“The recent increase in mortgage rates hasn’t slowed demand, as long as home affordability remains high,” noted Bob Walters, chief economist at Quicken Loans. “We are, however, seeing an increased urgency from potential new home buyers as they move to secure today’s historically low rates.”

New home sales jumped more than 8 percent month-to-month in June, but May’s sales numbers were revised sharply lower, and prices, while up from a year ago, are down 11.5 percent from April. That has some housing skeptics less optimistic about the builders’ prospects.

(Read more: Map: Tracking the US real estate recovery)

“Remember, last month on the ‘strong’ but FAKE new home sales print of 476k, home builders rallied, and every bull took a huge victory lap. Today we learned that was all garbage,” noted California-based analyst Mark Hanson. “Bottom line: May was a huge miss. Prices have tumbled as rates surged. And June is suspect because of the huge lower May revision.”

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100910336

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS/AP) – The real estate tracking firm DataQuick said Thursday that the median price for homes in the nine-county San Francisco Bay area reached $555,000 in June, an increase of 6.9 percent over the previous month.

The real estate data firm is reporting the median year-over-year price paid for a Bay Area home rose at its fastest pace on record in June.

DataQuick said Thursday that the rise was the result of disappearing distress sales, an improving economy and mortgage rates remaining low.

However, the number of homes sold dropped 7.5 percent to 7,897 in June. DataQuick attributes the decrease to the number of homes for sale falling short of demand and an easing of purchases by cash and investor buyers.

The real estate information service says last month’s sales were 20.9 percent below the June average of 9,993 sales.

• See the full DataQuick report and County-by-County sales breakdown

Home prices in the Bay Area are through the roof according to a new study by Data Quick.

Back in 2009, during the depths of the recession, the median price of a home was $290,000. Now that figure is $555,000; six percent higher than last month and 33 percent higher than one year ago.

Data Quick Analyst Andrew LePage said it’s a matter of supply and demand. We’ve seen sales fall on a year-over-year basis for the last five months in a row.

Richard Green with the Lusk Center for Real Estate at the University of Southern California said much of it is the shortage of homes for sale.

“Inventories are very small,” he said adding that there are many more all cash transactions than ever, which drives up the market for higher-end homes and drives up sale prices.

Speculators have said that things could ease with fewer homes underwater, prompting sales and increasing supply. In addition, developers are also starting to build new homes again.

(Copyright 2013 by CBS San Francisco. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Article source: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/07/18/median-bay-area-home-price-jumps-again-as-inventory-remains-tight/

La Jolla, CA – April 18, 2013 – (RealEstateRama) — Bay Area home sales fell below a year earlier for the second consecutive month in March as demand continued to outstrip supply in many markets. While low-end sales fell sharply compared with March 2012, $500,000-plus transactions jumped, helping to push the median sale price up on a year-over-year basis for the 12th consecutive month, a real estate information service reported.

A total of 7,263 new and resale houses and condos sold in the nine-county Bay Area last month. That was up 34.4 percent from 5,404 the month before, and down 6.0 percent from 7,723 in March 2012, according to San Diego-based DataQuick.

It’s normal for sales to jump between February and March, with that gain averaging 39.5 percent since 1988, when DataQuick’s statistics begin. March sales have ranged from a low of 4,898 in 2008 to a high of 12,645 in 2004. Last month’s sales were 17.1 percent lower than the March average of 8,758.

The median price paid for a home in the nine-county Bay Area last month was $436,000. That was up 7.7 percent from $405,000 in February and up 21.8 percent from $358,000 in March last year.

The median has risen on a year-over-year basis for 12 consecutive months, with double-digit year-over-year gains the last ten months, and increases above 20 percent for the past five months.

Still, last month’s median was 34.4 percent lower than the $665,000 peak in June and July of 2007. In March 2009 the median hit its post-peak low of $290,000. That trough was an almost absurdly low level for the Bay Area, reflecting both widespread price declines as well as robust sales of heavily discounted inland foreclosures at a time high-end sales were all but dormant.

It appears that well over half of the 21.8 percent year-over-year increase in March’s median sale price reflects rising home prices. It’s Economics 101: Prices go up as growing demand meets an exceptionally low supply of homes for sale. However, a portion of the March median’s year-over-year gain reflects a change in market mix – sales of low-cost distress homes have fallen sharply, while sales of pricier move-up homes have shot up.

