“People at this income level,” Paster said before the auction that wasn’t, “always have money.”

That maxim proved true when it came to luxury properties in the Bay Area last year. Technology executives paying discounts on listed prices were active buyers in 2012, as the growth of social-media and Internet firms including Twitter and Yammer created a wave of millionaires.

Some older homes on the market had sat unsold for years before finding buyers, said Rick Turley, president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage of Northern California. But by the final week of 2012, there were at least 13 publicly recorded transactions for more than $10 million in exclusive San Francisco neighborhoods such as Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights and Sea Cliff, according to DataQuick, a research firm.

That’s up from six sales last year and a dozen in 2007, the previous high mark. The numbers don’t include deals in expensive areas outside the city, such as Belvedere, Tiburon, Atherton or Palo Alto.

“Over a long listing period, it’s hard to say what will happen, because obviously the market is constantly changing,” Turley said. “The success of tech and social media means people are looking very generally at San Francisco and the Silicon Valley as places to live because these businesses are sourced here. It’s highest on their radar.”

Initial public offerings in 2012 by Bay Area companies raised a record $17.5 billion in public equities markets, including sales by Facebook, Yelp and Workday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The total is more than double the $8.3 billion reached in 1999, the height of the dot-com boom.

This year’s Bay Area IPOs generated $9.4 billion in cash for selling shareholders. Other investors have been able to generate money before initial stock sales through the rise of secondary-share markets such as SharesPost.

Yammer founder

Yammer founder David Sacks, who sold the social-media company to Microsoft in June for $1.2 billion, later bought an unfinished home in Pacific Heights that had been listed for $38.5 million. The transfer tax indicated a $20 million sale.

Sacks’ new residence, built in the style of a French chateau, was last purchased by Peter Sperling, incoming chairman of Apollo Group Inc., who paid $32 million in 2002, said David Barrett of listing brokerage Warwick Properties Group.

“It’s built to be the finest residence in San Francisco, from limestone quarried in France and with the same glaziers who worked on the Eiffel Tower renovation,” Barrett said.

In December, Jay Paul, the San Francisco developer of 6 million square feet of Silicon Valley offices, including Google’s four-building complex in Sunnyvale, completed a purchase in the same neighborhood, said a person with knowledge of the transaction. The house sold for $28.25 million, said Dona Crowder of TRI Coldwell Banker, a co-listing broker on the home. She declined to comment on the buyer.

Seller deals

The deal was at a 48 percent discount from the asking price in 2007, around the time U.S. housing prices peaked. The seller had most recently sought $34 million, Crowder said.

Paul didn’t return a telephone message seeking comment.

In some cases, luxury discounts this past year in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley are a reflection of aged homes built decades ago that needed extensive renovations, Crowder said. Sellers were also motivated by the prospect of higher capital gains taxes in 2013, she said. Her listing on Broadway in Pacific Heights received higher bids in the past, including one earlier in 2012, which were rejected by the seller, she said.

“The generations are turning over in this neighborhood,” Crowder said in a phone interview. “If it were understood back then that record prices were being offered, it would have been wise to sell” in 2007.

Dorsey, Benioff

Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder, paid $9.9 million in February for a “humble” two-bedroom house in Sea Cliff that had been listed for $12.5 million, said Olivia Hsu Decker, owner of Tiburon’s Decker Bullock Sotheby’s International Realty and Dorsey’s agent on the deal. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff bought a nearby house in 2009, Decker said.

The Sea Cliff neighborhood is named for its location high above the Pacific Ocean, just west of the Golden Gate. In May, Dorsey, who is known to take public buses to work, tweeted a quote from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, “I need the sea because it teaches me,” Decker said.

Other multimillion-dollar home buyers of 2012 included Mark Pincus, founder of online game maker Zynga. He purchased a Pacific Heights house in July for $16 million after a $500,000 price cut, said Decker, who represented him in the past and also was the listing agent for the Belvedere home.

Rising prices

The region’s broader housing market is also showing strong demand, bolstered by the addition of 32,400 new jobs in the San Francisco metropolitan area in the year through November. House and condominium prices in the nine-county Bay Area in November rose almost 21 percent from a year earlier to a median $438,000, the highest since August 2008, according to DataQuick of San Diego. Sales jumped almost 16 percent.

