The Bay Area saw home prices climb across the region in 2012, driven by tech growth and a recovering national economy.

Median prices for single-family detached homes were up in all but eight of 107 communities in the Bay Area for the fourth quarter, according to new numbers from the real estate data firm DataQuick.

Prices in Oakland were up 35 percent, while prices in San Francisco rose 21.2 percent.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2013/01/bay-area-home-prices-up-in-q4-2012.html

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) January 26, 2013

The Real Estate Marketing Insider announced this week’s recipient of the “Toby’s Choice” award for the best market for middle-income homes and properties. Following news from SFGate of a surge in home sales and a price spike in late 2012, the winner of this week’s award was the San Francisco Bay Area.

Over the course of 2012, the Bay Area saw its home sales accelerate steadily with prices keeping pace. By the end of 2012, according to research firm DataQuick, the market looked completely different from one year earlier. The price median among the nine counties of the Bay Area ended the year at $442,750. That marks a 32 percent increase from 2011, a record-setting spike. The total sales of homes and condos touched 7,800 in December, a 4.5 percent year-over-year increase. Meanwhile, home sales that resulted from foreclosures and short sales decreased from over 50 percent, to about a third.

These new numbers are great news for home sellers in the Bay Area. The numbers show that the area is popular with buyers, with high turnover for new properties. Sellers that arm themselves with online marketing campaigns can easily uncover real estate buyer leads and find high demand for Bay Area listings. The market in the Bay Area represents a great opportunity for real estate agents. Realtors looking for new mid-range listings should take a close look at this week’s “Toby’s Choice”.

The Real Estate Marketing Insider named its “Toby’s Choice” Market of the Week, an award that recognizes outstanding real estate markets for mid-range homes. REMI chose the San Francisco Bay Area as the Market of the Week, after DataQuick released figures showing record sales and price increases in 2012.

About Real Estate Marketing Insider:

The Real Estate Marketing Insider provides up-to-the-minute news, real estate tips, and insider analysis of the real estate market. An invaluable resource for home buyers, home sellers, and real estate professionals, REMI is based in La Jolla, Calif.

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prwebreal-estate-market/bay-area-san-francisco/prweb10365181.htm

Article source: http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2013/01/26/remi-announces-bay-area-%E2%80%9Ctoby%E2%80%99s-choice%E2%80%9D-market-week

Thirteen of the region’s 15 biggest cities recorded fewer murders, robberies, assaults and rapes last year than in 2010, according to new numbers released by the FBI and analyzed by The Chronicle. Three cities – Fremont, Concord and Daly City – enjoyed declines of better than 20 percent.

Although conventional wisdom links hard times to high crime, the factors behind the rise and fall of mayhem and theft have never been well understood. If the recession fed desperation, said Robert Weisberg, a criminal justice expert at the Stanford Law School, it may also have created a sense of “communal solidarity.”

Crime went down, he noted, in some of the worst years of the Great Depression.

Focusing resources

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi said the economy has “forced the law enforcement community and the criminal justice system to use its resources more effectively. We’re putting more resources into prosecuting – and defending – the more serious crimes.”

In growing safer, the Bay Area’s big cities are in lockstep with a national trend that has seen violence drop for five consecutive years, following a period of rising crime that stirred alarm. Violent crime fell 4 percent nationally from 2010 to 2011, while property theft crimes fell 0.8 percent – the ninth straight decline.

In the Bay Area, the gains are perhaps clearest in San Francisco, which averaged 94 homicides a year from 2004 to 2008. In the past three years, the totals were 45, 48 and 50.

Long-term drop

The news looks even better over the longer term, with many big California cities cutting violent crime nearly in half since a peak in the late 1980s – a time associated with the crack cocaine epidemic. Unprecedented decreases followed in the 1990s, and some experts now see a sustained leveling.

The statistics, though, reveal difficulties in some places. Violent crime went up 6 percent in 2011 in Oakland, which had the fourth-highest rate among U.S. cities with more than 100,000 people. Oakland was safer than only Flint, Mich., Detroit and St. Louis.

Still, Oakland’s violent crime rate is down 19 percent from its recent high point in 2008.

