homesmillbrae.com

We focused on housing reports that try to capture the current value and recent changes to the value of homes within the Bay Area’s rental and real-estate markets. This review was originally intended for internal purposes, but we thought it was worth sharing more widely.

The Chronicle data team’s preferred data resources for understanding changes to home values are CoreLogic, Zillow and the U.S. Census American Community Survey (ACS). For changes to the rental market, we recommend Apartment List, Zillow and the ACS. But we also recognize that other data sources may be appropriate depending on exactly what a person is hoping to learn.

Zillow

Rentals: Yes

Sales: Yes

Where to find the data: https://tinyurl.com/2jbrfabj

What they aim to provide: Zillow offers detailed monthly data on how home values and rents are changing, ranging from nationwide trends down to shifts at the neighborhood level.

Instead of just looking at homes that have sold in a given month, Zillow calculates monthly changes to its “Zestimates” — estimated values for nearly every home in the U.S. It calculates a home’s Zestimate by looking at its features (the number of bedrooms, for example), location and sales of homes nearby, among other factors.

To look at changes to rents, Zillow uses what’s called a “repeated transaction” methodology, where it only looks at properties that have been listed more than once. This allows it to analyze changes to rents for the same units over time.

Strengths: Zillow is generally regarded as one of the country’s best sources for property value data because of the Zestimate, which allows it to track changes to values of all homes, not just properties that have recently been on the market. Because the Zestimate does not rely solely on recent sales data, its reports can also be produced more quickly than others and capture changes reliably down to the neighborhood level.

Weaknesses: Zillow’s index is not quite as accurate when estimating the average value of listed homes as, say, Redfin, whose index focuses more on currently listed properties than every home that exists. Zillow’s real estate and rental numbers also do not reveal as much about what is on the market, as they give a sense of overall price levels.

U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey

Rentals: Yes

Sales: Yes

Where to find the data: https://tinyurl.com/y7835c5x

What they aim to provide: The American Community Survey (ACS) gathers multiple data points on housing in the U.S. on a yearly basis, including the share of homes that are occupied by renters vs. homeowners, the self-reported values of those homes, and median rents.

Strengths: The ACS surveys over 3.5 million U.S. households and is generally regarded as one of the most accurate sources of data about the American population over time. Its data can assess changes to rents and home values down to the neighborhood level.

Weaknesses: The American Community Survey relies on self-reported data, and not everyone may report their own home values or rents accurately. The survey also only publishes once a year, so its data will not reflect monthly fluctuations in the housing market.

CoreLogic

Rentals: Not for the Bay Area

Sales: Yes

Where to find the data: https://tinyurl.com/yuj55h3x

What they aim to provide: CoreLogic’s main product is the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, which reflects the average change in home values across 20 different metropolitan areas and is calculated monthly.

Strengths: The index is considered the gold standard for housing value data for people seeking to understand changes to the U.S. housing market over time; the Federal Housing Finance Agency uses it, as do many of the property websites listed below. It only uses data on houses that have sold at least twice to capture how each unit has changed in value over time.

Weaknesses: The Case-Shiller Price Index doesn’t update as quickly or frequently as some of the property data reports below. The Index also doesn’t have data at a level more granular than metropolitan areas, and only indexes a select number of metro areas (although San Francisco is included). Finally, its index does not list a dollar value for a typical home in a given region.

Redfin

Rentals: Yes

Sales: Yes

Where to find the data: https://tinyurl.com/7ufp8e2w

What they aim to provide: Redfin publishes data on monthly sales prices of homes, among other reports. It draws from sales reported to county governments and multiple listing services, organizations that gather home sales data from lots of realtors. It has also recently started to publish data on average monthly rents.

Strengths: Redfin publishes data more quickly than many other platforms, and provides both median sales price data and a Redfin estimate, which is similar to Zillow’s Zestimate in that it considers multiple aspects of a home including its location and other attributes. Unlike Zillow, however, Redfin focuses on homes that are currently on the market — though it does calculate estimates for off-market homes.