Dan Levy is a Bloomberg writer. E-mail: dlevy13@bloomberg.net

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Luxury-Bay-Area-homes-selling-briskly-4160241.php

Fremont, CA (PRWEB) July 16, 2012

Residents in Fremont and the San Francisco East Bay Area now have more options for Mortgage financing. Arcus Lending, a California Direct Mortgage Lender, recently opened a branch in Fremont, CA.

“Opening a branch office in Fremont is a strategic move for our company to better serve the needs of the clients living in the San Francisco East Bay Area”, Shashank Shekhar, Arcus Lending CEO stated. “By reaching into the East Bay we can further optimize the systems we have in place to offer great mortgage rates and legendary service for our clients ”.

The branch opening was kicked off with an exclusive event for Realtors based in the San Francisco East and South Bay. Noted real estate speaker and coach Rick DeLuca delivered great insights on “thriving in today’s real estate market”. “Arcus Lending’s core value of building relationships with clients is at the heart of their success and the services they offer to the realtor community are rare indeed”, DeLuca said.

Now also a Fremont Mortgage Company, Arcus Lending offers mortgage loans for residential properties and specializes in diverse loan programs such as FHA, VA, Homepath, HARP, Jumbo and Conforming mortgages. Arcus Lending is able to shop for the best mortgage rates for their clients and close loans quickly.

Arcus Lending, in business since 2008, prides itself on providing exceptional client service. This is reflected in more than 30 five star rating on Yelp and Google Places. In fact, Arcus Lending is one of the few mortgage lenders in the area which was awarded the “we are a favorite place on Google” sticker. Arcus Lending has built a solid business in California by educating and empowering its clients to take the right decisions when it comes to mortgage financing.

Mr. Shekhar leads the team at Arcus Lending. Shashank is widely regarded as “California’s #1 Mortgage Expert”. He is the author of the widely acclaimed book – “First Time Home Buying 101″ and he writes one of the top mortgage blogs in the country – “Lending Expert Blog”. He is a sought after industry speaker and has been featured on several national media.

Arcus Lending

39656 Mission Blvd

Fremont CA-94539

(510) 896-8150

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/7/prweb9695168.htm

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/Fremont-Mortgage-News-Arcus-Lending-Opens-a-New-3709177.php

Fremont, CA (PRWEB) July 16, 2012

Residents in Fremont and the San Francisco East Bay Area now have more options for Mortgage financing. Arcus Lending, a California Direct Mortgage Lender, recently opened a branch in Fremont, CA.

“Opening a branch office in Fremont is a strategic move for our company to better serve the needs of the clients living in the San Francisco East Bay Area”, Shashank Shekhar, Arcus Lending CEO stated. “By reaching into the East Bay we can further optimize the systems we have in place to offer great mortgage rates and legendary service for our clients ”.

The branch opening was kicked off with an exclusive event for Realtors based in the San Francisco East and South Bay. Noted real estate speaker and coach Rick DeLuca delivered great insights on “thriving in today’s real estate market”. “Arcus Lending’s core value of building relationships with clients is at the heart of their success and the services they offer to the realtor community are rare indeed”, DeLuca said.

Now also a Fremont Mortgage Company, Arcus Lending offers mortgage loans for residential properties and specializes in diverse loan programs such as FHA, VA, Homepath, HARP, Jumbo and Conforming mortgages. Arcus Lending is able to shop for the best mortgage rates for their clients and close loans quickly.

Arcus Lending, in business since 2008, prides itself on providing exceptional client service. This is reflected in more than 30 five star rating on Yelp and Google Places. In fact, Arcus Lending is one of the few mortgage lenders in the area which was awarded the “we are a favorite place on Google” sticker. Arcus Lending has built a solid business in California by educating and empowering its clients to take the right decisions when it comes to mortgage financing.

Mr. Shekhar leads the team at Arcus Lending. Shashank is widely regarded as “California’s #1 Mortgage Expert”. He is the author of the widely acclaimed book – “First Time Home Buying 101″ and he writes one of the top mortgage blogs in the country – “Lending Expert Blog”. He is a sought after industry speaker and has been featured on several national media.

Arcus Lending

39656 Mission Blvd

Fremont CA-94539

(510) 896-8150

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/7/prweb9695168.htm

Article source: http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2012/07/16/fremont-mortgage-news-arcus-lending-opens-new-office-fremont-ca

“Who has a party in Palo Alto?” she asks the camera, in a dig at the suburban capital of Silicon Valley that helped make the two-minute comedy, “Shit Silicon Valley Says,” a Web hit. For many of the twenty-something engineers and other professionals who play a central role in the latest Internet boom, the question is purely rhetorical.

