OAKLAND, Calif. — The Black Panther party preached “power to the people,” but in the San Francisco Bay area’s thriving real estate market, the power is in the property.

Realtors expected to close a deal Friday on the Oakland home where the militant black power group was founded in 1966.

After the improvements, the home was put on the market for $400,000 — almost 40 times what Seale’s parents paid for it in 1960.

Seale said he and Huey Newton drafted the party’s manifesto in the dining room.

“We would come in from patrol at night, unload our weapons at my house, and lay them all out across the long dining room table,” Seale wrote in his 1978 autobiography.

The surrounding streets that armed party members once patrolled in the name of black empowerment are quickly gentrifying, with longtime residents like Seale departing for less expensive suburbs.

Seale, now 75, has worked as a draftsman and a carpenter. He made improvements on the house and wanted to do more, but his sister persuaded him to sell.

The house’s dramatically increased selling price was part of “the same crap that got this financial debacle started in the first place,” he said.

But Seale didn’t hold the cutthroat realities of buying and selling homes in the Bay Area against the new residents.

“People move. Humans move. Power to the people, whether they’re black, white, blue, whatever,” he said.

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/24/black-panther-house_n_1377181.html

“We’re very, very fortunate in San Francisco,” Ting told SFAppeal. He also predicted that the growth will only continue here in SF in the coming years.

(SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTOS)

This may be news for Bay Area buyers and sellers, but real estate agents aren’t surprised.

“This city is a gold mine for real estate,” Rick Teed, cofounder of real estate and development company Teed Haze, told HuffPost. “If you have a house with no view, but it’s redone and in a neighborhood like Pacific Heights, it’s going to be north of $1000-per-square foot for starters.”

Teed agrees with Ting’s prediction that the market will only continue to grow. “We are a seven-by-seven-square-mile city,” said Teed. “There is no new land.”

Daniel Cressman, executive vice president of the commercial real estate company Grubb El, also commented on our city’s limited space. He told NBC Bay Area that San Francisco is “one of the very few markets in the entire country where investment demand for commercial office space is far outstripping the available supply that’s for sale.”

To celebrate this news, we contacted Sotheby’s International Realty and got some pictures of a home they are especially excited about. Check out this unreal Gold Coast-style 1927 home designed by Willis Polk Co. in Pacific Heights. We would move in tomorrow if it weren’t for that $25 million price tag.

Take a look at images of this amazing home below:

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/22/san-francisco-real-estate-best-market-in-state_n_907245.html