The median price for all new and resale homes throughout the nine counties in June was $417,000, up 10.4 percent from a year earlier, according to DataQuick, a San Diego real estate service. That was the highest since August 2008 and a big jump from the trough of $290,000 in March 2009, but still far short of the peak of $665,000 in the summer of 2007.

“This reflects a market that’s slowly moving back toward normalcy,” said Andrew LePage, a DataQuick analyst. “The bulk of the regional and countywide gains in median is the result of fewer foreclosures and other lower-cost homes selling and more mid- to high-priced homes.”

Decline in values

About half of the median’s drop over the real estate downturn came from a different composition of homes sold (more low-end homes results in a lower median), while the other half came from a decline in home values, DataQuick said.

Distressed sales – foreclosures and short sales in which homes are sold for less than what is owed on the mortgage – continued to decline. Distressed sales were 36.1 percent of the resale market, compared with 44.3 percent a year earlier.

The distressed sales were almost evenly split between foreclosure resales (18.1 percent) and short sales (18 percent). At their peak in February 2009, foreclosures accounted for 52 percent of resales, DataQuick said.

The 8,577 homes that sold in the month was up 7.2 percent from a year earlier, DataQuick said.

Real estate agents continue to report that inventories are low in the Bay Area, which increases buyer competition and drives up prices. Properties are selling much more quickly than in the past.

“We usually have a two-month agreement with clients, which gives them a nice marketing period to have our items in a home,” said Jeff Schlarb, owner of Green Couch Interior Design and Staging, which decks out for-sale homes to show them to their best advantage. “But now we’re seeing places sold in three weeks. It’s a big change from a year ago.”

Absentee buyers

Investors continue to be a potent market force. Absentee buyers bought 23.4 percent of Bay Area homes in June, up from 20 percent a year ago, paying a median of $270,000. Buyers paying all cash represented 27.5 percent of sales, up slightly from a year ago.

As always, market health varies tremendously by area.

“In part of the Silicon Valley, at least some of the increase in median reflects price pressure,” LePage said. “You’ve got a thin inventory of homes for sale and a fair number of people chasing them.

“Across the market, more and more neighborhoods are at least stable and some are inching up, while some remain weak. In some neighborhoods, if you get two more foreclosures on your street and they’re both dilapidated and the seller is anxious – those are scenarios where prices are still pretty soft.”

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

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Home-sales-prices-up-in-Bay-Area-in-June-3717559.php

A real estate source I knew recently told me about a guy he knows in Atlanta who has been hired by several different banks to winterize their REO’s (real estate owned, i.e. the bank-owned foreclosures).

The homes are abandoned and empty, and clearly the banks think they’re going to stay that way for a while.

The winterizer didn’t want to do an interview, for fear he would lose his clients, the banks, who might not want us all to know about this.

A new study by an economist at the Cleveland Federal Reserve finds today’s foreclosures stay vacant far longer than the historical norm. Studying one Ohio county, Stephan Whitaker found, “foreclosed homes go through more than a year of very high vacancy rates following the auction and are substantially more likely to be vacant up to 60 months after the foreclosure.” The higher the poverty rate in the area, the longer the property stays vacant.

Foreclosed homes obviously lower the value of surrounding homes, but Whitaker says the damage can go on much longer than we might think. “The data suggest that foreclosure may permanently scar some homes,” he writes in his research.

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