More than ever, technology entrepreneurs, and their investors and employees, are choosing the urban charms of San Francisco over the sprawl of neighbouring Silicon Valley. In the South of Market district, the nexus of the city’s tech industry, rents are soaring and latte lines are lengthening — conjuring memories of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

Late last year, the city had 34,000 tech jobs, topping the high set at the peak of the dotcom boom in 2001, according to a Jones Lang LaSalle analysis of California Employment Development Department data. Twitter, Salesforce.com, Zynga, Yelp and other sizable Internet companies now call the city home.

Half or more of graduates of the tech incubator Y Combinator, a widely watched Silicon Valley institution, now move to San Francisco, founder Paul Graham said by email. Four years ago, he said, the city lacked the seriousness of purpose that infuses Silicon Valley. “I’m suspicious when startups choose SF,” he wrote at the time. “Things have changed,” he declared recently.

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“This is really where the centre of gravity is,” agreed Y Combinator graduate Dan Siroker. He worked for Google in Mountain View but started his own business, a company that lets businesses test versions of websites, called Optimizely, in San Francisco. And the profitable company just got a round of venture funding.
That’s not to say Silicon Valley, which extends south of the city to San Jose and includes towns such as Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Cupertino, is no longer central to the tech scene.

San Francisco captured 20% of all venture capital funding in the last quarter of 2011, its best showing ever, a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on Thomson Reuters data noted. Silicon Valley accounted for a strong 27% of all VC investment in the same period.

The new generation of Internet companies has a more real-world, and arguably more urban, outlook. Customers of car service Uber, for instance, see a map of nearby cars on their smartphone app and can call one over in minutes.

Sahil Lavingia, who dropped out of college in Los Angeles to work at Pinterest in Palo Alto, is among those attracted by the city. Last year he left Pinterest and headed north, starting his own online payment service, Gumroad, which lets sellers tweet their wares and bears the design sense that is a hallmark of the San Francisco scene.

“I moved up here for two reasons. One is that Palo Alto is really boring,” the 19-year old chief executive officer said. “For me personally, it’s boring. And two, it’s boring for other people.” To be fair, he says, San Francisco parties are boring, because the people you really want to meet are home working. But the city is international, diverse — and has the people he wants to hire.

There are also plenty of reasons San Francisco is not a great place for business, starting with taxes. Among them is the city’s unusual 1.5% local payroll tax, which the business community views as a jobs killer.

Mayor Ed Lee, last year helped shield companies going public from the brunt of city taxes, and thus narrowly avoided losing Twitter to suburbia. Now he wants to swap a payroll tax for a revenue tax or other alternative.

“It’s all about compromise, and the good news is all of the constituencies are working together,” said Ron Conway, an angel investor known for seeding hundreds of earlystage companies.

Mr. Conway moved back to San Francisco from the Valley eight years ago for personal reasons. His business followed suit — now 60% of the roughly 200 companies his SVAngel portfolio holds are based in the city. Five year ago, three-quarters were in Silicon Valley.

But local progressives — the ultra-liberals who give the city its far-left reputation — have vociferously opposed the tax breaks, arguing that the payroll tax reflects the cost of city services and that newcomers should not be favoured over the people who give San Francisco its character.

The city turned more politically progressive after the “unchecked excesses” of the dot-com boom a decade ago, said Aaron Peskin, a former head of the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco’s city council. “I’m always amazed by human beings’ ability to conveniently repress recent history,” he said.

The last tech boom created jobs — and ill will, he noted. “When you are not taking care of people and families who have lived here for generations and made this the city that it is, it’s a little lopsided.”

Politics aside, high rents could eventually be problematic for businesses, too. Class B offices, including the industrial-looking lofts that tech startups love, currently go for around $43 a square foot and are climbing, Colliers International, a real estate broker said. The square-foot rate is double that in 2003, though still comfortably below the 2001 peak of $65.

Silicon Valley still has major advantages as a location, including wide-open tracts that can accommodate large corporate campuses. “As startups get beyond startup stage and start hiring people, they look to move out of San Francisco,” said Chuck Reed, mayor of Silicon Valley capital San Jose, where Cisco Systems Inc.’s campus stretches along several stops of the city’s lightrail system.

© Thomson Reuters 2012

Article source: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/06/11/startups-flock-to-san-francisco/

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

Gagan and Jasmin Arneja in their 1,800-square-foot home, which attracted 22 bids and sold for $1.5 million, 40% over asking price.

