homesmillbrae.com » Collapse

The incredible soaring Bay Area home prices

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 01:02:22 +0000

Tuesday’s SP/Case-Shiller report underscored the rapid run-up in Bay Area home prices, showing that the San Francisco metro area — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties — saw home prices surge 17.5% in January compared to a year ago. That outpaced the national run-up of 8.1 % and was second only to Phoenix.

For a detailed analysis of the numbers and what they mean for the Bay Area, click here.

Bidding wars and multiple offers are the new norm here.

Here’s a look at a San Jose house listed for $1,075,000 that sold for $1,120,000. Redfin agent Ashley Rabello said she had four offers within the first day of listing. The winning offer had no contingencies, a large percentage down, and was significantly higher than the asking price.

Share this gallery: 1 of 7

Heavy action at all price points is new — and another harbinger of recovery.

“During the boom and bust, the lower-priced houses had the biggest percentage price increases and then the biggest percentage collapse,” said David Blitzer, chair of the index committee for SP/Dow Jones. That’s because the most-outrageous lending practices — subprime loans, liar loans, no money down — were more concentrated in the low end.

Case-Shiller tracks homes at three price tiers — low (under $383,942), middle ($383,9422 to $681,776) and high (over $681,776). “Until the boom, the three moved together; during the downturn, they spread apart,” Blitzer said. “Now they’re moving in sync again; it’s a sign the market is coming back to normal, behaving a lot less bizarrely than it did before.”

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. For insights and news on the real estate market, follow her on Twitter: @csaid

Article source: http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2013/03/27/the-incredible-soaring-bay-area-home-prices/

Bay Area home sales, prices surging

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 13:57:46 +0000

Jon Walawitch is preparing to sell his midcentury Hayward home so he can retire from his job as a SamTrans bus driver and move to Nevada or New Mexico.

It’s a normal life transition – but one that would have been unavailable to him just a year ago, when his home was underwater. Now, with the Bay Area real estate market on a rapid upward trajectory, Walawitch, 62, should be able to sell his three-bedroom, two-bathroom home at a decent profit.

“This is my dream, it will provide me with the down payment for my retirement home,” he said. “I was quite concerned (during the housing downturn); I didn’t know how long I’d have to stay in the house. I’m very happy the market has turned.”

Sale prices of Bay Area homes surged in 2012 at a pace that accelerated throughout the year, according to DataQuick, a San Diego research firm. In December the nine-county median rose to $442,750, an astounding 32 percent increase compared with the prior year – the highest jump in 25 years of record keeping, DataQuick said Wednesday.

That benchmark is heavily influenced by a changing mixture of homes sold. About half of the increase represents higher values, while the other half stems from fewer bargain-priced distress sales and more high-end homes changing hands.

Foreclosures dropping

Foreclosures and short sales comprised about a third of the resale market in December; a year earlier, they were 52.4 percent of sales. The number of homes sold for more than $500,000 rose 61.2 percent, while the number sold for less than $500,000 fell 12.6 percent compared with a year earlier, DataQuick said.

“This absolutely does not mean the typical house in the Bay Area is up 32 percent compared to last year,” said DataQuick analyst Andrew LePage.

Beating previous year

However, 2012′s strong sales do show a market that is finally in recovery after the carnage of the housing collapse. From April on, Bay Area median sales prices consistently outshone those of the prior year; from June through December they outperformed 2011 by double-digit percentages.

“We’ve had a sustained buildup,” LePage said. “There is real price appreciation, particularly in the more-desirable coastal markets with a lot of demand meeting very little inventory.”

A total of 7,832 new and resale homes and condos changed hands in the nine-county Bay Area in December, up 4.5 percent from a year earlier. Realtors throughout the region report that inventories remain super-tight and many homes attract boom-style bidding wars.

December marked “the 20th consecutive month of a decline in inventory,” said Glen Bell of Better Homes and Gardens Mason McDuffie Real Estate, speaking of data for Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

The East Bay now has a two-week supply of homes for sale (meaning the existing inventory would sell out in two weeks at the current sales pace), the lowest he has ever seen, Bell said. Ordinarily it should have a three- or four-month supply.

Investors jumping in

“There is so much (buyer) competition for so few properties out there that people are scrambling to try to get in,” he said. “If a home looks good, is in an area people want to live in and is priced right, you get multiple offers all over the place.”

