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Bay Area housing inventory drops by 30 percent

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 07:29:33 +0000

Fewer Bay Area homeowners listed homes for sale in June than last the same month last year.

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Housing inventory was down by more than 30 percent during the past year in the Bay Area, according to real estate website Zillow.

When comparing June of 2013 to June of 2012 in its database of listings, Zillow found there were fewer homes on the market in the San Francisco metro area, but nationwide, the number rose by 5.3 percent.

Zillow listed 4,528 total homes for sale in June of this year, down from 6,496 last year, in the San Francisco metropolitan area including San Francisco, Alameda, Marin, Contra Costa, and San Mateo counties.

In our market, having fewer homes for sale has pumped up prices and sparked bidding wars.

“Inventory will likely remain below year-ago levels for a while yet, as builders ramp up capacity and sellers wait to squeeze every drop of equity from their home before listing,” said Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist.

Experts expect that with prices climbing up, more homeowners will list their properties for sale and prices will stabilize.

“Going forward, as this new supply makes its way to market, we expect the pace of home value appreciation to slow down from unsustainably high annual levels of 5 percent or above to more moderate levels closer to historic norms of 3 percent or 4 percent,” Humphries said.

Blanca Torres covers East Bay real estate for the San Francisco Business Times.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/06/bay-area-housing-inventory-drops-by-30.html

San Francisco 2nd, San Jose 6th least affordable places to buy in the country

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 10:52:17 +0000

We’ve written numerous times about how crazy expensive buying a home in the Bay Area is for the average folk. Out comes another survey, this one by the National Association of Home Builders/ Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index, that confirms what we already know about Bay Area real estate. As AOL Real Estate reports, this survey looks at a metropolitan area’s median home price and median income and then determines what percentage of the homes an average homebuyer can afford.

The San Francisco metro area ranks 2nd in the nation in housing affordability

Based on these statistics, the San Francisco metro area was the second least affordable area to buy. With a median home price of $659,000 and median income of $103,000, only 31.4% of homes are affordable to the average Bay Area resident. This wasn’t too far off from New York City, which was the least affordable place to buy, where the average New Yorker could afford to buy only 28.5% of homes there.

Heading south along the bay, San Jose was ranked the sixth least affordable place to buy. The median home price there was $530,000. Median incomes in the San Jose metro area were $105,000 and based on these two numbers, about 46.2% of homes are affordable to the average homebuyer. Better, but still not great.

San Jose is 6th in the country in housing affordability

Interestingly, the article also points out that San Francisco and San Jose were two of only a handful of metro areas where the median income was in the six figures – all thanks they say to the once again booming tech industry.

In all, California heads the list as the least affordable state. In addition to San Francisco and San Jose, the metro areas of Los Angeles, Santa Ana and San Diego made the list. To look at the other areas that made the list, click here.

Article source: http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2012/12/07/san-francisco-2nd-san-jose-6th-least-affordable-places-to-buy-in-the-country/

San Francisco: 36% Drop in Foreclosures Year Over Year

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 08:34:09 +0000

The San Francisco housing market continues to recover, and in more ways than one. New research shows that foreclosure activity has dropped significantly across the Bay Area. This will support home prices and increase market stability going forward.

The Federal Reserve recently published a positive outlook for the San Francisco metropolitan-area housing market. Among other things, it predicted strong demand for homes into 2013. That’s good news for sellers.

Here’s more good news for homeowners in the area. Foreclosure filings are receding — and fast.

At Gay Realty Watch, we look for news to share with you about the gay real estate market – both lgbt real estate news and news specific to gay and lesbian real estate meccas.

Authored By Brandon Cornett – See the Full Story at the Home Buying Institute

Click here for gay realtors, mortgage lenders, and other real estate professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Article source: http://www.gayapolis.com/news/artdisplay-realestate.php?artid=19568

San Francisco Leads Nation in Foreclosure Reduction

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:54:14 +0000

Home News San Francisco Leads Nation in Foreclosure Reduction

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By Brandon Cornett | November 1, 2012
© 2012, All rights reserved

Trending: Mortgage Rates are Rising
On August 16, 2012, the average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage rose to 3.62%. What kind of rate can you get?

Conventional:
FHA:

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Colorful houses in San Francisco. Ian Ransley.

The San Francisco housing market continues to recover, and in more ways than one.

New research shows that foreclosure activity has dropped significantly across the Bay Area. This will support home prices and increase market stability going forward.

Here’s more good news for homeowners in the area. Foreclosure filings are receding — and fast.

