San Francisco has seen a record increase in home prices in recent times. ACL Real Estate and Property Management analyze whether this growth is a sign of a healthy real estate market by reviewing the recently released report by The Demand Institute.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) March 18, 2014

Analyzing the recent report published by The Demand Institute, leading real estate and property management firm ACL Real Estate and Property Management says that San Francisco is unlikely to continue to witness the double digit housing price growth it experienced in 2013.

According to their report, A Tale of 2000 Cities, published by The Demand Institute in February 2014, home prices are likely to increase by an average of 2.1% per year during 2015-2018. However, this figure does not fully reflect the huge pricing differences the nation is likely to see across region. Here is how the report sees prices across states by 2018.

The report also demonstrates the disparity between home prices and the median income, with rents in San Francisco as high as thrice the national average. The Case-Schiller House Price Index for June 2013 had put the price rise in San Francisco at 47%, the highest among all the metropolitan areas studied. This increase, The Demand Institute’s report says was “largely driven by investors buying up swaths of distressed homes to meet growing rental demand.” At the same time, the report forecasts an annual growth rate of 2.1% for single-family homes during 2015-2018, given the expectations of better equilibrium between demand and supply.

“Rising housing prices is not always an indicator of a healthy market because health is more a function of whether people can afford homes at those prices in the long term,” says a spokesperson from ACL Real Estate and Property Management. According to the report published by The Demand Institute, 41% of households faced a moderate-to-severe housing cost burden in 2013 (with 25% carrying moderate burden and another 16% carrying severe burden). The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies defines a moderate cost burden as “the need to allocate 30 to 50 percent of pretax household income to essential housing expenses: mortgage principal and interest payment, rent, insurance, taxes, and utilities,” while a severe burden occurs when this figure rises to 50 percent.

The situation is scarcely better for renters. Following the 2007-2008 recession, more and more homeowners have turned into renters, leading to rising demand for rental accommodation. According to The Demand Institute’s study, 31% of tenants in the United States are today spending about 30%-40% of their pre-tax income on housing, with one in every four spending more than 50%. So, is the San Francisco residential market really healthy?

About ACL Real Estate and Property Management: With wide experience and a proven track record in quality service and reliability, ACL Real Estate and Property Management has carved a niche for itself for its real estate and property management services in the East Bay and Peninsula areas. The company has a successful track record of assisting home owners in both selling and buying any type of property. The company also offers comprehensive property management services that ease the process of selecting tenants, maintaining the home and ensuring timely rent collection for homeowners.

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/03/prweb11678686.htm

Article source: http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2014/03/18/rise-sf-bay-area-home-prices-sign-healthy-real-estate-market

A new report out Tuesday shows the real estate market in the Bay Area is hot.

San Francisco home prices have surged nearly 25 percent in the past year; the biggest increase in seven years. That’s more than double the nationwide average of major cities.

According to the SP/Case-Shiller index that ranks metropolitan cities, Las Vegas reported the next biggest jump at 23 percent, followed by Phoenix at nearly 21 percent.

<!– POLL

ABC7 Poll

–>

Get more Business »

real estate, housing market, las vegas, business

<!–

–>

• Comment Now
• Email
• Print
• Report a typo
• 
  

Article source: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/business&id=9190210

It’s a good time to sell your house. Home prices in 20 major markets are at their highest in seven years. You can bet the San Francisco Bay Area is on the list.

The S P/Case-Shiller home price index calculated growth rates for a 12 month period ending last February. They looked at 20 major markets and found home prices went up 9.3 percent.

The housing recovery’s been driven by near record low mortgage rates, lower unemployment and more buyers than sellers.

This last factor is a big one in California and the Bay Area where the inventory of homes on the market is one of the tightest in the country.

<!– POLL

ABC7 Poll

–>

Get more 7 On Your Side »

housing market, economy, real estate, 7 on your side, michael finney

<!–

–>

• Comment Now
• Email
• Print
• Report a typo
• 
  

Article source: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/7_on_your_side&id=9085727

April 22 (Bloomberg) — Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman discusses the madness in Bay Area real estate with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West.” (Source: Bloomberg)

The recent tech boom in the Bay Area has also meant a boom in the real estate market, with a mad dash to buy homes.