San Francisco

A bidding war broke out in November when a small house in San Francisco’s tightly packed Noe Valley came on the market.

Twenty-two people, including employees of Facebook, Zynga, Google and Pixar, battled for the home. The winning offer was $1.5 million—40% higher than the asking price. The house had a great view, but it was only 1,800 square feet and came with an old kitchen which, like most of the interior, was covered in 1970s plywood paneling. Seen from the curb, there’s hardly any house at all—just a one-car garage and gate leading to small front courtyard.

View Slideshow

Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

Dolores Park, with a view of the Mission District and skyline of downtown San Francisco in the background, is a popular hangout for the new generation of tech entrepreneurs.

The inconspicuousness was part of the attraction, said Jasmin Arneja, 42, who bought the two-bedroom house with her husband Gagan, 40, a software engineer at a networking start-up. “It’s the antithesis to these outrageous bizarre Gordon Gekko-esque houses. It just incorporates so much of our values,” said Ms. Arneja, who runs a philanthropic advisory firm.

Housing prices in the San Francisco Bay area are once again soaring, thanks to an infusion of cash from the rising shares of Apple and Google and the initial public offerings by Zynga, LinkedIn, Yelp and soon Facebook, expected to be the largest in Internet history. But while a previous generation of dot-com executives opted for mansions in wealthy San Francisco neighborhoods like Pacific Heights and tony Silicon Valley suburbs like Atherton, this generation is gravitating to modest homes and condos in grittier parts of the city.

Ground zero of the current tech-fueled real-estate boom is the Mission, formerly a majority Hispanic neighborhood on the southern edge of San Francisco that’s close to the main arteries that link San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Median home prices in the Mission grew 44% in December compared with a year earlier. Adjacent Noe Valley had a rise of 31% over that same period, according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors. The average number of days homes sat on the market in both neighborhoods has almost halved over the past year.

That’s in sharp contrast to what’s happening nationally, where the housing market continues to flounder, with the Case-Shiller 20-City index down for the fourth straight month in a row. It’s even an aberration from the San Francisco area (including Oakland), which saw a 5.4% drop in home prices in December from a year earlier.

Newly minted tech millionaires in San Francisco are shunning mansions in wealthy neighborhoods and leafy suburbs in favor of modest homes and condos in grittier parts of the city. Geoffrey Fowler has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Jason Henry for WSJ

Real-estate agents say it’s a cultural shift. The new generation of Internet executives—younger than the last generation of dot-commers—eschews the trappings and responsibilities of expensive properties. They want to bicycle, walk or take public transportation. They like living near food trucks and dive bars.

“You can spend a lot of money on a great restaurant here or just $5 on a burrito,” said Christian Niles, 31, who bought a two-bedroom apartment for $585,000 in the Mission with his wife in August because he saw real estate as a good place to store the cash he’d made from selling his app called TrackerBot to Pivotal Labs last summer. He plans to never own a car.

StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp bought a 2,900-square-foot loft penthouse with four bathrooms and a patio for $3 million this past summer in the South of Market area. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams bought a $2.4 million house in Noe Valley in 2009.

The hottest properties are near corporate shuttle bus stops—where employees for companies like Google, Facebook, Genentech, LinkedIn and Apple line up daily for the ride to Silicon Valley. Real-estate agent Amanda Jones calls it the “Shuttle Effect” and said proximity can command as much as a 20% premium. Some real-estate agents said they’re dying for a map of where the buses pick up. “When a listing gets deluged with people—that tells me it’s close to a stop,” said Ms. Jones.

Some companies share a few of the same stops, occasionally leading to employees getting on the wrong bus. Discussions can get animated about adding or moving a stop, said Jessica Herrera, Facebook’s transportation coordinator who controls the stop locations for Facebook’s eight shuttle busses, including a new glass-topped double-decker the company rented to make space for the growing crowds. “Everybody wants a stop that’s next to their house that comes every five minutes,” she said, adding that discussions have remained civil.

Enlarge Image

Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

The Mission apartment building where investor Michael Barton bought a condo: ‘You can tell there is an upsurge going on here.’

Stephanie Pocino, 28, makes the 45-minute trip to Facebook every day from her rented apartment building in the Mission. She has no garbage disposal and no dishwasher, but the Victorian building has lots of charm and bay windows. She carries a wireless Internet card, which she uses to answer emails and work on presentations while on the commute, and her laundry, which she gets done free at the company’s headquarters.

