rose 3.9% from February to March of this year. Prices have risen by a whopping 22% annually, when measured from March 2012 to March 2013. There is a two-month reporting lag with the Case-Shiller index, which is published on the last Tuesday of every month.

The chart below shows the 20 cities that make up the Case-Shiller 20-city composite. As you can see, the San Francisco real estate market experienced the second-largest annual gain in home prices, slightly behind Phoenix, Ariz.

San Francisco had the largest monthly gain of any metro in the 20-city index, and one of the largest monthly returns in the country. According to the Case-Shiller index, San Francisco property prices rose by 3.9% from February to March.

The Bay Area real estate market continues to rise a wave of recovery that has spread across the entire state. In the chart above, you’ll also notice strong annual returns for San Diego and Los Angeles. These returns are indicative of the positive housing trends throughout California.

In San Francisco’s real estate market, as in other metros across the Sunshine State, housing inventories have plummeted. According to Realtor.com’s monthly housing summary, the total number of homes listed for sale in San Francisco has dropped by 31.22% over the last year. This trend is being seen in other California cities as well, and often to a larger degree. Listing inventory is down 52% in Orange County, 46% in Oakland, and 45% in San Jose.

These are unprecedented statistics. Imagine half of a local real estate market disappearing in a single year. It’s no wonder home buyers are having trouble finding properties in these markets. The supply-and-demand picture has shifted considerably over the last couple of years, and it’s sending prices north. In short, more buyers are vying for fewer properties.

The median list price within the San Francisco housing market has climbed by more than 20% over the last year, according to Realtor.com.

According to DataQuick, a San Diego-based company that provides real estate market data, the median sale price in the nine-county Bay Area reached $519,000 in May. That was an increase of 1.8% from the previous month and 29.8% from the same time last year. The median for San Francisco County climbed to $870,000 last month — the highest of any county in the Bay Area.

Within the city proper, the median sale price is a cool million. According to the real estate firm Redfin, sellers within the city are getting 112% of their asking prices, on average. Clearly, it’s a good time to be selling a home within the San Francisco real estate market.

Home sales have slowed over the last year. In May 2012, a total of 8,899 sales were recorded across the Bay Area. Last month, 8,541 sales were recorded, 4% fewer than the same time last year. In San Francisco County, home sales have declined by 14% over the last year. But this is certainly not due to a lack of demand. It’s from a lack of inventory. If every buyer who wanted to buy a home in the Bay Area could actually find one, sales would probably be 20% to 30% higher this year.

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Article source: http://www.homebuyinginstitute.com/news/case-shiller-san-francisco-409/

Home News The Top 7 San Francisco Housing Trends in 2013

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By Brandon Cornett | January 31, 2013
© 2013, All rights reserved

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Haight-Ashbury district. Photo by Philippe Teuwen.

The housing recovery continues to sweep across California. In major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego, inventories are returning to healthy levels and home prices are rising.

But the most dramatic real estate changes seem to be occurring in the San Francisco Bay Area.

San Francisco home buyers entering the market in 2013 will find a market that is completely different from a few years ago. In just three or four years, the city has transformed from a stagnant buyers’ market to a bustling sellers’ market.

The 7 Biggest Trends in San Francisco Real Estate, 2012 – 2013

We scoured the housing headlines of the last few weeks to come up with this list. Here’s what is currently happening in the San Francisco housing market, and what we expect for the rest of 2013.

1. Housing supply will remain tight in 2013.

RE/MAX recently published a report that listed cities with the lowest housing supply, going into 2013. They measured the number of months worth of supply in December 2012 and ranked the cities accordingly.

Several California cities made the list. San Francisco took the #1 spot, with only a 1.1-month housing supply in December 2012. That was well below the national average of 4.4 months of supply.

Related: Bay Area price gains driven by supply-and-demand shift

This will be one of the biggest obstacles for San Francisco home buyers in 2013. Buyers will need to be aggressive when shopping for a property in this market. They should also be prepared for bidding wars. Sellers, on the other hand, can enjoy being in one of the hottest markets in the country. A well-staged, reasonably priced house should sell quickly in this market.