“Higher sales in the middle and top of the housing market reflect improved consumer confidence, ultra-low mortgage rates and the unleashing of more pent-up demand than many anticipated. There’s been a shift in psychology, where more people worry prices will rise and fewer fear a decline. It’s drawn a lot of folks off the fence following a long stretch of sub-par sales, especially in the higher price ranges. In the more affordable markets, we’ve seen a big drop in foreclosures, which limits the supply of homes for sale. Then you have homeowners who still can’t sell because they owe more than their homes are worth,” said John Walsh, DataQuick president.

“The more prices rise, though, the more likely we’ll see a lot more people put their homes on the market,” Walsh added. “There’s pent-up demand among potential sellers, too, and many will try to move as soon as it makes sense. A substantial jump in inventory would at least moderate home price growth.”

Last month the number of homes that sold for less than $500,000 fell 18.9 percent compared with March 2012, while the number that sold for $500,000 or more rose 25.2 percent, DataQuick reported.

Distressed property sales – the combination of foreclosure resales and “short sales” – made up about 30 percent of the resale market in March. Last month’s figure, which was the lowest in five years, was down from about 35 percent in February and down from about 49.0 percent a year ago.

Foreclosure resales – homes that had been foreclosed on in the prior 12 months – accounted for 10.7 percent of Bay Area resales last month, down from 14.0 percent in February, and down from 25.5 percent a year ago. Last month’s level was the lowest since foreclosure resales were 10.1 percent of the resale market in November 2007. Foreclosure resales peaked at 52.0 percent in February 2009. The monthly average over the past 18 years is 10.2 percent.

Short sales – transactions where the sale price fell short of what was owed on the property – made up an estimated 19.0 percent of Bay Area resales last month. That was down from an estimated 20.5 percent in February and down from 23.8 percent a year earlier.

Jumbo loans, mortgages above the old conforming limit of $417,000, accounted for 39.7 percent of last month’s purchase lending, up from 37.1 percent in February, and up from 30.7 percent a year ago. Jumbo usage dropped as low as 17.1 percent in January 2009. Before the credit crunch struck in August 2007, jumbos accounted for nearly 60 percent of the Bay Area purchase loan market.

Adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), another indicator of mortgage availability, accounted for 12.7 percent of the Bay Area’s home purchase loans last month. That was up from 11.0 percent in February, and up from 11.6 percent a year ago. Since 2000, ARMs have accounted for a monthly average of about 42 percent of all purchase loans. ARMs hit a low of 3.0 percent of purchase loans in January 2009.

Government-insured FHA home purchase loans, a popular, low-down-payment choice among first-time buyers, accounted for 12.3 percent of home purchase mortgages in March. That was down from 14.6 percent in February and down from 20.9 percent a year earlier. In recent months the FHA level has been the lowest since summer 2008, reflecting both tougher qualifying standards and the difficulties first-time buyers have competing with investors and other cash buyers.

The most active lenders to Bay Area home buyers last month were Wells Fargo with 14.8 percent of the purchase loan market, Stearns Lending with 4.5 percent, and RPM Mortgage with 3.6 percent.

Last month absentee buyers – mostly investors – purchased 27.3 percent of all Bay Area homes. That was down from 28.7 percent in February, and up from 24.2 percent a year ago. Absentee buyers paid a median $324,000 in March, up 29.6 percent from $250,000 a year earlier.

Buyers who appear to have paid all cash – meaning no sign of a corresponding purchase loan was found in the public record – accounted for 31.1 percent of sales in March. That was down from 32.3 percent the month before and up from 29.4 percent a year earlier. The monthly average going back to 1988 is 12.9 percent. Cash buyers paid a median $325,000 in March, up 30.0 percent from $250,000 a year earlier.

San Diego-based DataQuick monitors real estate activity nationwide and provides information to consumers, educational institutions, public agencies, lending institutions, title companies and industry analysts. Because of late data availability, sales were estimated for Alameda and San Francisco counties.

