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If you’re looking for a home in the Bay Area, you will probably need two things on your side: luck, and a lot of cash.

Those who aren’t willing to compete with up to dozens of other offers on a home are now trying to buy it – hours after it’s listed on the market.

The new trend has been dubbed by realty experts as “flash sales” – any sale that happens within 24 hours.

For example, a home in East Palo Alto on Gates Street was put on the market on March 19. It got nine offers the same day and sold for above asking price within 24 hours.

Glenn Kelman, CEO of online real estate brokerage Redfin which is set up in 19 U.S. markets, said that trend is growing in the Bay Area and calls it “Ground Zero” for an incredibly hot housing market, one that experienced an incredible boom at the start of 2013 in January.

“In the Bay Area in the past six months, we’ve seen 1,000 homes get under contract in less than 24 hours. It used to be a fast sale was three days – now, it’s three hours,” Kelman said.

Ken DeLeon, a realtor, said his latest listing is a 1200 square foot home in Palo Alto that he just put on the market Thursday. “The amazing part is just within 24 hours, we already had a client with a Chinese all-cash buyer offer us more than 300,000 above and we said, ‘No thank you, please wait,’” DeLeon said.

He and other realtors said they’re still catering to those wealthy foreign buyers, mostly from China and Russia; however, with historic-low mortgage interest rates and an inventory that’s also hitting record lows, they said the competitive cash offers are no longer limited to the high-end homes.

“That’s the main trend. It’s spreading out to other neighborhoods that once weren’t so hot,” added Kelman.

The Silicon Valley Association of Realtors compiled data from MLS listings for the South Bay. According to its numbers, for single family homes between February 2012 and February 2013, inventory was slashed by 52 percent in Santa Clara Country and 44 percent in San Mateo County.

Both experienced more than 30 percent in increase of median sale price. Redfin’s numbers show just how competitive it’s gotten in the last couple of months.

A San Francisco home in the Sunset District had 29 offers, a townhouse in Oakland got 15, and one on Dauphine Avenue in Fremont was hit with a stunning 65 offers. That house eventually sold for at least $100,000 more than the half-a-million asking price.

“There are sometimes traffic jams outside open houses,” said Kelman. “Folks get worried they can’t wait for the offer deadline on Sundays, so they make a preemptive strike to try and buy it on the spot.”

He said Redfin and other companies offer “mobile alerts” that let customers know almost immediately after there’s a new listing on the market. He believes that has also contributed to the high competition and quick sales.

Both he and DeLeon agreed on one more thing: the only relief, if it comes, will be when people decide to start selling, and when you’re talking about the Bay Area, there is no way to predict when that will happen, or if prices will go up or down.

“I hate it when people ask me about Bay Area real estate because it defies all the laws of physics,” Kelman lamented. “When you look at Chicago real estate, Atlanta real estate, you know what goes up must come down. It’s going to act like a normal economic market, but in the Bay Area, it seems there’s all sorts of money from the tech economy. There’s all sorts of people who want to move here for the sun. I can’t way when it will ever let up.”

Article source: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Real-Estate-Flash-Sales-Prove-Market-Is-Hot--199652731.html

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PR Web

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) October 29, 2012

Real Estate Marketing Insider offered its expert opinion about a new trend of modern high-rise investment by young tech professionals in San Francisco, stating it was great news for the real estate market as the number of high-price and high-demand properties available in the city would increase exponentially as a result.

The New York Times stated that the tech industry’s San Francisco base of operations is in the South of Market area of the city; it has been there for decades, but the newest generation of young professionals in that industry have been investing in high-rise condo living, a real estate option that simply wasn’t present in San Francisco until recently. Now there are downtown glass-and-steel real estate site design condos available downtown for prices for substantially less than some New York housing options.

These downtown high-rise condos include The Montgomery, Millennium Tower, Four Seasons, and One Hawthorne. The areas outside of South of Market, like the financial district and Mission Bay have their own offerings, like Madrone, the St. Regis, and the recently-filled Infinity. The residents of these condos, while primarily employed by local tech companies like Google, Twitter, and Zynga, come from many different walks of life. They include real estate professionals, venture capitalists and even celebrities like former San Francisco 49er Joe Montana and chef Michael Mina, both residents in Millennium Tower.

The newer neighborhoods of South Beach, Mission Bay and Rincon Hill have much more relaxed zoning regulations than older neighborhoods like Golden Gate Heights or Fisherman’s Wharf, enabling investors to construct more ambitious, luxurious properties. Millennium Tower, the city’s tallest residential building at 645 feet, is a harbinger of things to come as more developers tap into these prospective markets.