Even properties that don’t meet those criteria win popularity contests. Bell recently listed “a little, tiny, dinky fixer,” a bank-owned foreclosure in a “not great area of Richmond,” priced at $72,000, and received 32 offers, six of them north of $100,000. Every offer was for all cash, implying they were from investors. It went into contract this week for about two-thirds above the asking price.

All that competition – so many buyers vying over so few houses – is driving up prices. But soon it should also bring more sellers, increasing inventory, which in turn should moderate the pace of price hikes.

Correction is real

Potential sellers “are getting the sense that the market has really corrected and this is a good time to make a move,” said Rick Turley, president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, which covers much of Northern California. “The market improvement has gotten people to a point where they can transact, which they previously couldn’t.”

Will spring, the traditional kickoff for real estate’s strongest selling season, see a surge in sellers?

“We are certainly hopeful that the spring will give us the bump we need in listing inventory,” Turley said.

Looking back at the full year, 2012 saw an annual Bay Area median price of $404,000, still shy of the median a decade earlier. But annual medians – which mute some of the month-to-month spikes – paint a portrait of a market where the prices that shot up during the boom and crashed during the collapse now seem on a steadier path.

Could the rise in prices presage another housing bubble?

“I don’t think it will shoot up and crash down again,” Turley said. “The more-conservative lending will help us to stay healthy longer.”

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

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Bay-Area-home-sales-prices-surging-4200912.php

Why Rise in Home Prices May Not Mean Much—Yet

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 23:40:12 +0000

Average home prices through May increased for the second month in a row, according to the latest SP/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, which measure both the top ten and top twenty housing markets in the US.

Prices are still down from a year ago, but those annual drops are improving.

“On a monthly basis, all 20 cities and both composites posted positive returns and 17 of those cities saw those rates of change increase compared to what was observed for April. Seventeen of the 20 cities and both Composites also saw improved annual rates of return,” notes SP’s David Blitzer.

“We have observed two consecutive months of increasing home prices and overall improvements in monthly and annual returns,” he added. “However, we need to remember that spring and early summer are seasonally strong buying months so this trend must continue throughout the summer and into the fall.”

This is not the first time since the initial home price collapse in 2006 that we have seen prices rise, only to fall again. We saw large price gains in 2009, thanks to the home buyer tax credit, and we saw slight gains last spring due to some seasonality and a big run on distressed properties by investors.

So how do we know if the latest gains we are seeing are here to stay?

Much of the answer lies in foreclosures. Many markets have seen their supply of foreclosed properties fall dramatically, due to huge investor demand.

Take Phoenix, for example, where investors claim there is just not enough to buy. Home prices there are up 11.5 percent from a year ago.

Miami and Tampa are also seeing solid gains. But Atlanta continues to be the weakest spot; as foreclosure supplies there surge, prices are down 14.5 percent.

Foreclosures are falling nationwide, but the crisis is far from over, and the concern is that all the delays in foreclosure processing will continue to wreak havoc on home prices for at least another year, if not longer.

There were 1.4 million homes in some stage of foreclosure in June, down slightly from 1.5 million in June of 2011, according to a new report from CoreLogic.

Completed foreclosures, however, fell more dramatically, down 24 percent from a year ago. This is likely due to renewed loan modification efforts by lenders, as well as new state legislation, that are keeping many homes from final foreclosure.

The big questions continue to be how long these foreclosure delays will last and how successful foreclosure alternatives and loan modifications will ultimately be. And these numbers don’t include loans that are delinquent but not yet in the foreclosure process. Those number around 3.6 million according to Lender Processing Services.

With so many different home price surveys showing gains this spring, and in the absence of a home buyer tax credit, it would appear that this price recovery is the real thing.

But there is in fact one government stimulus in play that some have been discounting, and that is record low interest rates. Those low rates should be giving home buyers even more purchasing power than we are seeing in the price numbers.

The concern is that these price gains are largely on the low end, distressed sector, where the bulk of home sales are right now. Lack of supply is pushing prices up there, but not, perhaps, in the rest of the market, where sales are still sluggish, and buyers need mortgages, unlike so many all-cash investors.

While some housing analysts have already called a bottom to home prices, others warn we may not have seen the last of the losses.