The typical monthly mortgage payment that Bay Area buyers committed themselves to paying last month was $1,579. That was up from $1,460 in February, and up from $1,359 a year ago. Adjusted for inflation, last month’s payment was 44.1 percent below the typical payment in spring 1989, the peak of the prior real estate cycle. It was 58.7 percent below the current cycle’s peak in July 2007.

Indicators of market distress continue to decline. Foreclosure activity is well below year-ago and peak levels reached in the last few years. Financing with multiple mortgages is low, and down payment sizes are stable, DataQuick reported.

All Homes #Sold #Sold Pct. $Median Median Pct.

Source: DataQuick, www.DQNews.com

Media calls: Andrew LePage (916) 456-7157

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Article source: http://www.realestaterama.com/2013/04/18/bay-area-home-sales-dip-below-2012-level-again-median-sale-price-rises-ID020407.html

Mattress maker Zinus houses its U.S. sales, marketing and distribution operations in the East Bay. It recently expanded into San Leandro. 

Blanca Torres
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

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Zinus Inc., a mattress and bedding distributor, took 116,017 square feet in the Fairway Industrial Center at 1951 Fairway Drive in San Leandro.

The company plans to expand from its current 48,000-square-foot space at 30799 Wiegman Road in Hayward, which serves as its U.S. sales and marketing base.

Zinus, based in Asia, also has offices in Canada, China and Korea. It makes mattresses, pillows, sleep foundations and slippers sold in stores such as Target, Bed Bath Beyond, Sam’s Club and Walmart.

The company’s San Leandro deal is one of the largest inked this year in the East Bay.

“The commercial real estate market is showing continued signs of improvement,” said Greig Lagomarsino, a broker with Colliers International who represented the landlord, Loma Verde Properties along with Todd Severson and Nick Ousman of the same firm. “Many Bay Area companies are back in expansion mode and this transaction is indicative of the market today. This facility provides an excellent opportunity to accommodate Zinus’ current and future expansion needs.”

Fairway Industrial Center contains 288,000 square feet with about 38,638 square feet available for lease.

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

Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/04/zinus-inc-takes-116000-sf-in-san.html

Sonoma County bucked regional and statewide real estate trends last month, which saw fewer homes sales than in February 2012, according to figures provided by DataQuick, a San Diego-based analysis service.

Sales are generally flat from January to February, according to DataQuick’s analysts.

But Sonoma County saw a 6.6 percent increase in the number of homes sold between February 2013 (403 homes) and February 2012 (378 homes). Last month’s sales also are on-par with the 398 homes sold in January of this year.

The median home price in Sonoma County also rose to $345,000 last month, a 16.9 increase over February 2012 and a $5,000 jump from the median sale price in the county in January.

Last month’s figures showed the median home price for the county was $340,000, up from $285,000 in January 2012.

The median price of a home sold in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area skyrocketed nearly 25 percent when comparing February 2013 to February 2012, the data showed. The median has had a double-digit year-over-year increase the last nine months, and the past four months have seen gains above 20 percent.

Other interesting real estate market facts this month? DataQuick supplied these:

• The typical monthly mortgage payment that Bay Area buyers committed themselves to paying last month was $1,460. That was down from $1,479 in January, and up from $1,243 a year ago.
• The most active lenders to Bay Area home buyers last month were Wells Fargo with 15.0 percent of the market, Stearns Lending with 4.0 percent, and RPM Mortgage with 3.7 percent.
• Foreclosure resales – homes that had been foreclosed on in the prior 12 months – accounted for 13.6 percent in the Bay Area in February. That’s the lowest since November 2007.

“…[W]ith 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,” said John Walsh, DataQuick president. “This spring is going to be interesting.”

Article source: http://petaluma.patch.com/articles/sonoma-county-home-prices-on-the-rise-again

“Drum-tight inventory, lower (interest) rates than most people alive have ever seen, and in some areas record levels of investor purchases (created) an unusual environment,” said Andrew LePage, analyst at San Diego’s DataQuick, which produced the report.

Another big factor – “unleashing of pent-up (buyer) demand,” he said. During the downturn, “for years, some people sat on the sidelines, afraid to buy. Now there’s been a shift in psychology in the past year with people switching from fearing prices might fall more, to fearing they will go up, so they want to buy now.”