Weaknesses: Redfin’s data is not as accurate as Zillow’s when looking at unlisted homes. This means that if you’re using the site to understand the value of your own home before selling it, you should search for similar homes near yours that have recently sold — not your own property. Redfin also has less-thorough coverage of areas outside of major metros, though the company’s Bay Area data is among its most reliable and complete.

California Association of Realtors

Rentals: No

Sales: Yes

Where to find the data: https://tinyurl.com/tj252dhh

What they aim to provide: The California Association of Realtors (CAR) releases monthly data on real estate trends in California, including the number of home sales, median sale price, number of active listings and more.

The organization also calculates a Housing Affordability Index on a quarterly basis; this index looks at the percentage of households in a given region that could afford a median-priced single-family home.

Strengths: CAR focuses exclusively on California, which can be useful to people looking at trends across the state and within its regions. Its reports also analyze changes to inventory and active listings, providing a bird’s eye view of market demand.

Weaknesses: CAR primarily analyzes median prices, and does not account for changes in available housing stock, so is not as useful for assessing trends. In other words, while this data can reveal whether the average cost of a house in a market has risen, it does not say much about whether the price of a similar 3-bedroom house in the market is going up or not.

Compass

Rentals: No

Sales: Yes

Where to find the data: https://tinyurl.com/uaz3n7d8

What they aim to provide: Compass publishes monthly reports on home prices and real estate trends in major Bay Area markets, including San Francisco, Marin and Oakland-Berkeley.

Strengths: For sheer volume of reports, Compass can’t be beat. And the reports cover a lot of ground, citing everything from monthly new listings and average number of days on market to an “unsold inventory index,” which calculates how long it would take for all homes in a given market to sell out at the current rate of sales. Compass averages its sales data across three months to help control for outliers.

Weaknesses: Compass lacks its own sophisticated index like the Zestimate or the Redfin Estimate, and the company’s Bay Area reports do not generally incorporate Census data, which include a wider range of housing types, like public housing. So its reports might have a higher margin of error than Redfin and Zillow.

Apartment List

Rentals: Yes

Sales: No

Where to find the data: https://tinyurl.com/88d25zaz

What they aim to provide: Apartment List publishes a monthly report that estimates median rent for studio apartments and 1, 2, 3 and 4+ bedroom apartments.

The company looks at data from the Census Bureau to analyze rent statistics for recent movers. Its analysts then estimate how rents have changed more recently using a growth rate calculated from listing data on its platform.

Strengths: Because Apartment List uses Census data and not just its own listings, its rent averages reflect more types of properties, including public housing and single-family rental homes. Other websites tend to over-represent more expensive rental units, according to Apartment List researcher Rob Warnock.

Apartment List also estimates changes in actual rents paid by renters, not list prices, which is helpful because landlords often reduce list prices over time as units remain vacant. Apartment List also uses a similar “repeat transaction” model as Case-Shiller and Zillow, where it looks at changes in the same apartments’ rents over time instead of just looking at how median rents overall have changed.

Weaknesses: While it uses Census data to look at median rents in various months, Apartment List only uses listings on its own platform to look at changes over time. So if rents change in a market segment that doesn’t have a strong presence on Apartment List, the platform may not accurately reflect changes to that market within a given month.

Zumper

Rentals: Yes

Sales: No

Where to find the data: https://tinyurl.com/7cpxvejj

What they aim to provide: Zumper generates monthly reports on changes to median rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments for the top 100 most populous cities in the U.S., plus hundreds of other cities within major metropolitan areas. Its most recent report for the S.F. Bay Area was published on August 26. It sources its rental data through its own website, as well as multiple listing services.

Zumper’s methodology excludes listings that are currently occupied or not on the market. Zumper spokesperson Crystal Chen said this allows the website’s reports to serve as “a better measure of what a consumer would experience shopping for an apartment at any given time.” Chen noted, however, that the site’s reports do not capture every new listing on the market.