Soaring rental prices—up more than 10% in the Mission and Noe Valley in the past six months alone—are also making buying more competitive, said Vanguard Properties broker Craig Waddle. He’s seen bidding competitions for rentals and rental offers coming in higher than the asking prices. At an open house for a one-bedroom offered for $1,400 a month, 40 people were filling out applications on the spot. One person walked up to the owner, offered $1,700 and got the place.

“It’s been kind of shocking,” said Raj Gajwani, 36, who has been looking for a house in Noe Valley for around $1.5 million for the past few months. A founder of two online companies, he and his wife are expecting twins and want a house close to a shuttle-bus stop for his wife’s commute but with “culture, interesting people and activities.” They also want something they will be able to sell for more money in five years, when they might have to move to the suburbs for better schools.

Mike Shaw, a real-estate agent who has worked for 15 years in the San Francisco market, said buyers often want something already renovated or vintage because they don’t have the time or the interest to hire designers and architects. “That person in jeans and a sweatshirt could be low on the totem pole or a multibillionaire. They haven’t realized the value of good design either in architecture or fashion,” said Suzanne Tucker, a San Francisco designer who has remodeled many of the most lavish homes in the Bay Area.

Buyers argue they have a different sensibility. Ms. Arneja, who snagged the sought-after house in Noe Valley, said she was drawn to the interior, which is covered almost entirely by dark redwood and brick, lending it a feel that lands somewhere between a den and a tree house. “This is clearly a ’70s house,” said Ms. Arneja. “I would like to think of it as a shining example of good architecture during a bad period of design.”

Pop-up restaurants with long lines, coffee shops that brew one cup at a time and shops selling curiosities like local honey have followed the influx of cash. Apple employee Amandeep Jawa, who takes the company bus to work, covered the driveway of his Victorian with a “parklet,” a public space registered with the city featuring seating and greenery. His crowning achievement: a topiary triceratops, dubbed Trixie, made of succulent plants.

But the gentrification is far from complete. A surge in violence between feuding gangs called the Norteños and Sureños claimed two lives in less than 24 hours in the Mission in August, and there was a shooting in front of a coffee shop. Noe Valley saw a rash of sexual assaults; residents there have also reported attempted carjackings and armed robberies.

“The key word is coexistence,” said David Campos, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors representing the Mission and Bernal Heights.

Blogs popular with tech workers keep track of the violence, and one UC Berkeley student produced a map called “Gangs and Cupcakes,” which overlaid Norteño and Sureño territory with the Mission’s most popular cupcake cafes. In recent years, somebody spray-painted “cafe gentrification” on the sidewalk in front of popular coffee shops.

The high prices and the changes in the neighborhood are only going to intensify, predicted Lawrence Coburn, 42, who first moved to the Mission in 1999 to found a start-up and has lived in an 1,100-foot rental loft there since 2003. “A lot of my friends are trying to hustle to buy a place before all the Facebook people get liquid,” he said.

Investor Michael Barton, 48, recently decided to buy because he wanted to lock in his investment before Facebook’s IPO money hits town. The area around his 950-square-foot, two-story loft is “kind of funky, and gritty and dodgy,” said Mr. Barton. But an industrial building next door has been taken over by Internet start-ups. “You can tell there is an upsurge going on here,” he said.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 16, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Hot Spot for the Rising Tech Generation.

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204781804577271491070580960.html

Meanwhile, sellers in the know are waiting to list. “It seems foolish to put [my house] on the market when there are a thousand people down the street who are about to make a million dollars,” said SF homeowner Adam Holm, whose Potrero Hill home is easy walking distance to Zynga’s headquarters.
· IPOs Stoke San Francisco Housing Market [Reuters]

Article source: http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2011/11/29/yet_again_local_ipos_make_sf_real_estate_dearer_still.php

SAN FRANCISCO—In Tuesday’s mayoral election here, 16 candidates will battle in one of the most competitive contests in years. And to influence the race’s outcome, Silicon Valley technology players are getting involved in the election to an unprecedented degree.

In the past several weeks, founders of San Francisco-based Salesforce.com Inc., Twitter Inc., Zynga Inc. and Yelp Inc., along with several investors in those companies, have contributed thousands of dollars to try to keep interim mayor Ed Lee in office. They support Mr. Lee’s policies that have shaved millions of dollars from some Web companies’ tax liabilities in an effort to …

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204621904577014230782933846.html