An improving economy and job growth – factors that are stronger here than elsewhere in the country – also feed buyer demand.

“The San Francisco Bay Area is the hottest market in the country right now,” said Errol Samuelson, president of Realtor.com, the online marketplace for the National Association of Realtors.

February’s sales median for the nine-county region was $405,000, compared with $325,000 in February 2012. It was the fourth straight month in which prices rose more than 20 percent compared with the prior year, and the ninth consecutive month of double-digit increases, DataQuick said.

The same dearth of inventory that amped up prices caused the volume of sales to slump 6.1 percent compared with a year earlier. A total of 5,404 new and resale homes and condos changed hands in the region in February, DataQuick said.

Return of bidding wars

Realtors around the area report that tight inventories are spurring ferocious bidding wars over properties – a phenomenon that holds true at all price points.

In Berkeley, John and Judith Ratcliffe of the Grubb Co. sold three homes in recent weeks that listed for more than $1 million and went for substantial amounts above asking. One architecturally distinctive home was listed at $1.295 million but sold for $1.8 million, all cash – more than half a million dollars, or 39 percent, above the asking price.

“Everything in our market is getting multiple offers,” Judith Ratcliffe said. “We need more inventory.”

At a different point on the scale, Annie Brown, an agent with ZipRealty in the East Bay, recently took an investor client to tour a $399,000 four-bedroom tract home in Dublin.

“We drove up and saw all these people in a line,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘What the hey?’ and then I realized it was to get in this particular house. It’s human nature; if people think they can’t get something, they want it more. We stood in line for over an hour to get in.”

Her client offered $92,000 over asking and lost out to another investor who bid $100,000 more than the list price, she said. There were 40 offers.

“It’s an investor’s market right now,” Brown said. “Our first-time home buyers … are having a really hard time getting an offer accepted. It’s hard for them to compete with investors.”

Absentee buyers

Indeed, investors continued to be powerful forces in the market. Absentee buyers accounted for an all-time high of 28.2 percent of February sales, DataQuick said. All-cash buyers also hit a record, representing 31.9 percent of February sales. Historically, cash transactions have been about 12.9 percent of sales.

Realtor.com data show that listings here are being snapped up much more quickly than elsewhere in the nation. In Alameda County, for instance, listings go into escrow on average within 14 days of hitting the market. Nationwide, it takes 98 days for houses to sell.

Around the Bay Area, inventories of for-sale homes are about half what they were a year ago, Realtor.com shows. By contrast, nationwide, inventories are down about 16 percent compared with last year, Samuelson said.

That’s true in many micro-markets as well. Take San Francisco’s Nob Hill, for instance. A year ago, it had 30 homes for sale. Now it has just 15, according to Redfin.

Kiesha Stephens, a listing specialist with Redfin, is preparing a two-bedroom Nob Hill condo – a remodeled unit that retains its early 1900s character, including stained glass windows, wood wainscoting and two fireplaces – to hit the market next week for $799,000, a relative bargain in that neighborhood.

She’s already had six agents ask if they could make pre-emptive offers.

“There’s so little inventory that things are definitely skewed in sellers’ favor,” she said. “Right now there seems to be a surge of buyers.”

Fewer distress sales

DataQuick said that changes in the market mix, such as fewer bargain-priced distress sales and more high-end homes, account for about half of the median’s increase. In other words, all Bay Area home values did not jump 25 percent in February, although values definitely are rising across the board. Distress sales – foreclosures and short sales, both often sold at a discount – are still above their historic norms but are declining.

About a third of February’s existing-home sales were distressed; a year ago more than half (53.4 percent) were foreclosures or short sales, DataQuick said. Just 13.6 percent of resales were foreclosures in February, the lowest level since November 2007.

At their peak in February 2009, foreclosures accounted for 52 percent of all resales. Short sales also declined, but not as much. They were 21.4 percent of resales, versus 27.0 percent a year ago.

The number of homes selling for more than $500,000 rose 27.7 percent compared with last year, while those less than $500,000 fell 14.4 percent, DataQuick said.