Strengths: Zumper sources from over one million active listings per month, more than many other property websites, according to Chen.

Weaknesses: Like Compass, Zumper does not use an index to measure change over time — it looks at changes to median rents. Thus, its monthly data can look more volatile than the actual market, and potentially mislead consumers as to changes in a given market over time.

For instance, if a slew of new luxury apartment buildings were constructed within a year or two in Oakland, a report from Zumper might show that the median price of a one-bedroom apartment in the city jumped up, when in reality most of the city’s one-bedroom apartments could have hovered around the same monthly rental price.

Additionally, Zumper’s reports source largely from listings on its own website, which skew towards higher-income properties, according to urban economist Joe Cortwright. So median rents and home prices may look higher in Zumper reports than they actually are in reality.

Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: susie.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson

 

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-S-F-Chronicle-s-guide-to-Bay-Area-housing-16441648.php

Holmes’ partner, hotel heir William “Billy” Evans, listed one of the houses on the Green Gables property as his address on a traffic citation found from court records, CNBC reported. The outlet said it “independently confirmed” through a courthouse clerk that the couple have been staying in one of the homes along the 74-acre property.

The sprawling estate — which boasts seven houses, three swimming pools, a tennis court and a gargantuan Roman pool — went on the market or the first time ever in March and is currently listed for $135 million.

The property has been in the Fleishhacker family for five generations and was built primarily as a summer retreat, but was also used as an event space over the years. It’s co-listed by Compass realtor Brad Miller and his wife, Helen, and Zackary Wright of Christie’s International Real Estate. Neither Wright nor Brad Miller immediately responded to a request for additional information.

Kevin Downey, attorney for Holmes, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Holmes founded Theranos, the now-defunct health technology startup, when she was 19 and soon became the youngest self-made female billionaire in the U.S. The company pioneered a low-cost blood testing technology that claimed it would be able to detect medical conditions with only a small amount of blood from patients, but several investigations soon revealed the technology didn’t work.

In 2018, Holmes and Theranos’ former president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani — who was also Holmes’ ex-boyfriend — were indicted on two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 10 counts of wire fraud. Both have pleaded not guilty and are free on $500,000 bail. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison each.

Annie Vainshtein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avainshtein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @annievain

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/See-inside-the-135-million-estate-where-16441295.php

As most Californians already know, Governor Gavin Newsom is in the midst of facing down next month’s historic recall vote. As he prepared for this challenge earlier on, Newsom was also likely preparing documentation for the sale of his Kentfield estate, which he purchased in 2011. The sprawling Marin property sold in May, per records reviewed by SF Gate. In fact, the timeline suggests that the sale went through around the time that recall election polls began to lean toward a certainty.

Newsom, who grew up in the Bay Area and attended Redwood High School in Larkspur, initially moved into the Kentfield estate in 2011 after becoming California’s Lieutenant Governor, a position that he held until 2019. According to the New York Post, Newsom invested around $330,000 remodeling the property before putting it on the market for a whopping $5.95 million. In case you didn’t know, Marin County contains some of the most expensive zip codes in the country, including Ross, which ranked as #4 through the US in terms of real estate values.

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Newsom first listed the five-bedroom, five-bathroom, 4,000 sq. ft. property in January 2019 for $5,995,000 with Vanguard. Despite the highly competitive real estate market, the property did not get picked up right away. Considering the high-end location and spacious backyard, including swimming pool, hot tub, and coveted nearby schools, the home eventually sold off-market for $5.695 million.

The home, tucked into the hills of Marin, was built in the 1950s by Bay Area architect Worley K. Wong. Per marketing materials, in the morning and when conditions are right, the new owners will experience views of San Francisco. At night, one might be able to see the skyline reflected on the Pacific.