The single biggest motivator for the purchases of these high-rise properties, above and beyond desire for luxury and convenient living, is the tight rental market in San Francisco. These downtown properties offer a rare chance for city living that rental does not, and other benefits, like proximity to on-ramps and train stations that ease the commute to Silicon Valley, make these sales an easy decision for young tech professionals.

The Real Estate Marketing Insider released a statement regarding the New York Times’ report that high-rise condo living in San Francisco has exploded in popularity among young tech professionals in the city. The newer neighborhoods like South of Market and Mission Bay have seen an influx of new high-rises in the last five years, and the properties contained therein are selling well among techies, as well as other wealthy Bay Area professionals.

About Real Estate Marketing Insider:
Real Estate Marketing Insider is an online journal providing hot news, trend analysis and marketing tips to real estate professionals. REMI is based out of La Jolla, CA.

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/san-francisco-high-rise/steel-glass/prweb10067686.htm

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Article source: http://www.equities.com/news/news-headline-story?dt=2012-10-29&val=643723&d=1&cat=headline

That vision may have once been largely accurate. But now, in a post-recession world buffeted by persistently high unemployment and a housing market yet to regain its footing, poverty has taken a profoundly a different shape. In places like the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s been moving from areas surrounding the high-rises of city centers into the formerly empty spaces on their outskirts.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF HOMELESSNESS

A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that, over the past decade, poverty in the Bay Area has shifted out of the cities and into the suburbs. From 2005 to 2009, the percentage of people living in poverty in the suburbs grew by 16 percent, compared with a 7 percent increase in urban areas.

This migration of many of society’s neediest has been an issue for years. Yet a new trend — an upward spike in real estate prices in the area between San Francisco’s tech-fueled economic success story and the economically depressed towns of the California’s San Joaquin Valley — threatens to push the phenomenon into overdrive.

“We’re seeing a different kind of homelessness,” said Capt. Michael Paugh, who has run the Salvation Army in the central California city of Modesto for about a year. “There’s fewer chronic homeless and more people just lost their jobs and couldn’t keep up on their home payments.”

The Salvation Army has been in Modesto since 1890, providing hot meals, emergency shelter, job training and free child care for people in need. Rarely have those services been in higher demand, said Paugh.

“During the summer, there are whole entire families coming in for a meal. With school out, these are the only hot meals these kids are getting,” Paugh explained. “It’s been an eye-opener to me. When you think of the homeless, you think of people that–for whatever reason–can’t or don’t want to work. But homelessness here is seniors, veterans, people living on a small amount per month and have to chose between food and shelter. It’s good people who just lost their jobs.”

Modesto is unquestionably full of good people who have lost their jobs. The unemployment rate in the region is 15.7 percent, down from a mind-boggling 17.4 percent earlier this year. That’s not counting the chronic underemployment of people who do have jobs, and therefore aren’t counted in the statistics, but aren’t able to book enough hours to make ends meet.

In a recent Forbes list of the most “miserable” cities in America, Modesto ranked fourth. Neighboring Merced and Stockton were third and first, respectively.

“There are certain subdivisions in Modesto where one out of every two or three houses are in foreclosure,” said Ruben Villalobos, an attorney and Modesto school board member.

THE BUBBLE AND THE WAVE

Many of the area’s problems can be traced to the collapse of the housing bubble. During much of the 2000s, scores of Bay Area residents took advantage of cheap, sub-prime financing and bought homes in the San Joaquin Valley. Housing prices shot through the roof and the construction industry boomed.

When the bubble popped, home values plummeted and new home construction, a driving force of the region’s economy, slowed to a crawl. A sea of wealth quickly evaporated.

It wasn’t just the lure of big houses for low prices that drew many to the outer rings of the Bay Area. Some people could no longer afford the growing cost of living.

“In [East Bay cities like] Oakland and Richmond, the most recent census saw the African American population there decreasing by about 25 percent due to people in those communities being priced out of the market,” said Gloria Bruce, deputy director of East Bay Housing Organizations. “Minority groups like African Americans are often the most vulnerable to being pushed out of their homes when prices rise.”

If the housing bubble, and its subsequent collapse, left many of the most vulnerable on the geographic edges of the Bay Area, the shape of the local recovery will likely have the same effect.

