A total of 5,404 houses and condominiums were sold, down 1.8 percent from January and more than 6 percent from February of 2012, DataQuick said.

The median sales price for a home in the nine-county area was $405,000. That was down 2.4 percent from January but still nearly 25 percent higher than a year ago.

Although prices remain well below the peak of several years ago, they have soared by double digits each month for the past nine months when compared with the same months a year earlier. The gains have topped 20 percent in the past four months in year-over-year comparisons, DataQuick said.

“Isn’t this Economics 101? Supply and demand?” DataQuick President John Walsh asked in a statement. “If demand outstrips supply in a free market, the price goes up.”

“Now, with a recovering economy, prices still closer to the bottom than to the top, with ultra-low mortgage interest rates and tight supply, the stage is set for price gains. This spring is going to be interesting,” Walsh said.

There were continuing indications that California’s housing market is recovering from its five-year slump.

“Foreclosure activity is well below peak levels reached in the last few years. Financing with multiple mortgages is low, and down payment sizes are stable,” DataQuick said in a statement.

Sales in February shifted from low-cost, distressed homes to mid-market and higher properties, with the number of homes selling for $500,000 or more jumping by 27.7 percent, DataQuick reported.

Foreclosures and short sales, those in which the price was less than the amount owed on the property, both were down over January and there were a lot fewer of them compared with February a year ago.

Investors, as compared with first-time homebuyers, accounted for a sizeable chunk of the sales. Absentee buyers, who mostly are investors, bought 28.2 percent of all Bay area homes.

That was an all-time high based on DataQuick figures going back to 2000, the company said.

In Southern California, homes sales continued strong, with 15,945 sold – the most for a February in the past six years.

The median sales price in Los Angeles and five other counties was $320,000, DataQuick reported Wednesday.

Article source: http://www.vcstar.com/news/2013/mar/14/sf-bay-area-february-home-sales-dip/

A total of 5,404 houses and condominiums were sold, down 1.8 percent from January and more than 6 percent from February of 2012, DataQuick said.

The median sales price for a home in the nine-county area was $405,000. That was down 2.4 percent from January but still nearly 25 percent higher than a year ago.

Although prices remain well below the peak of several years ago, they have soared by double digits each month for the past nine months when compared with the same months a year earlier. The gains have topped 20 percent in the past four months in year-over-year comparisons, DataQuick said.

“Isn’t this Economics 101? Supply and demand?” DataQuick President John Walsh asked in a statement. “If demand outstrips supply in a free market, the price goes up.”

“Now, with a recovering economy, prices still closer to the bottom than to the top, with ultra-low mortgage interest rates and tight supply, the stage is set for price gains. This spring is going to be interesting,” Walsh said.

There were continuing indications that California’s housing market is recovering from its five-year slump.

“Foreclosure activity is well below peak levels reached in the last few years. Financing with multiple mortgages is low, and down payment sizes are stable,” DataQuick said in a statement.

Sales in February shifted from low-cost, distressed homes to mid-market and higher properties, with the number of homes selling for $500,000 or more jumping by 27.7 percent, DataQuick reported.

Foreclosures and short sales, those in which the price was less than the amount owed on the property, both were down over January and there were a lot fewer of them compared with February a year ago.

Investors, as compared with first-time homebuyers, accounted for a sizeable chunk of the sales. Absentee buyers, who mostly are investors, bought 28.2 percent of all Bay area homes.

That was an all-time high based on DataQuick figures going back to 2000, the company said.

In Southern California, homes sales continued strong, with 15,945 sold – the most for a February in the past six years.

The median sales price in Los Angeles and five other counties was $320,000, DataQuick reported Wednesday.

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Article source: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/03/14/5262908/sf-bay-area-february-home-sales.html

Six months, millions of new users and a doubling of its staff later, the smart-phone security company is already on the hunt for additional real estate, with the hope of moving in the second half of the year. By the end of 2011, the company expects to double its staff again, to about 100 employees.

“Every person who is buying a smart phone today has a computer in their pocket and they realize they need to keep it safe,” said John Hering, chief executive officer and co-founder of the firm. “That has created a major opportunity for Lookout.”