According to Realtor.com, the property was 136.27% more expensive than the nearby properties, whose median price hovers around $2.5 million. Selling the home is one of many tasks to check off his list as the September 14th recall, due to dissatisfaction over Newsom’s COVID-19-related policies, looms. It’s also worth noting the property, in just under ten years, doubled in price.

Image: Pool / Getty Images (Left) | Realtor.com (Right)

Article source: https://sfist.com/2021/08/19/amidst-ongoing-recall-gov-newsom-sells-his-kentfield-home-for-5-7-million/

“How can I help?” Francis Suarez tweeted.

Millions read the mayor’s tweet, and the idea began to take hold, making Miami the noisiest tech upstart during the pandemic.

Soon Asparouhov and his Founders Fund colleague Keith Rabois, a veteran of PayPal and LinkedIn, made the move to Miami. So did Jack Abraham of venture capital firm Atomic.

The two companies both leased space in a boutique, glassy office building in Wynwood, Miami’s arts district, which was filled with neglected warehouses just a few years ago. Their neighbors are Uchi, a sushi restaurant with $100 tasting menus, and Panther Coffee, Miami’s answer to Blue Bottle. Startup incubators have replaced artist studios.

Then the giant Japanese tech investor SoftBank committed $100 million to fund Miami area companies. The Magic City was on a hot streak.

But economic reality still lags digital hype in Miami’s tech quest.

Along the sunny coast, dozens of towers are perpetually under construction, but they’re almost all for hotel guests or wealthy condo buyers, not legions of tech workers. Cruise ships and tourists have returned to downtown and revelers have crammed bars throughout most of the pandemic, but the city’s economic recovery has been sluggish.

Miami’s office vacancy rate is 16.9%, the highest rate since 2013, according to real estate brokerage Avison Young. Miami-Dade County’s unemployment rate was 7.1%, in June, worse than the national and state average.

Despite prominent Bay Area transplants, in 2020 the Miami metro area had a net loss of 42,100 people who filed change of address notices with the U.S. Postal Service, according to an analysis by real estate brokerage CBRE. It was an 11% steeper loss from the previous year. LinkedIn data shows that over the past 12 months, ex-New Yorkers were by far the biggest group moving to the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, while the Bay Area was just the sixth biggest source for new arrivals.

There’s also a lack of engineers. CBRE ranked South Florida, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, as the 37th best North American market for tech talent, behind Rust Belt cities Detroit and St. Louis, and even below Florida’s Tampa and Orlando.

South Florida had 12,677 tech graduates from 2015 to 2019, but only 10,280 tech jobs added from 2016 to 2020, indicating a “brain drain,” CBRE said.

“South Florida lacks the educational and research infrastructure that anchored the emergence of Silicon Valley, the (North Carolina) Research Triangle or Austin. No Stanford University or the University of Texas here,” said Alejandro Portes, a Princeton sociology professor and author of two books on Miami. He said he believes Miami “is not a tech city and is not likely to be in the future.”

“Despite all the hoopla from Mayor Suarez, those likely to come to Miami are financial and real estate investors, as well as commercial and tourist-oriented firms drawing on the established strengths of the area. Miami has a solid labor supply to meet the needs of such firms, but not high-tech and engineering ones,” Portes said.

But Ken Russell, a city commissioner who represents downtown Miami, said he believes the city’s reputation has changed during the pandemic.

“We’ve never had a tangible migration. We’ve had one-offs. We’ve had companies that have come in, but nothing where there was this much energy around an attraction to Miami,” he said. “It’s not from a single tweet. This is a real thing happening.”

It’s still early. Many of the tech movers are executives and managers, and it’s unclear whether more rank-and-file workers will follow, Russell said.

“The question is, how many of them actually bring over an actual infrastructure of work? If they’re able to do it remote … then we become a symbolic tech hub,” he said. “If the companies are based here, but there’s not actually much work being done here, it doesn’t really pass the test.”

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Miami’s challenges are stark.