36% Drop in San Francisco Foreclosures

Last week, RealtyTrac released their Metropolitan Foreclosure Market Report for the third quarter of 2012. Among the nation’s largest metro areas, San Francisco experienced the largest reduction in foreclosure activity. Third-quarter foreclosure filings fell 36%, compared to the same time last year.

RealtyTrac’s report included all properties with at least one foreclosure filing, across all three phases of the foreclosure process — defaults, auctions, and bank repossessions. In total, there were 9,798 filings in the San Francisco metro area, during the third quarter of 2012. That marks a 3% reduction from the previous quarter, and a 36% reduction from the same period in 2011.

Typically, a major reduction in foreclosure activity helps to stabilize the market in two ways. First, we have an overall drop in the number of homes for sale. With a consistent level of demand, a drop in supply will put upward pressure on home prices.

Secondly, we have less price erosion resulting from distressed properties. Foreclosure homes are often priced and sold below their market values. So they end up as low-end comps, or comparable sales, putting downward pressure on home prices. Thus, the San Francisco real estate market benefits in two ways from this trend.

On the broader stage, this is just one of several factors boosting Bay Area home prices. The metro-area unemployment rate hit 7.4% in August, down from a recession high of 10.1% in January 2010. Housing inventory has fallen across the board, not just in the foreclosure sector. Meanwhile, demand is growing among investors and ‘regular’ home buyers alike.

Homes are Selling Faster, and for More

According to data provided by ZipRealty, San Francisco’s real estate market is still bustling. Home sales typically drop off in the fall, after the summer buying ‘season.’ But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. In most Bay Area counties, homes sold faster this September compared to last. List prices and sale prices both rose at the same time.

Within San Francisco County, the median number of days on market (DOM) was 40 days in September. That marks an 18% decline from the same time last year. At 12 days, Santa Clara County had the lowest median DOM for the Bay Area (it’s no wonder prices are jumping in places like Saratoga). The median DOM declined in eight of the nine Bay-Area counties over the last year. Only Solano County saw an increase in this metric.

The median listing price rose in eight of nine counties as well, again with exception of Solano County. Median selling prices rose in all nine counties over the last year. This is according to data from ZipRealty, a real estate company headquartered in Emeryville, California.

The latest SP/Case-Shiller Home Price Index was released the day before Halloween. According to that report, home prices rose 5.3% across the San Francisco metro area, from August 2011 to August 2012.

While California seems to be leading the recovery, it’s becoming a national trend. At the monthly level, prices rose in 19 of the 20 major metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller. “The sustained good news in home prices over the past five months makes us optimistic for continued recovery in the housing market,” said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at SP Dow Jones Indices.

Filed under San Francisco

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Article source: http://www.homebuyinginstitute.com/news/san-francisco-foreclosure-reduction-275/

Bay Area home prices expected to stabilize in 2012

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:58:31 +0000

After years of decline, housing prices are expected to stabilize or even increase in some parts of the Bay Area this year, according to a new forecast.

Stabilizing prices are a sign of a healthier market, even though homebuyers still face challenges — tight credit, not many homes for sale and competition from investors paying cash.

In a report to be released Monday, Clear Capital, a real estate valuations company in Truckee, predicts that prices will remain almost flat this year — compared with a 4.7 percent drop in 2011 — in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metropolitan area, including Contra Costa County. Silicon Valley should see a 1.6 percent increase in home prices, compared with a 2.5 percent drop last year, the company said.

“This region overall is doing pretty well,” said Clear Capital research director Alex Villacorta.

In three of the past four years, Bay Area home prices have declined from the previous year, including a dramatic 35 percent drop for the San Francisco metro area in 2008 and a 28 percent drop in Silicon Valley that year. Only in 2010 were there slight increases, followed by last year’s drop.

“We haven’t seen any stretches of normal activity for the last 20 years or so” in the Bay Area, he said, noting that prices had rocketed upward in the years before the decline. “It’s really been a roller coaster, with exception of now, when things are settling and leveling off.”

Nationally, the company

sees a 0.2 percent gain in home prices in 2012, compared to a 2.1 percent drop in 2011. The San Jose area’s expected performance was in the top third and San Francisco was in the top half of 50 major metropolitan areas analyzed.

Across the country, housing could help repair the economy, said economist Sung Won Sohn at Cal State Channel Islands. Sohn, who recently released his own economic forecast, is predicting a housing-led recovery for the U.S. this year based partly on low interest rates and renewed multifamily home construction, which usually brings gains in the overall housing market. And prices, he said, are about as low as they can go.

“No one is expecting a dramatic fall in house prices,” Sohn said. “That gets people buying houses.”

The Bay Area, especially Silicon Valley, is already doing better, he said, “because the underlying economy seems to be doing better. I think we will see a somewhat faster recovery in the Bay Area.”

