Home prices keep on ratcheting up as Bay Area outpaces national growth

Thu, 30 May 2013 11:20:24 +0000

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Homes keep getting bid up over asking, which keeps pushing up prices. Another week, another real estate report showing that home prices are on a tear, with the Bay Area among the nation’s leaders. This time, it was the SP/Case-Shiller home-price index showing double-digit prices increases.

Here are photos from one of those now-commonplace scenarios: A perfectly nice, but not extraordinary house that went for way over asking. In this case it was a four-bedroom rancher in Walnut Creek’s Larkey Park area. Listed for $615,950, it went for $650,000 — $34,050 or 5.5 percent over asking.

On average, homes in the 9-county San Francisco Bay Area area are selling for 103.6 percent of asking; this time last year, they went for 100 percent of asking, said Lanny Baker, CEO of Emeryville’s ZipRealty.

Realtors around the Bay Area continue to report flocks of buying chasing super-tight inventory. ZipRealty shows that for-sale Bay Area inventory is down 43 percent from this time last year to only about 6,998 homes. In 22 out of 24 metro areas it tracks nationwide, ZipRealty “saw more new listings as of April 30 compared to April 30, 2012,” it said in a report. “San Francisco and Austin were the only two metros showing slight declines in new listings.”

“Five of the top seven cities in our national report on price appreciation are in California,” Baker said. “We see San Francisco (metro) as the No. 1 city in the country right now for price momentum,”

In the Case-Shiller report, prices for a 20-city composite index were up 10.9 percent in March versus a year earlier. For the SF metro, which Case-Shiller defines as the counties of San Francisco, Marin, San Mateo, Alameda and Contra Costa, the increase was a strong 22.2 percent, second only to Phoenix’s 22.5 percent gain. For an in-depth look at the report and its implications, click here.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Follow her on Twitter: @csaid

Article source: http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2013/05/29/homes-prices-keep-on-ratcheting-up-as-bay-area-outpaces-national-growth/

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Home prices keep on ratcheting up as Bay Area outpaces national growth