The city’s income inequality, exacerbated by its appeal as a safe piggy bank protected by U.S. laws for international business moguls, means it’s one of the least affordable housing markets in the country when income is factored in, Russell said. The gleaming towers of downtown Miami and nearby Brickell, the city’s financial center, are a testament to the city’s wealth, but the tourist-driven economy is heavily dependent on service workers. A 2019 study found Greater Miami had the second-worst inequality in the country, behind only New York, with 47.8% of the the workforce in low-wage service jobs with an average salary of $26,532 a year.

“If you saddle a tech boom on top of that … does that actually even pinch our middle and lower class and our housing crisis even further?” Russell said.

There’s also the existential question of sea level rise and who pays for protection. The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed a $6 billion sea wall across 6 miles of downtown and Brickell, a plan that locals are concerned will hurt property values because of its ugliness.

The catastrophic collapse of the Surfside condo tower, just north of the city of Miami Beach, raised concerns about the region’s aging buildings and could dampen more in-migration. And Florida’s coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are at record highs.

Still, both new and old Miami groups are trying to bolster tech. In February, the Knight Foundation, the Miami powerhouse philanthropic nonprofit, committed $15.3 million in grants to promote tech and science at local universities. It’s invested in tech groups for a decade, including the Lab Miami, a co-working space. Miami Connected is an effort to bring internet to 100,000 households in the county. This month, hundreds came to attend the first Miami Hack Week, whose goal is to recruit 5,000 engineers to Miami.

Mayor Suarez wasn’t available after repeated requests for comment, but he has said that a tech boom would lift up all residents, keeping natives working in Miami instead of fleeing to other cities, while bolstering tax revenue for public works.

The mayor, who is a moderate Republican, has far less power than many other big city leaders, with no vote on legislation, no control over the budget and no city staff oversight — the domain of the city manager. The Miami-Dade County mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, oversees a bigger region that has six times the population of the city of Miami. (In 2018, voters rejected a Suarez-backed ballot measure that would have bolstered his power.) Suarez also works as a real estate attorney and private equity investor.

What Suarez does have is a bully pulpit, and he’s become one of the biggest cheerleaders for any city during the pandemic’s economic dispersion.

Case in point: bitcoin.

In February, Suarez asked the City Commission to study paying employees in bitcoin and potentially investing in it, though that would be illegal under state and federal laws.

The city is looking into helping workers exchange their dollars into bitcoin, and the city is now exploring the creation of its own cryptocurrency called MiamiCoin, which could help fund public projects. In June, the city hosted the largest bitcoin conference to date, with 12,000 attendees. A follow-up conference is scheduled for April.

“He wanted to send a strong message to the world of tech that this is a place that is open-minded,” Russell said. “If this is the language you speak in terms of currency and investment, we want you to know that we’re learning that language as well.”

Suarez hails Miami as the new “capital of capital,” drawing both Wall Street south and the tech industry east. Some ex-Bay Area residents have joined his evangelism.

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Sizhao Yang, co-creator of the hit video game “Farmville” and now a venture capitalist, moved to Miami from San Francisco in the spring. He said his old home felt irrevocably broken.

“I’ve been in the Bay Area for 10 years, and you just don’t see California and the Bay Area improving. Nothing ever changes: no infrastructure, no public transportation, no housing,” he said.

He faults elected officials and entrenched policies. “There’s a lack of understanding of supply and demand with housing. And then because of that, they basically blamed tech for everything,” he said. “The Bay Area has now demonized capitalism.”

The pandemic has unshackled tech workers from having to be in the Bay Area, and Miami is ready to welcome them, Yang said.

Florida’s lack of state income tax means government budgets are highly dependent on property tax revenue going up, which means encouraging more housing construction. Yang calls it far more progressive than the “regressive, conservative” policies of the Bay Area.

“In five, 10 years, I think it’s going to be one of the top hubs,” Yang said. “A lot of professionals are now mobile.”