In the past two years, home prices bobbed up and down in response to government programs to encourage sales, as well as fluctuations in the number of foreclosures and short sales, in which homes are sold for less than is owed on them.

But agents say too few homes are on the market, and buyers still face tight credit.

“People are in escrow forever, and they finally give up,” said Richard Calhoun of Creekside Realty. “That is what I see as the biggest hindrance on the market.”

Investors paying cash for lower-priced houses remain a big obstacle for people like Nicole Collison, 25, a San Jose schoolteacher trying to buy her first home.

Motivated by the high rent she’s paying and the market’s current low interest rates and prices, Collison has looked at nearly 50 houses since October and bid on half a dozen of them, only to lose out every time to cash buyers.

“We’re always outbid,” she said. “It has been quite a challenge.”

But she hasn’t given up.

“We’re going to keep at it. We’re hopeful after the beginning of the year more things will come on to the market.”

In the East Bay, about 20 percent of the homes are selling rapidly, said Unhei Kang with Grubb Co. in Berkeley. A nicely presented home in a desirable area will draw multiple bids, she said.

“I don’t know what the future will hold, but to me it seems like it is stable. There are definitely buyers out there. Maybe it has to do with the low interest rates. A lot of buyers are feeling it’s not going to get any better than this,” Kang said.

The housing market is “spotty” in Contra Costa County, with some areas doing well and others not, said Barbara Safran, president of the Contra Costa Association of Realtors. “I think we’ve dropped about as low as it can get, unless some crazy thing happens in the economy and the world.”

The median price for single-family homes dropped about 4 percent last year, Safran said, with condos dropping about 4.6 percent.

“We’re predicting that it’s probably going to stay the way it is for a while. I think we’re going to continue to see a lot of short sales. The foreclosure market is still iffy. It’s a question of how quickly banks are going to put out those foreclosures.”

Contact Pete Carey at 408-920-5419.

Bay Area home prices

San Jose metro area
2011- down 2.5%
2012 forecast – up 1.6 %
San Francisco metro area
2011 – down 4.7%
2012 forecast – up 0.1%
source: Clear Capital.

Article source: http://www.mercurynews.com/business-headlines/ci_19691779

Home prices fall in US, SF region

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 07:05:13 +0000

Home prices nationally and in the Bay Area fell more than expected in September and in the third quarter, according to a closely watched index. The continued declines show a still-struggling housing market that is unable to give a boost to the economy.

Nationally, residential real estate prices fell 3.9 percent in the three months ended in September compared with the same period last year, according to the SP/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. Compared with a year ago, prices fell in 18 of the 20 metropolitan areas tracked by the index, including the San Francisco area, which was down 5.9 percent in the quarter compared with 2010.

“There is no significant momentum, no signs of the housing market contributing to the economy anytime soon,” said Maureen Maitland, vice president of SP Indices, which produces Case-Shiller. “The fact that so many markets were negative does cause us to pay attention. We are on very shaky ground.”

While some seasonal weakness is to be expected after the prime spring selling season, “weakness and negativity do not have to be synonymous,” she said.

In other words, while flat prices might not stir concern, the continued price declines do.

The San Francisco metropolitan area – which Case-Shiller defines as the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo – is actually among the better-performing regions, despite falling more than the national average.

“San Francisco (metro) has recovered 13 percent from its low in 2009,” Maitland said. “Since then, its prices have been largely increasing, although they have recently fallen down a bit on a year-over-year basis. But two years ago, when there was some recovery, San Francisco was one of the markets that was doing better than others.”

While the nation has undergone a “double dip” in which prices fell, recovered and then fell further, San Francisco has not, she said.

Case-Shiller tracks sales of the same single-family houses over time. It compares changes with a base value of 100, which represents values as of January 2000.

The San Francisco index is now 133.22, meaning that prices here are 33.22 percent above their year 2000 level. The region’s index peaked at 218.37 in May 2006 and hit a low of 117.74 in March 2009.

“Housing is struggling to get up off the mat everywhere,” said Jim Diffley, chief regional economist for IHS Global Insight. “The Bay Area in some ways has been more fortunate than its Sun Belt neighbors. Its economy is doing relatively better.”

IHS predicts that the California market is near bottom and that prices nationally may drop another 7 percent before turning around in mid-2012. “We may have a little further to fall in other parts of the country before we finally get some growth in 2012,” Diffley said.

Patrick Newport, U.S. economist for IHS, said the continued weakness in sales of existing homes bodes poorly for recovery in construction of new homes, typically a major source of job creation. The country is on track to build 600,000 new homes this year, compared with a normal market of 1.4 million new homes.