2. San Francisco has one of the healthiest housing markets, according to economist.

Jed Kolko, chief economist for the real estate website Trulia, recently published a list of the healthiest housing markets in 2013. He based his rankings on a number of factors, including vacancy rates, job growth, foreclosure trends and more. The San Francisco real estate market ranked among the top three cities.

Kolko pointed out that San Francisco has one of the fastest-growing job markets in the country right now you. Additionally, foreclosure filings and default notices have both declined across the metro area, over the last few years. All of these trends bode well for the local housing market.

3. Significant price gains have been reported by Case-Shiller.

The SP/Case-Shiller home price index for January was released a few days ago. It included pricing data through the end of November 2012. According to that report, house prices in San Francisco have increased by a healthy 12.7% (from November 2011 to November 2012).

4. San Francisco’s median list price rose by 25%.

Each month, Realtor.com publishes a housing summary with data on 146 of the largest metropolitan areas in the country. It includes monthly and yearly changes to the median list price for each metro. According to their latest report, which included data through December 2012, the median list price in San Francisco has risen 25% over the last year or so.

In this context, the “list” price is the amount sellers are asking for when they list their homes for sale. This makes it different from the median sales price, which is the actual amount paid. But that number has also risen over the last year (see below).

5. Median sales price rose by 32% across the Bay Area, 21% in San Francisco.

According to San Diego-based DataQuick, the median sales price for the nine-county Bay Area rose by a whopping 32% from December 2011 December 2012. Inside San Francisco proper, the median sales price rose by 21.1% during the same 12-month reporting period.

This is one area where all of the experts and data agree. Whether you look at the list prices on Realtor.com, home prices in the Case-Shiller Index, or the median sales price reported by DataQuick — they all show a clear trend of appreciation. We expect this trend to continue through 2013, though the gains will likely be more modest.

6. Default notices have dropped by 42%.

This is something I touched on earlier. Default notices (one of the first steps in the foreclosure process) have dropped by more than 40% over the last year or so. This is according to a recent report from DataQuick. From the fourth quarter of 2011 to the same period in 2012, default notices in the San Francisco metro area dropped by 42.3%

This should improve the health of San Francisco’s real estate market even more, going forward. The dramatic decline in default notices suggests a return to normalcy. It also means there will be fewer distressed properties on the market down the road — the kinds of properties that erode home values.

7. Trustee deeds are down by 51.2%.

During the foreclosure process, a trustee deed is typically issued whenever a house is actually foreclosed upon. So another way to state this statistic is to say that home foreclosures have dropped by more than half. From the Q4 2011 to Q4 2012, trustee deeds in the San Francisco area fell by 51.2%.

Many housing markets across the country are rebounding. But few are experiencing the kinds of dramatic changes that we are seeing in San Francisco’s real estate market.

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Article source: http://www.homebuyinginstitute.com/news/san-francisco-trends-304/

Asking prices for homes for sale around the Bay Area rose substantially in December compared with the same time last year, according to San Francisco real estate website Trulia, ranging from a 16.3 percent spike in tech-fueled Santa Clara County to a 7.6 percent increase in Napa County. The nine-county Bay Area saw an average increase of 13 percent. By comparison, asking prices nationwide rose 5.1 percent in December compared with December 2011, Trulia said.

“Both job growth and tighter inventory gave (sale) prices a lift,” said Jed Kolko, Trulia’s chief economist. “Price increases accelerated throughout 2012, getting bigger as the year went on.”

Analyzing asking prices of homes currently for sale provides a leading indicator of what sales numbers are likely to look like in a few months’ time, Trulia said.

Data on sales throughout much of 2012 have shown the housing market recovering from the extended downturn that started in 2007.

Nationwide, Trulia said, “2012 marked a huge turnaround year for most local housing markets” with prices increasing in 82 of the 100 largest metro areas in December. In December 2011, only 12 markets had price increases.