Bloomberg TV talks with Redfin CEO about the area’s real estate market.

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/morning_call/2013/04/how-crazed-is-the-bay-areas-real.html

I remember learning in high school science class that equilibrium is a state of “no force or disturbance in any one direction.” Applying this concept to real estate, one might say that a balanced market – one with “equilibrium” – would have roughly the same number of buyers as it would properties for sale.

Not that many months ago, many parts of the Bay Area’s real estate market were saturated with properties for sale. It was, in many areas, a buyer’s market – buyers had their way when it came to selecting from a wide range of properties in nearly every corner of every market. But now, as the economy has been coming back, and real estate along with it, the pendulum has swung and we have shot past that real estate equilibrium point in a nanosecond.

Today we have many more buyers than we have properties for sale. (Potential sellers, take note! It hasn’t been this good for sellers in a long time – but that’s fodder for another article.) Our market has gone from having too many properties on the market to not having nearly enough.

The “inventory” of properties for sale has suddenly become so slim that the supply is now far below the demand almost everywhere. The average time a property spends on the market has decreased by 40% over a year ago.  That makes life for hopeful real estate buyers really tough.

If you’re a buyer right now, you are probably in competition now for almost every property, and although your agent might tell you that you are a SPECIAL buyer (and I’m sure you ARE), it’s more than likely that every other buyer out there is just as special. And it’s just as likely that all of those special buyers are competing for the same property, creating a “multiple offer” situation.

What’s a buyer to do? For starters, be honest with yourselves about your expectations. Expect there to be multiple buyers for the same property and talk to your agent about what will make your offer stand out.  Understand also that an offer is not just about price. There are lots of other factors in a purchase contract that might appeal to a seller as well. Things like length of escrow, minimal contingencies, and even who you choose as your mortgage company can make a seller happy or have them quickly flipping to the next buyer in their stack of offers.

In some areas as recent as a few months ago, it was possible to ask for seller concessions and give-backs, but we are now in a time where those factors will send your offer to the circular file faster than almost anything else.

Work with your agent as any effective team would work together. Be sure that your agent knows your situation and your personality so that he/she can tailor their approach to each property that you choose to purchase.  Be honest and open with them, and don’t be afraid of what he or she will think. Ask your agent how you can best work together, and understand that while you really can’t do this by yourself, no agent is “Super(wo)man” and none of us bat 1000 in multiple offer situations.

Lastly, be patient. It will probably take a while, and very possibly more than a few offers before you win in a multiple situation. But keep trying, and listen to your agent. We do this every day. And yes, you ARE special.

A Bay Area native, Mark Penn has been a REALTOR® with Coldwell Banker since 2004. He is also active in animal welfare, and is a former educator, facilitator, and air traffic controller. Mark can be reached at mark@MyHomeInSonoma.com 

Article source: http://www.sfbaytimes.com/?sec=article&article_id=17489

(Read More: Home Buyers Are Back, but Where Are the Houses?)

“What’s holding people back from buying a property is a fear of selling their property and not being able to find one. That’s what the problem is,” noted Herrera.

The Las Vegas market is being fueled by investors, but even the investors can’t find the great bargains anymore. While the economy has improved some, the drop in foreclosures is really due to a new law that went into effect in Nevada last year; it criminalizes faulty foreclosures. Banks have therefore tried to do more short sales and loan modifications. Foreclosures in Nevada dropped 36 percent in 2012 from the previous year, according to RealtyTrac, but the distress is still there.

“People in Las Vegas talk about shadow inventory to the point where nobody really wants to talk about it anymore, said Mike Brunson, a local appraiser. “People will argue and say it isn’t, but I can name a dozen people off the top of my head who have been in their houses for over three years without a payment.”

Brunson called Las Vegas the Titanic of the real estate market. It was once thought unsinkable, and even now that the worst is over, he still thinks the market is on a well-provisioned life raft, not on solid ground.