“Think of the housing bubble like a wave,” said Eli Davidson of the real estate firm Marcus Millichap. “Depressing home prices in Stockton and Modesto, then coming through the East Bay and the finally making its way into San Francisco. As it recedes, it’s going to see increases in San Francisco first and then the East Bay and finally make its way back into the Central Valley.”

While that wave has yet to wash all the way back to the San Joaquin Valley, the resurgence of the housing market in the Bay Area’s urban core is already well at hand.

San Francisco has arguably the strongest housing market in the country. Rents are the priciest of any major city. The home sale prices aren’t just the highest in the nation; they’re increasing faster than anywhere else. Funding cuts to the city’s affordable housing programs have increasingly made San Francisco unaffordable to people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

The city’s high cost of living has long pushed residents, especially families, into East Bay cities like Berkeley and Oakland. However, over the past six months, home prices in some portions of the East Bay have also soared. Demand continues to rise sharply as employees of the surging, social media-fueled economies of San Francisco and Silicon Valley search for affordable housing.

The supply of new East Bay housing units, on the other hand, is still being constrained by the recession. Since it can take up to a decade to get from Point A (“Let’s build some houses!”) to Point B (“Here are the keys!”), there aren’t a lot of new residential properties opening.

This mismatch between between supply and demand has the potential to further exacerbate the new trend of poverty moving to the outskirts while people with money remain in urban cores. And its effects aren’t difficult to predict.

“I can see people being forced further and further out from the immediate Bay Area and moving into the Central Valley,” said Maeve Elise Brown, executive director of Housing and Economic Rights Advocates.

LIFE ON THE MARGINS

Far-flung suburbs lack the services regularly utilized by the working poor. There aren’t as many housing shelters, soup kitchens or job training centers as in cities. Public transportation infrastructure isn’t as developed: Modesto has a solid bus system that hooks into the Bay Area’s larger public transportation grid, but access can be spotty and, in some areas, nonexistent.

Paugh explained that emergency shelters in Modesto offer space for less than a dozen families, woefully inadequate for a region where some 20,000 individuals have undergone foreclosures.

The lack of strong city governments hurts the situation further. A recent article by California Watch found that areas like Modesto are spotted with unincorporated zones that have little access to government services.

“It’s like people are living in colonies of the United States,” Miguel Donoso, a longtime Latino community advocate in Stanislaus County, told California Watch. “Living in a Third World country, that’s close to what you see here today.”

Moreover, the collapse of the housing bubble and the drop in the tax base has made maintaining governmental services more difficult.

Nearby Stockton, which recently became the largest American city to ever file for bankruptcy, was forced to lay off 40 percent of its government workforce.

Resources at the state level has also decreased precipitously. “We’re only receiving 60 cents on the dollar from what we’re supposed to getting from the state,” Villalobos said, noting that school dropout rates have increased not only in his community but across the board. “Without that funding, students are more likely to slip through the cracks.”

Villalobos was also quick to point out that while much as the effects of poverty’s suburbanization are economic, there’s also a devastating social aspect. Housing instability has made it more difficult for individuals to cultivate roots.

“Modesto is a different place now,” he explained. “Ten years ago, if you went to the grocery store, you’d run into people you know. That’s not as true anymore. We seem to be a far more transient community.”

HuffPost Live will be taking a comprehensive look at the persistence of poverty in America Sept. 5 from 12-4 p.m. EDT and 6-10 p.m. EDT. Click here to check it out — and join the conversation.

Check out these aerial photos of California’s Central Valley region:

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• Looking south over the Delta from the South Fork of the Mokulmne River

• Looking north up the Sacramento Deep Water Ship Channel

• Hog Slough in the California Delta

• Farm patterns on Prospect Island in the California Delta

• Oxbow Marina on Georgianna Slough near the town of Isleton in the California Delta

• Delta Coves on Bethel Island in the California Delta is waterfront community development that was halted in 2008 when owner, Lehman Brothers, went bankrupt.

• A private water feature near Stockton, Calif., in the California Delta.

• “Grindstone Joe’s” island marina on Little Potato Slough in the California Delta.

• The pumping station near Tracy, Calif., that delivers water from the California Delta into Bethany Reservoir and down to Southern California via the California Aqueduct.

• At center, the California Aqueduct runs adjacent to Interstate 5, with the Delta-Mendota Canal at left, through farmland, and the barren foothills at right, near Patterson, CA.

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/bay-area-poverty_n_1855189.html