The spring market was slightly better than expected, especially for the home builders, but we have to remember that the builders and the overall housing market are not necessarily the same.

Home builders may be seeing gains due to the drop in supply of distressed properties, but that drop in supply could in turn slow the existing home sales market and push price numbers down yet again.

-By CNBC’s Diana Olick
Questions? Comments? And follow me on Twitter @Diana_Olick

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/48417387?__source=RSS*blog*&par=RSS

San Francisco Luxury Home Sales Hit Three Year High, Coldwell Banker …

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 23:27:00 +0000

San Francisco, CA, August 06, 2011 –(PR.com)– Luxury home sales in San Francisco reached their highest level since 2008 during the second quarter of this year as the high-end market continued to bounce back from the recessionary downturn, according to a new market report by Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, the region’s leading provider of luxury real estate services.
A total of 86 homes sold for more than $2 million in San Francisco during the April-June quarter, up from just 50 sales in the first quarter of the year and 76 during the second quarter of 2010. The 86 transactions marked the highest level of multi-million-dollar sales in the city since just before the Lehman Brothers collapse and the subsequent crash of the financial markets.

While sales have steadily improved, prices in the high-end market continued to adjust during the most recent quarter. The median sale price of a multi-million-dollar home in San Francisco dipped to $2,665,000 during the second quarter, down from $2,727,500 in the first quarter and $2,912,500 during the same period a year ago.

Other metrics showed improvement for the city’s luxury market. Home sales over $3 million more than doubled from the first quarter to 33 transactions. Homes sold in average of 70 days, down from 79 days the previous quarter. And sellers received 97 percent of their asking price on average, up from 96 percent in the first quarter.

The figures were derived from Multiple Listing Service data of all homes sold in San Francisco for more than $2 million during the second quarter of 2011.

“After a fairly quiet spring, the housing market is heating up this summer, particularly the luxury market here in San Francisco,” said Rick Turley, president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. “The high-end segment normally leads the way for the rest of the market in a housing recovery, so this is encouraging news for the entire market.”

Turley said Coldwell Banker is seeing similar improvement in other luxury markets around the Bay Area, including Silicon Valley, the Peninsula and Marin County. All of those markets have bounced back from their recessionary lows and in some cases are nearing their pre-recession levels in sales.

Although the high-end markets have done best, Turley noted that many entry-level and mid-level markets around the Bay also showed solid gains last month. Bay Area home sales overall in June rose to their highest level for any month since June 2010, when expiring tax credits gave housing a final boost, according to DataQuick, the La Jolla research firm.

Some key findings from the second quarter Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage luxury report:

* The most expensive sale in San Francisco during the quarter was a six-bedroom, seven-bath 5,800-square foot home in Presidio Heights that sold for $9.25 million;

* Zip code 94123 (Marina) had the most multi-million-dollar sales with 14, followed by 94115 (Pacific Heights) with 11 sales, 94109 (Nob Hill) with nine, and 94114 (Noe Valley/Castro Valley) and 94118 (Presidio Heights/Inner Richmond) with eight apiece;

* Sellers received on average 97 percent of their asking price, up from 96 percent the previous month but down from 98 percent a year ago;

The San Francisco Luxury Market Report is a quarterly report by Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, a specialist in high-end real estate sales. Through its internationally renowned Coldwell Banker Previews® program, the company is recognized around the world for its expertise in the luxury housing market.

Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage serves San Francisco with five offices. For more information, please call 925-275-3085.

About Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage

Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage is the largest residential real estate brokerage in Northern California and serves the markets from Monterey to Tahoe and nearly every market in between. The company has 62 office locations and more than 3,600 sales associates throughout Northern California. Last year the company handled 13.5% of all dollar volume sold in Northern California, more than double its nearest competitor. Through its internationally renowned Coldwell Banker Previews® program, the company leads the luxury home market in Northern California, representing more than 22% of all dollar volume sold of properties over $1 million. Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage is part of NRT LLC, the nation’s largest residential real estate brokerage company. NRT has 750 offices and 45,000 sales associates operating in more than 35 major metropolitan areas. A subsidiary of Realogy Corporation, NRT operates Realogy’s company-owned real estate brokerage offices. For more information please visit www.CaliforniaMoves.com or call 925.275.3085. DRE # 00313415.

###

Article source: http://www.pr.com/press-release/344027