“The only thing that concerns me is that we have been here before and the market itself is not what is driving the price increases. It’s not that we have new employers coming in and creating tens of thousands of new jobs that are leading to people buying new houses. It’s ‘Las Vegas is on sale,’ and investors are buying up everything they can in the used market.

Whatever the cause, the result is new construction and new life breathed into the nation’s home builders.

“There’s been a lot of talk about shadow inventory. It’s gone on for years, and the reality is there’s not enough inventory out there to meet demand today. Demand has increased, certainly our buyers see that, and we’re getting a lot of buyers because of that,” argued Andrews, whose company is, he said, building 150 percent more homes than a year ago.

(Read More: Home Buyers Are Back, but Where Are the Houses?)

Brunson acknowledged there is no question the demand is real. The sales are real. But he still worries about the fundamentals, such as the slow economic growth and the fact that so much of the funding for new home sales is coming from low down payment, government-backed mortgages.

“We have been here before,” said Brunson.

What remains to be seen is if history will repeat itself or if this recovery is as unique as the collapse that preceded it.

—By CNBC’s Diana Olick; Follow her on Twitter @Diana_Olick or on Facebook at facebook.com/DianaOlickCNBC

Questions? Comments? RealtyCheck@cnbc.com

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100522314

Disclosure: I am long KBH. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. (More…)

The real estate market, like any other market, is a numbers game. Demand versus Supply. If one is greater than the other, it tips the balance and creates a turn in the market. Did we turn? Let’s look at the numbers.

Demand can be tracked simply by population growth. Using 2010 US census numbers, we can track back 50 years of population growth and get an average compound growth of 1.4% growth per year. Factors such as birthrate and immigration make this demand stable and consistent through the last 50 years.

(click to enlarge)

Secondly, let’s look at Supply. New supply comes onto the market in terms of new homes built each year. The best way to track this is through housings starts. Let’s track back 50 years of housing starts to see our levels of new supply to the market.

(click to enlarge)

From the graph, the average cyclical real estate market is plotted through 10 year cycles. It’s rather clear that the 10 year cycles have been pretty predictable the last 50 years up to 1997. Instead of the cyclical downturn we should had expected in 1997, we accelerate upward mainly due to the dot-com bubble. This continued to after 2001 when the dot-com bubble popped, and was followed upward with historically low interest rates from the Federal Reserve. It’s no wonder why we had a dramatic downturn in 2006, followed by historically low starts the next 5 years to clear the supply. Excluding the bubble period, if you break down these 10 year averages from the last 60 years, the average new housing starts are close to 14M per decade. There are decades where the homebuilders either overbuilt or under-built, but the demand over time remains consistent to level out this supply. More dramatically though, in the last 4 years, the total cumulative housing starts combined to a number barely over 2.2M homes. To reach the historic 14M decade average, there will need to be 2M housing starts per year or a sum of 11.8M starts in the next 6 years.

If we are able to meet 2M homes per year, the homebuilders would need a dramatic spike in housing starts the next 6 years.

(click to enlarge)

From the latest housing report this month, the homebuilders are currently on pace to reach only 894k (revised, Oct 2012) (seasonally adjusted) new starts this year. It is no wonder why new homebuilders are in “catch-up” mode buying any large developed parcel of land to meet the supply shortage. Furthermore, to support this data, inventory in many local markets are experiencing 50 year historic lows. So in principle, the increased demand due to consistent population growth, combined with decreased supply shortage from the last 4 years, will equal price appreciation in the next 6 years. Do you think we hit a bottom now?

Who are the best homebuilders that are position to take advantage of this shortage?

Any homebuilders that survive the downtown of the last 5 years are all in a great position to take advantage of the next 5 years. More specifically, homebuilders with the largest and key coastal land position will benefit the most. I like KB Home (KBH) as my top pick due to its heavy land position in California. They own more than 60% of their total land holdinsg in California, with the majority of the remainder in other hot markets like Texas. Fundamentally, their balance sheet and cash position is solid with moving a large part of their short-term bond holdings ($585M) well out to 2020 and beyond. In addition, they have a meaningful deferred tax asset of $883M that could be used to potentially offset $2.2B future taxable income. All of this combined will just provide them with a significantly large cash position to fill the shortage the next 5 years in housing.