Prices, which went into free fall during the downturn, are still far off their peaks. The Bay Area median reached a high of $665,000 in summer 2007 and a low of $290,000 in March 2009. DataQuick said that if the current rate of increase holds up, the Bay Area prices will be halfway back to their peak this spring or summer.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Bay-Area-home-prices-up-24-6-over-2012-4356658.php

(Read More: Pending Home Sales Soar Despite Rough Winter)

Banks are making more of an effort to do short sales instead of taking a home to foreclosure, and new federal guidelines are streamlining the process. That led to a 15 percent drop in sales of bank-owned homes and a 6 percent increase in short sales. This has helped home prices because short sales on average sell for a higher price than do bank-owned homes, because they are usually neither abandoned nor vandalized.

“Although foreclosure-related sales represent a shrinking share of total sales, primarily because of fewer bank-owned purchases, distressed sales are still a disproportionately high portion of the overall housing market,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac. “And while distressed properties — whether bank-owned, pre-foreclosure or short sales not in foreclosure — are still selling at a significant discount compared to non-distressed properties, average distressed property prices are increasing in many markets thanks to strong demand and limited inventory.”

(Read More: Housing May Not Be as Healthy as It Looks: NAHB Pro)

Limited inventory continues to be the key in today’s housing market, driving prices higher than most analysts expected. This is surprising, as distress in the market has not simply vanished. There are currently 1.7 homes in the foreclosure process and 1.5 million more seriously delinquent loans (90 days without a payment), according to a new report from Lender Processing Services. Banks are being more aggressive with loan modifications and principal forgiveness, but many of these homes will inevitably end up going back to the banks.

“Inventories continue to be low because non-distressed sellers are largely absent from the market, apparently waiting for prices to increase even more before they decide to sell,” noted Blomquist. “I think we are seeing signs of the shadow [foreclosure] supply hitting, but more on a market-by-market basis and often in the form of short sales as opposed to REO [bank-owned] sales — although REO sales are starting to show signs of life in judicial foreclosure markets with bigger backlogs.”

(Read More: Homeowners Rise Above Water on Mortgages)

Strong investor demand for these properties is pushing prices higher, even creating bubbles in some of the formerly hardest hit markets, like Phoenix and Las Vegas. If prices get too high, however, and investors can’t reap the returns they need, then supplies could grow. So far that has not happened, but home prices are rising far faster than anyone predicted.

(Read More: Taking The Real Estate Recovery Local)

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100503223

(Read More: Pending Home Sales Soar Despite Rough Winter)

Banks are making more of an effort to do short sales instead of taking a home to foreclosure, and new federal guidelines are streamlining the process. That led to a 15 percent drop in sales of bank-owned homes and a 6 percent increase in short sales. This has helped home prices because short sales on average sell for a higher price than do bank-owned homes, because they are usually neither abandoned nor vandalized.

“Although foreclosure-related sales represent a shrinking share of total sales, primarily because of fewer bank-owned purchases, distressed sales are still a disproportionately high portion of the overall housing market,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac. “And while distressed properties — whether bank-owned, pre-foreclosure or short sales not in foreclosure — are still selling at a significant discount compared to non-distressed properties, average distressed property prices are increasing in many markets thanks to strong demand and limited inventory.”

(Read More: Housing May Not Be as Healthy as It Looks: NAHB Pro)

Limited inventory continues to be the key in today’s housing market, driving prices higher than most analysts expected. This is surprising, as distress in the market has not simply vanished. There are currently 1.7 homes in the foreclosure process and 1.5 million more seriously delinquent loans (90 days without a payment), according to a new report from Lender Processing Services. Banks are being more aggressive with loan modifications and principal forgiveness, but many of these homes will inevitably end up going back to the banks.

“Inventories continue to be low because non-distressed sellers are largely absent from the market, apparently waiting for prices to increase even more before they decide to sell,” noted Blomquist. “I think we are seeing signs of the shadow [foreclosure] supply hitting, but more on a market-by-market basis and often in the form of short sales as opposed to REO [bank-owned] sales — although REO sales are starting to show signs of life in judicial foreclosure markets with bigger backlogs.”

(Read More: Homeowners Rise Above Water on Mortgages)

Strong investor demand for these properties is pushing prices higher, even creating bubbles in some of the formerly hardest hit markets, like Phoenix and Las Vegas. If prices get too high, however, and investors can’t reap the returns they need, then supplies could grow. So far that has not happened, but home prices are rising far faster than anyone predicted.