Las Vegas, Seattle and Phoenix were Trulia’s “top turnaround” markets, followed by Oakland metro (Alameda and Contra Costa counties) and San Jose metro (Santa Clara and San Benito counties).

California cities such as Sacramento and Fresno that were devastated by the housing crisis also saw strong gains in 2012, Trulia said.

“Nine of the top 10 turnaround markets in 2012 were in the West,” Kolko said. “The only one east of the Rockies was Atlanta.”

Asking rents also rose, with Alameda County seeing the biggest spike (13.2 percent) and already pricey San Francisco the least (2.9 percent), Trulia said. The average increase for eight Bay Area counties (Napa did not have enough data) was 7.8 percent. Nationwide, rents grew 5.2 percent.

“We’re seeing rent increases across the region,” Kolko said. “In San Francisco they were smaller because rents are already so much higher there than elsewhere and it has had strong rent increases before this. The slower increase doesn’t make the city affordable.”

While rising home prices illustrate a housing market beginning to recover – and to stimulate economic recovery – they of course are not good news for those house hunting.

“They come with the perennial challenge of affordability in the Bay Area,” Kolko said.

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

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Bay-Area-rents-home-prices-up-sharply-4163037.php

Back in 2008 and 2009, foreclosed homes were selling for double-digit discounts, but nowadays savings are much slimmer, especially in some California cities, according to an analysis by real estate site Zillow.

In Sacramento, buying a bank-owned property saves you less than 1 percent, and in Riverside it’s only 1.8 percent. That’s compared to a current national average of 7.7 percent, and 27.4 percent in the city with the highest discount — Pittsburgh, Pa. In San Francisco, the average discount is 4.7 percent. San Francisco’s foreclosure discount peaked at 20.4 percent in January 2008.

Here’s a look at some currently bank-owned homes in San Francisco:

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When the housing market was falling like a rock, the large discounts available for foreclosed properties led to the popularity of foreclosure bus tours, which real estate agents are still conducting in the Bay Area and elsewhere. But it hardly seems worth putting in the effort to learn about the foreclosure process for a tiny discount.

In two cities, Las Vegas and Phoenix, Zillow found that buying a foreclosure offered no price advantage at all.

“The smallest foreclosure discount is found in places where competition for homes is so high, people there are willing to pay the same amount for a foreclosure re-sale that they would for a non-distressed home simply to take advantage of historic affordability,” said Zillow Chief Economist Dr. Stan Humphries. “Additionally, in areas such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, where not long ago one out of every two homes sold was a foreclosure re-sale, buying a foreclosure is no longer just for investors.”

Carrie Kirby is a freelance writer who recently returned to the Bay Area after living for six years in Chicago. Carrie is more heavily invested in real estate than she ever expected to be, since she and her husband are now long-distance landlords of their Chicago home, and have also purchased a house in Alameda. She posts about interesting properties and real estate trends in San Francisco and Silicon Valley every Tuesday. Carrie also shares money-saving tips on her blog, Frugalistic Mom.

Article source: http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2012/11/13/foreclosure-discounts-shrinking-away/

(Read More: Is Housing Recovering as Much as Everyone Thinks?)

Contract activity has increased on an annual basis for seventeen straight months, but is fluctuating month to month and region to region. The Realtors’ index of so-called pending home sales rose 1.4 percent month-to-month in the Northeast, fell 5.8 percent in the Midwest, rose 1 percent in the South and rose 4.3 percent in the West. The western region, which includes some of the hardest hit states of the housing crash, was the only region to see nearly flat gains from a year ago. That is do to low supplies of distressed properties.

(Read More: Is There a Housing Shortage?)

Investors have focused their attention and cash on formerly hard hit cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas and several California cities.

The National Association of Realtors estimates that completed existing home sales in 2012 will total close to 4.6 million, an increase of 9 percent from 2011. Lower housing inventories, they also predict, should push existing home prices up 6 percent this year nationally.

Questions?  Comments?  And follow me on Twitter @Diana_Olick