This growth story is playing out repeatedly in the Bay Area, pushing tech sector jobs near the all-time highs set during the dot-com boom – if they haven’t already surpassed them. Niches that hardly existed a few years ago, like mobile apps, social media and cloud computing, are now driving the region’s economic recovery.

Near peak levels

By the end of last year, San Francisco had an estimated 30,700 tech jobs, just shy of the 32,800 around the peak in early 2001, real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle found in an analysis of state employment data. In Silicon Valley, tech positions reached 106,300 in the fourth quarter, nearing the 112,700 crest.

Figures for the first three months of the year aren’t yet available, but it’s clear the numbers have continued to rise. Tech companies like Facebook, Motorola, VMware, Hewlett-Packard and Google have leased 3.5 million square feet of space in Silicon Valley this year alone, Jones Lang LaSalle said in its report. That’s the equivalent of filling the Transamerica Pyramid seven times.

“Silicon Valley really caught fire,” said Colin Yasukochi, director of research at Jones Lang LaSalle. “The economic recovery here is being led by technology.”

San Francisco had 2.5 million square feet of tech leasing since the beginning of 2010, and has 90 firms scouting the market for another 2.3 million square feet.

The recent growth in the industry is single-handedly transforming the conditions of the commercial real estate sector in key tech markets. In Palo Alto, Cupertino and San Francisco’s South of Market district, office rents increased by 10 to 25 percent in the last year, as vacancies dropped by half, according to Jones Lang LaSalle.

For the most common type of office buildings in SoMa, average rents climbed 16.4 percent to nearly $33.50 per square foot, as vacancy plummeted from 17.4 percent to 8 percent.

It’s become the place many tech companies want to be, with Zynga, Google, TechCrunch and Mozilla leasing significant space in the district during the last year. Hering said it’s the only place Lookout plans to search for its new space.

“There’s a huge advantage of being in SoMa, in terms of being surrounded by great resources and great minds,” he said.

Growing sector

But the tech sector represents a large and growing part of the Bay Area’s economy overall.

Jobs in the industry now account for 16.6 percent of private-sector employment in San Francisco, up from a low of 12.5 percent in September 2003, according to data from the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics in Berkeley. Tech represents 25.2 percent of employment in Silicon Valley, up from 24 percent in December 2006.

Still, in an area badly burned by the last technology-sector meltdown, concerns have already begun to surface about the sustainability of the new boom.

Yasukochi took a hard look at this issue in the first-quarter report, and concluded that there’s “no bubble in sight.”

He noted that price-to-earnings ratios, which represent the amount of money investors are willing to pay for every dollar of company profit, are far more reasonable today than they were in 2000. At the time, the P/E ratio for the SP Information Technology Index stood above 70. Today it’s just more than 16.

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/03/BUHP1JB97H.DTL

It’s normal for sales to be slow this time of year, meaning January and February are not necessarily predictive of upcoming trends, according to a report by real estate monitoring service DataQuick.

Overall home sales rose slightly in early 2011 compared with the same time last year, with 4,966 sold in the Bay Area, DataQuick said.

Within the Bay Area, Napa County had the highest increase, rising 35.6 percent from last year. Solano County saw the biggest decrease with a drop of 3 percent from last year, according to DataQuick.

New-home sales dropped to their lowest in more than 20 years with 253 sales, DataQuick officials said.

“Builders just can’t build homes that can compete in price with the bargains out there, especially foreclosure resales,” DataQuick president John Walsh said in a statement.

The median price for new and resale houses and condos in the Bay Area dropped to $338,000 in January 2011, compared to $350,000 in January 2010, DataQuick reported.

Sales of higher-cost homes appear to still be suffering from the credit crisis, which made adjustable-rate mortgages and “jumbo” loans more difficult to obtain, the report said.

Jumbo loans, which accounted for nearly 60 percent of the Bay Area purchase loan market before the credit crunch more than three years ago, accounted for only 27.1 percent of January’s purchasing lending, the report
said.

Government-insured Federal Housing Administration loans made up 25 percent of all home purchase mortgages in January.

Monthly mortgage payments are down from last month and last year, according to DataQuick.

The typical mortgage for January was $1,412, compared to $1,558 in December and $1,525 in January 2010.

Foreclosure activity remains high but is below peak levels reached over the last two years, the report said.

Article source: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/02/bay-area-home-sales-down-december-last-year