(Read More: Taking The Real Estate Recovery Local)

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100503223

But across the country, San Francisco offers an intriguing counterpoint: distinctive architecture is conspicuously lacking in the high-rise building boom.

Forty years after it was completed, the 850-foot Transamerica Pyramid remains the most recognizable high-rise tower built in the City by the Bay. Designed by the architect William Pereira, it took a lot of flak from locals during its planning and construction, with detractors sometimes referring to it as a phallic symbol, though their actual wording was more blunt.

Nevetheless, it became a fixture of the city’s skyline. Today it stands mostly alone in a city more interested in conserving its old Victorian-style homes than in making a statement with new development. It is a puzzling phenomenon in a part of the country often seen as an engine of American innovation.

“People work hard to preserve old things without taking the risk to build something new,” Mr. Gehry said about San Francisco in a recent phone conversation.

He was critical of the high-rise building boom under way in San Francisco’s South of Market area, where the newly built towers are boxy and utilitarian. “It’s business without heart,” he said.

In the past decade, 13 high-rise condo towers of 20 stories or more have been built in San Francisco. Another four such projects have been approved by the city, according to the Mark Company, a real estate marketing and sales firm.

There is nary a brand-name architecture firm to be found among the towers that have already been built, though Handel Architects did design the sleek Millennium Tower. A new luxury high-rise being designed by Richard Meier is still struggling to get approved by the city after almost five years of development.

The new buildings South of Market are meant to attract singles and young couples, many of whom are working in the tech industry and don’t yet want the hassles of a single-family home. And while higher-end offerings like the Millennium have attracted a few prominent locals — like the former 49ers quarterback Joe Montana — foreigners, especially from China, make up a large chunk of the buyers.

At the Madrone, another high-rise in the newly developed neighborhood of Mission Bay, a young techie apartment owner I spoke with said that the architecture of the building had never really been a consideration.

That doesn’t surprise Mr. Stern, who doesn’t see young tech buyers as having the sophistication to care about buildings (though, it must be said, they may have refined tastes in the subtle design touches of the latest smartphones). “I think it takes them awhile to get over the initial high-dose blast of wealth to realize that wealth can be used more creatively than just buying big shoebox spaces and sticking in foosball games and other things like that,” Mr. Stern said.

The young software engineers may not care too much about the quality of architecture where they live, but down in Silicon Valley some big tech firms have tapped world-renowned architects to design their new headquarters.

Facebook hired Mr. Gehry, 83, for the expansion of its campus in Menlo Park. Mr. Gehry designed a 433,555-square-foot building with a rooftop garden that will be built on stilts. “It should look like a floating forest where the building peeks from beneath a series of trees,” said Slater Tow, a Facebook spokesman. “We are not out to make an architectural statement, we are out to make the most functional building for engineers.”

It was Steve Jobs himself who commissioned Sir Norman Foster to design Apple’s new 2.8-million-square-foot headquarters in Cupertino, which Mr. Jobs described as a “spaceship.”

Both the Apple and Facebook projects are expected to be completed by the end of 2015.

But just a commute away in San Francisco, there is little buzz about big-name designers. “San Francisco is not a place where people shout architects’ names on a building,” said Mary Comerio, a professor in the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. “You get more controversy when that happens.”

Indeed, developers in San Francisco are loath to take architectural risks because the city’s approval process for new development is long and rigorous, perhaps the most onerous in the country, architects say.

It’s hard to fault their caution when you consider how small San Francisco really is — 47 square miles (Manhattan alone is 23 square miles) — with much of the area consumed by neighborhoods zoned for single-family homes. More than the pedigree of the architect, the city worries about things like shadows and wind and, of course, earthquakes.

The earthquake issue is not as tough to navigate as you might think, but it is still a costly concern. The Bay Area remains highly susceptible to earthquakes, and “seismic readiness” can add as much as 15 percent to the cost of a new structure, said Mark Sarkisian, director of seismic and structural engineering in the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings Merrill, which built the John Hancock Center and Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago.