“I would say, without an exaggeration, 90% of my entrepreneur and investor network inside San Francisco have left the city” to places like Miami, Austin and Los Angeles, he said. “I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. I felt like I would be leaving my entire network. Instead, the network basically arrived here.”

And there was San Francisco crime, what Yang calls a “breaking point.” Yang said his car was broken into five times, friends had intruders in their apartments and laptops were snatched from cafes.

He feels “a lot safer” in Miami, although someone unsuccessfully tried to steal his car by masquerading as him at a valet pickup. He said it beats break-ins.

Homicides are up in Miami-Dade County, mirroring a nationwide trend, but burglaries and robberies fell in the first half of 2021 compared with last year, according to police data. Homicides also rose in the Bay Area’s biggest cities, while San Francisco has seen a spike in burglaries.

In May, Yang summed up the contrast on Twitter, citing San Francisco’s “overwhelming crime,” “pervasive drug use” and “syringes and feces on the ground.”

Two days later, he was tweeting about the Miami area’s “warm water with beaches, salads with picanha, roasted branzino with kimchi” and “optimism everywhere.” Yang said he’s been able to convince roughly one small startup a week to move to Miami.

In Miami, “everybody’s happy. The government isn’t fearing or penalizing success, and that’s unusual for people in tech,” Rabois, the Founders Fund venture capitalist, said at a recent Miami Herald panel, describing his flight from California as escaping an obsolete “Ancien Régime.”

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Some Californians moved to Miami to escape tech and were unpleasantly surprised.

Melanie Ensign, founder of the cybersecurity startup Discernible, was drawn to Miami for her ocean diving hobby. Last fall, she moved from San Francisco to split her time between Miami and Tulum, Mexico — renting in two cities is about the same as the nearly $3,000 she was paying in San Francisco.

She previously worked at Facebook and Uber, and being in the Bay Area was a definite career boost. But it always felt like a temporary phase for her.

“I don’t regret the time that I spent there. I think it really made my career, in a way, and I’ve met some amazing people,” she said. “I always knew that I wasn’t going to be there forever.”

“My social group in the Bay Area was so homogeneous. Everybody was in tech. We go out to dinner, and we inevitably end up talking about work, because that’s what we all have in common,” she said. “I need more balance in my life, I need more variety, and diversity of people and topics and activities.”

Little did she know, many tech workers would have the same idea.

“As somebody that’s coming from the Bay Area, I’m not thrilled about that. I see what tech did for San Francisco, and I don’t know that that’s necessarily good for Miami in terms of really catering to that specific industry,” she said. “I don’t want to go back into that cultish culture that I just came from. I didn’t move to Miami hoping that that would follow me. I was actively trying to get away from it.”

The expansion of venture capital firms is particularly concerning, she said. “I think the VCs are the most destructive force in tech,” she said. “It’s the VCs that empower and embolden the smaller startups who grow into Facebook and Google without any accountability or taking responsibility for the impact of what their business does to the community.”

She hopes to extend a better lifestyle to the people she hires, is setting limits on how much time her employees work, and is giving benefits, even to part-time contractors.

“I don’t want to work people into the ground. I come from that culture in the Bay Area,” she said. The pandemic “really changed my hiring strategy.”

Despite all the comparisons, Russell sees a Miami future that’s less about rivalry and more about self-determination.

“We have no grudge match with the West Coast at all. We’ve really lived in our own ecosystem here. We’ve been working on this for a long time,” Russell said. “We’ve never considered ourselves a head-to-head competitor. I think we’re very young in our phase right now of what’s possible, but we have the advantage of learning from what they’ve been through.”

“We’re still on the front end of the interest in hype,” Russell said. “I think the wave is yet to come. I think we’re just teetering on it.”

Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/Miami-wants-to-become-the-next-Silicon-Valley-It-16382946.php

Sierra Sotheby broker Demian Black advised his clients, buyers Michael and Rhea Wisherop, to postpone the transaction, even if they lost their deposit. The home could burn down, and he doubted whether loan or insurance companies would sign off. His own office was forced to evacuate.