“This year is probably going to be the worst we’ve ever had for new-home sales and new-home starts,” he said. “Normally, in a recovery, housing is a key sector that gets the economy back on track. Building more homes creates more jobs and has a positive feedback loop.”

The only two regions where prices increased year-over-year were Detroit, where they had tumbled so drastically that they may have hit bottom, and Washington, D.C., where federal jobs buoy the local economy, Maitland said.

Prices nationally rose 0.1 percent in the third quarter compared with the second quarter, which means they were essentially flat.

E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/30/BUOG1M5MCG.DTL&type=business

Office rents rebound – SF jets to No. 1 in US

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 04:52:48 +0000

Fueled by tech company growth, San Francisco office rents rose sharply in the second quarter and vacancies decreased, vaulting the city to the leading spot in an otherwise-tepid national office market, according to three separate research reports this week.

“San Francisco jumped to the No. 1 position in the country” for office real estate performance, said Colin Yasukochi, vice president of research at Jones Lang LaSalle and author of one of the reports. “Technology companies are the underlying driving force in the San Francisco market. It’s recovering very quickly” from the economic downturn.

He shows the city’s average asking office rent at $40.06 per square foot, up from $33.71 a year ago.

Over the past four quarters, about 1.3 million square feet of space was absorbed by tenants, “the best four quarters since 2008, which was the peak of the market,” Yasukochi said. While the vacancy rate overall is still a relatively high 16.2 percent, in hot neighborhoods such as South of Market, it’s only 6.9 percent, he said.

Chris Macke, senior real estate strategist for research firm CoStar Group in Washington, agreed that San Francisco is bouncing back.

“You folks have seen steady rental-rate increases for effectively every quarter since early 2010, whereas nationally they’re still having rental-rate decreases,” he said. “In the second quarter, San Francisco had the largest rental-rate increases, going up 4.4 percent compared to the first quarter. That’s very, very strong, far better than anywhere else in the country.”

Part of the dynamic is that San Francisco tends to be volatile, as supply is constrained for the most sought-after, higher-quality “creative” spaces. “It’s a market that is prone to greater increases and decreases; it acts like a tightly wound rubber band,” Macke said.

Bright outlook

The San Francisco metropolitan area, which includes San Mateo County, was also on top for rent increases between the first and second quarter in a report from research firm Reis.

“I think the outlook for San Francisco is relatively bright,” said Ryan Severino, an economist at Reis. “We expect to see fairly robust rent growth there this year.” Both Oakland and San Jose metro areas also are benefiting from increased office demand, Reis found. It ranked San Jose fourth in the nation for rent increases and the East Bay ninth.

Tech firms increasingly are branching out from SoMa into downtown, previously the domain of more traditional companies.

‘The hustle and bustle’

“We like the hustle and bustle of the Financial District,” said Alex Mehr, co-founder and co-CEO of online dating site Zoosk Inc., which signed a lease in the second quarter for 21,391 square feet at 475 Sansome St. It already was subletting the space from Yahoo.

“Software companies prefer SoMa because they hire a lot of Java developers who live in the South Bay and so (being near) Caltrain is an advantage,” Mehr said. “But we’re a Web company and our developers live in San Francisco, so the Financial District is a much easier commute for them.”

Zoosk went from about 20 employees 18 months ago to almost 90 now. Mehr expects the staff to double annually, so the company will soon outgrow its current location. Rising rents don’t concern him too much.

In the heart of the city

“The advantage of being in the heart of San Francisco with quick access to BART and having all that action all around us outweighs any increase in prices,” he said.

Meade Boutwell, senior vice president with broker CB Richard Ellis, recently represented a downtown building that remodeled a 3,000-square-foot space specifically to lure tech tenants.

“The Mills Building at 220 Montgomery is one of the oldest buildings downtown, it’s a classic that survived the 1906 earthquake,” he said. “It’s class B space with traditional dropped ceilings. We tore out the ceilings, exposed the raw concrete, brick and piping, which made it very creative-looking. The tech tenants that all wanted SoMa in 2000 said they loved the feeling of the space; we had nine offers.” A tech company leased the space for $41 per square foot, a premium from its $35 asking price. Now the owner plans to do a similar rehab elsewhere in the building.

Executives at Starwood Property Trust, a real estate investment trust based in San Francisco, said they are bullish on the city.

“San Francisco has held up better than most markets,” said Chris Tokarski, managing director and chief credit officer. “In particular the tech growth is creating more pressure and space is leasing up quicker. You can say that about apartments, retail and office. It clearly is seeing growth on all fronts.”

E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/08/BUUK1K7QG3.DTL&type=tech