Not surprisingly, the science of engineering tall buildings has come a long way in the last 20 years. The structures have special joints to dissipate energy without fracturing during a quake. They can bend, almost like a fishing pole.

In the South of Market area, the sandy soil creates a bigger risk if a big one hits. So developers need to dig foundations 100 to 125 feet deep, Mr. Sarkisian said.

All the engineering advances have made newer high-rises less susceptible to collapse than lower-rise brick structures being held together by gravity, experts say.

But it hasn’t been fear of earthquakes that has held up the approval of a residential tower being designed by Mr. Meier’s firm for the corner of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue. City planners were concerned about how an early design for the building, currently scheduled to have 37 floors, would affect wind conditions for pedestrians, said Bernhard Karpf, an associate partner at Richard Meier Partners, who is in charge of the project.

“They describe that area as having ‘hazardous wind conditions,’ where people would literally get blown off the street,” Mr. Karpf said.

The developer David Choo asked Mr. Meier in 2009 to do something that was “not your traditional San Francisco architecture,” Mr. Karpf said. Meier Partners initially designed a “free-standing sculptural object” on the small site. With approval threatened, the firm hired a Canadian company to test a scale model in a wind tunnel, delaying the design process by another year.

“We had never heard of these kinds of wind regulations,” Mr. Karpf said. “It became almost obsessive on the planning board’s side to make sure wind is mitigated.”

Their frustration mounting, the Meier architects asked the Canadian company to give them three or four shapes that would meet the wind requirements. “We have to move forward,” Mr. Karpf said he told them. “We have to find a solution that works. It may look horrible, but let’s see if we can reverse the process and turn it into a building.”

In the end, the slender shape of the building “was strongly influenced” by studies in the wind tunnel laboratory, which showed that it would “actually improve wind conditions in this part of town,” he said.

When Mr. Karpf asked Mr. Choo how he could stand to buy a property and still have nothing to show for it some five years later, he shrugged and told the architect, “That’s the way it works in San Francisco.”

Follow Alexei Barrionuevo on Twitter: @alexeinyt.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/realestate/big-deal-in-san-francisco-life-without-starchitects.html?pagewanted=all

The number of homes for sale in April hit a 6.6-month supply, down from 9.1 months a year ago, the National Association of Realtors says. A six-month supply is considered a healthy market.

• MORE: Number of homes for sale in 50 top markets and change from a year ago

Some markets have fallen below that. Last month, nine of 18 leading markets tracked by real estate brokerage Redfin had less than a three-month supply. That means it would have taken three months to sell all of the listed homes at April’s sales pace.

Those markets included the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Denver and Washington, D.C. A year ago, only Phoenix had such a low inventory, Redfin’s data show.

“Multiple offers are definitely the norm,” says Rick Turley, president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage for the San Francisco Bay Area. At one point this month, 80% of the properties that his agents were working to buy or sell had multiple offers, Turley says.

Unlike the days during the housing bubble, house shoppers are more likely to go to the sidelines after making three or four offers, he says.

“We’re seeing a significant number of people step back from multiple bids,” says Glenn Kelman, Redfin CEO. “They say, ‘I’m not going to make the mistake people made in 2006.’ “

Compared with a year ago, supplies are tighter in every price category in 47 of 50 top U.S. markets, according to real estate website Zillow. Leaner supplies of lower-price homes are especially evident in some markets.

In Phoenix, San Francisco and Las Vegas, the number of lower-price homes for sale has dropped 64%, 53% and 50%, respectively, in the past year, Zillow’s analysis found. That’s a bigger drop than what’s occurred for higher-price homes in those markets, Zillow’s data show.

Tight inventories will push up prices, encouraging more people to list homes, Zillow economist Stan Humphries says.

Plenty are waiting. “Every Realtor knows divorced couples living in the same house because they’re waiting for higher prices,” says Remax Realtor Kathie Shandro in Denver.

Many people lack enough home equity to buy again, CoreLogic economist Mark Fleming says. CoreLogic says 45% of mortgage holders have less than 20% home equity.

Fewer foreclosed homes are also coming to market, Fleming says. Plus, lower-priced homes are attractive to investors, who’re turning them into rentals, Fleming says.

Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/story/2012-05-24/Housing-becomes-sellers-market/55194106/1