“The city is still struggling to devise a response to the crime problem that the city can unite around,” said David Sklansky, a law professor at UC Berkeley who has written extensively about policing.

Fewer cops

Vallejo, which like Oakland has slashed its police force in recent years, saw a 10 percent jump in violent crime. But that’s still down 25 percent from its recent high in 2006.

Homicides in San Jose nearly doubled from 2010, to 39. However, overall violent crime dropped slightly year-to-year in that city, and is down 42 percent over the past decade.

Police officials in the Bay Area said they could only speculate on why crime is falling. But many said they had gotten smarter – strengthening relationships with residents and community aid groups, using technology like crime mapping to add officers to troubled neighborhoods, and cracking down on the small number of hard-core offenders who drive violent crime.

“Community partnerships have been huge here,” said Fairfield police Capt. Darrin Moody. “For years we tried to do it ourselves, and we should have realized a long time ago that we couldn’t.”

Moody pointed to the Leaven, a Fairfield nonprofit that since 2005 has gone into low-income apartment complexes to tutor children after school. Crime dropped at each site, Moody said.

Enlisting the feds

Gregg Ogelsby, a police detective in Daly City, singled out the effort in recent years to bring federal racketeering cases against gang members, which can put them in prison for years even if they don’t personally take part in a killing or assault. The cases have weakened MS-13, a gang that plagues San Francisco’s Mission District.

The federal prosecutions “can wipe out entire groups of violent offenders,” Oglesby said.

Crime statistics tend to fluctuate, and the numbers have ticked up in some cities this year. Violent crime is up 19 percent in Oakland, 10 percent in Fremont and 6 percent in Fairfield, which has recorded seven homicides – two more than in all of 2011.

Moody said Fairfield was seeing early fallout from the state’s effort to cut overcrowding in its prisons, known as realignment, which began in October. “We anticipated an increase in crime, and we’re taking strides to deal with it,” he said.

But in an example of the disagreements that often arise among those analyzing crime statistics, others said reforms to the corrections system were making cities safer.

“The fact that we’re seeing violent crimes reduced when a record number of people are being released from state prison is significant,” Adachi said. “We have to make sure we continue to reform our system in the right direction.”

Demian Bulwa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: dbulwa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @demianbulwa

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

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/06/16/BAQB1P0SBQ.DTL

The US Treasury just released its latest “scorecard” on the state of the government’s housing bailout. The numbers are still weak, compared to the overall picture.

In May, 32,398 borrowers got permanent modifications, bringing the total to 731,451, but nearly 98,000 modifications have already gone bad and been canceled. Treasury did put out some interesting new numbers on how many modifications involve principal forgiveness from the banks.

Close to 5,000 “active modifications” have a reduced principal balance of, on average, about $70,000, or 32 percent of the balance. About 16,000 more are in the trial period—kind of a pittance, when you look at the 1.6 million trial modifications started.

Banks tell me they are doing more principal reduction in their own proprietary modifications, but getting that data is, suffice it to say, difficult to obtain.

It is interesting to note that short sales are really ramping up. The Treasury’s report now includes numbers on the Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternative program, which gives incentives to servicers and borrowers to do short sales and deeds in lieu of foreclosure. Close to 18,000 of these started, nearly all short sales, and this program is just a few months old.

So, where do we stand?

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Earlier this week, when we got the report of a bump up in sales of newly constructed homes, I cautioned that the home builders are still facing huge competition from distressed properties (foreclosures and short sales). Today we have some new numbers showing just how big and how widespread that competition is. 

Foreclosed properties made up 28 percent of all home sales nationwide in the first quarter of this year, according to RealtyTrac.

That’s up slightly from Q4 of 2010, but not the record 29 percent we saw a year ago. More than 107,000 bank-owned (REO) properties sold, which is actually a drop from the previous quarter and a bigger drop (36 percent) from a year ago. Foreclosed properties sold at a 35 percent discount to their non-distressed counterparts.

So here we have fewer selling but making up a larger share of total sales. That’s not particularly healthy. We need to get more of these properties sold, because as I showed you on the blog Tuesday, there are hundreds of thousands of them and millions more in the potential pipeline.

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