Additional disclosure: John Chiem is a realtor in the SF Bay Area real estate market.

Article source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1081501-why-housing-will-surge-in-the-next-5-years

The 2012 Home Listing Report compares the average home listing price of more than 72,000 four-bedroom, two-bathroom properties listed on coldwellbanker.com between January and June 2012.

Of the 48 markets surveyed in Virginia, Arlington topped the list. Here, the average price of a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home was $678,486. Northern Virginia certainly isn’t a stranger to high home prices. Vienna, Alexandria, Ashburn and Fairfax rounded out the top five in the Coldwell Banker report.

On the other end of the spectrum, Danville was ranked most affordable in Virginia. There, the average price of a comparable home was $153,957.

Nationally, the five most expensive markets were all in California — four in the San Francisco Bay area. Los Altos, Calif., is the most expensive market in the country, according to the report. The average listing there? $1,706,688.

Of 2,479 markets surveyed nationally, Arlington ranked 85th most expensive.

The most affordable market in the country is Redford, Mich., where a comparable piece of property goes for $60,490.

The average listing price of a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home in the United States is $292,152, according to the report.

Coastal states are home to the majority of the country’s most expensive markets, the report states.

Article source: http://arlington-va.patch.com/articles/report-arlington-real-estate-market-the-most-expensive-in-virginia

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.

If you have a gay real estate story that you’d like to share with us, contact us at info@gayrealtynetwork.com

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

Walnut Creek, CA (PRWEB) February 02, 2012

As the San Francisco East Bay Area real estate market continues to lean toward a strong rental market, Bay Area property management company,Stokley Properties Inc. would like to offer new and foreclosed-upon renters tips on securing a lease.

For a first-time renter or for someone re-entering the rental world after being far removed from it for years, Concord property management company, Stokley Properties recommends considering the following:

1)    Preparation is key. Have every necessary document ready.

2)    Those that have lost their homes due to a foreclosure or a short sale should have a letter of explanation ready. This should not be left to chance. Property management companies, such as Stokley Properties Inc., can work with people who have lost their homes, but they need to be prepared with documentation so that upon review of their application, their situation can easily be understood.

3)    Do not to prevaricate. If the property is priced correctly and is a clean and well-maintained home – in a desirable neighborhood – it will not stay on the market long. Therefore, renters are encouraged to bring their checkbooks, and if they like the property, to snap it up immediately!

The continuing havoc that the real estate industry has been cycling through is the main reason rental properties have been making a strong showing this year and beyond. Because of short sales and foreclosures, people who were once homeowners are now renters. For those who finds themselves in this situation, it is important to be aware of the market and what the competition is, as well as what they need to be prepared.

“I have been very happy with Joe Stokley and his team. All the clients I referred to him have expressed great happiness with the service he provided when they needed to rent a property. His property management service is very well received. I look forward to referring many more clients to him. We have known each other for many years and enjoy a close working relationship,” said Don and Norma Flaskerud, Realtors(R) of RE/MAX CC Connection.

For more information about any of Stokley Properties’ services, call 925-658-1415 or view the property management company on the web at www.stokleypropertieseastbay.net. Stokley Properties is located at 1630 N. Main St., Suite 54, in Walnut Creek.

About Stokley Properties Inc.

The Walnut Creek company, Stokley Properties, provides complete property management services throughout the greater San Francisco East Bay Area, including Concord, San Ramon, the Bay Area, Brentwood, Martinez and Oakland. It provides professional real estate investment advice to enable clients to make well-informed decisions. Services include advertising and marketing, residential screening, leasing and retention management, property inspections and more.

# # #

For the original version on PRWeb visit: www.prweb.com/releases/prwebproperty-management/bay-area/prweb9160781.htm

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/02/02/prweb9160781.DTL