But the Wisherops were undeterred, and on Friday, the property sold for $684,500, $35,500 above its initial asking price. The fire shifted course, sparing the new purchase.

The Caldor Fire has spread to nearly 213,000 acres and upended the Lake Tahoe region’s idyllic status as a blue-skied pandemic escape, choking the area with smoke and displacing tens of thousands of residents. But real estate experts say the area’s booming housing market is resilient.

“I definitely anticipate a little bit of hesitation” after the wildfire, Black said. But “people have been coming to Tahoe for a long time.”

South Lake Tahoe’s median home price leaped 50% to $737,000 in the second quarter compared with to the prior year, according to Sierra Sotheby’s. Truckee, which saw an unprecedented increase in San Francisco transplants, gained 63% for a median price of $1.2 million.

“It was probably one of the greatest real estate markets up here that we’d ever seen,” said Camille Duvall, vice president of North Tahoe and Truckee at Sierra Sotheby’s. “When they can work from anywhere, they spend time here.”

Money is still flowing in, despite the nearby danger. Breck Overall, a Sierra Sotheby’s broker, had a $4.5 million sale close this week near Donner Lake and Truckee. The northern side of Lake Tahoe, where he works, is farther from the fire and air quality has been better.

“I’m not seeing a big shift, with people saying, ‘We’re not interested,’” he said. “I don’t really see that demand diminishing right now.”

The threat of the virus and more restrictions in the Bay Area will continue to push people to come to Lake Tahoe, he said.

Most of Overall’s clients are also fortunate enough to have the flexibility of easily relocating when the smoke thickens. In 2020, his team worked with 102 families, and all were purchasing second homes in Lake Tahoe.

“I haven’t had any of them call me and say, we want out,” he said. In his 18-year career, only five buyers planned to get rid of their other homes.

There’s been some push-back on the soaring prices, so Overall expects the rate of growth to lessen, but he’s doubtful prices will fall any time soon. Sellers are motivated to make a profit and few are under financial distress, he said.

There’s more uncertainty for renters.

Tristan Biles and his girlfriend moved from San Francisco to South Lake Tahoe during the pandemic last fall, excited for regular skiing trips and access to the outdoors.

Buying was too costly, but they were able to rent a condo next to the Heavenly Mountain Resort. “I never thought it’d be viable,” he said. “We saw an opportunity and jumped on it.”

What he didn’t expect: having to flee to Palm Springs last week.

He plans to return soon, and remains committed to Tahoe, and isn’t sure what it would take for him to leave. He would consider a place that offered the same amenities and fewer risks, but hasn’t found it.

“I think a lot of people don’t know what to think. You see it on the news, it’s really bad. Until you see it for yourself, you’re not sure what to make of it all,” he said. “I’ve been fixated on Tahoe for such a long time.”

Other parts of Northern California have seen more destructive wildfires. Yet housing demand has only intensified during the pandemic.

“Napa, Sonoma and Santa Cruz counties have obviously experienced terrible fires over the past four years, but their markets have always rebounded very, very strongly and quite quickly following the fires, and their median home prices are much higher than they’ve ever been,” said Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst at real estate brokerage Paragon. “Buyers still want to live in these beautiful places. If history is any guide, Lake Tahoe will also rebound from the current crisis.”

Still, the fires present challenges. The Wisherops, who live in the East Bay, had wanted to buy in Tahoe for a long time after visiting frequently. The first obstacle to buying their home in South Lake Tahoe was last month’s Tamarack Fire, which jeopardized the insurance. But as firefighters contained the fire, the buyers were able to secure their insurance before the Caldor Fire became a threat.

“It never did impact the loan, or else we’d be out of deal,” said Michael Wisherop. “The firefighters did a great job.”

Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/california-wildfires/article/The-state-of-Tahoe-real-estate-As-the-Caldor-16434606.php