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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KRON) — The price of a home in the San Francisco Bay Area continues to rise.

A recent study says that in Contra Costa County alone, home prices were up nearly 20% in the past year.

Realtors say homes in the Bay Area are going fast and for a high ticket price, due to low interest rates, a lack of inventory and intense demand.

“We’ve hit a new foundation here in terms of pricing and inventory in the Bay Area. We are not building enough houses. We are not building enough apartments, which helps the rental market, which affects the sales market, so we are kind of at a new plateau. I don’t see the prices coming down much in the near future,” said real estate broker Mark Ross.

Based off of a simple Zillow search, there are about three dozen single-family homes for sale in Walnut Creek right now.

All but one of them is at or above $1 million.

“A turn-key home like this we expect will go within 5 to 10 days,” Ross said of the one home below $1 million.

The house in the video sits on a quiet street. It has a kitchen, a living room, three bedrooms and two bathrooms.

“It’s not a mansion, but it’s what a basic family would need. We’ve put in a lawn, we’ve put in some significant upgrades, and it’ll do for most families,” Ross said.

According to a CoreLogic study, homes in Contra Costa County rose 19.4% in the past year from $632,500 to $755,000.

Home prices went up 25.2% in Walnut Creek alone.

So how do you even purchase a home in the Bay Area right now when houses are selling so fast?

“Do your homework. Be ready. Be very aggressive when it comes to searching, willing to drop what you are doing,” Ross said. “Go out and look at the home. Look at the neighborhood. Contact your professional if you are using one. Be ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

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Article source: https://fox40.com/news/california-connection/why-san-francisco-bay-area-homes-are-selling-so-quickly-for-so-much-money/

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The listing offers a 50,000-square-foot lot for $75,000. Here’s the catch. It is offshore and underwater in San Francisco Bay, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“Own a piece of San Francisco,” says the official real estate listing for 250 Fitzgerald Ave.

The property was purchased six years ago by Daly City real estate agent Trent Zhu, KGO reported. The 1.1-acre lot is located three city blocks east of Candlestick Park, the television station reported.

Zhu said he bought the land from San Francisco County at a foreclosure auction for less than $5,000, KGO reported. He has never visited the property, the television station reported.

The real estate agent’s listing is not deceptive.

“Land is underwater. Zoning is RH1D per public record,” the listing reads. “Street #250 is not an official assigned address.”

The RH1D zoning means a single-family dwelling can technically be built on the property, SFGate reported.

The street address is fictitious, Zhu explained, since there is no network of underwater streets in the area — and certainly no place to put a mailbox, the Chronicle reported.

So far, Zhu has no takers for the property, KGO reported. But he likes the idea and admitted he has bought some other underwater parcels.

Zhu admitted he had no real plans for the land. He believes it could have some value since major development is planned at the former home of Candlestick Park, the Chronicle reported.

“It was more of a fun thing to buy a piece of land underwater,” Zhu told the newspaper.

However, Zhu’s listing has a final caveat for would-be buyers.

“Seller is not sure if this land can be developed into a pier or anything at all,” the listing reads.

Cox Media Group

Article source: https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/land-is-underwater-odd-san-francisco-real-estate-lot-market-75k/YGTN6PT2PRAJHLD5CWGEGOTOKE/

ATHERTON, Calif. (KRON) — It’s a great time to be a seller if you own a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially near Silicon Valley where all-cash offers are flowing faster than they ever have before. 

Multi-million dollar mansions are selling for way over the asking price because of intense bidding wars. The Bay Area housing market took a big hit when the COVID pandemic began.

But since then it has not only rebounded, houses are selling for unprecedented price tags to buyers working in the tech industry who emerged from the pandemic’s upheaval relatively unscathed.

Nowhere is the housing market surge more apparent than in Atherton, which was recently ranked by Forbes as the most exclusive community in which to live.

According to data compiled by Compass, Atherton’s median home sales price is $6 million. That’s the highest in the Bay Area, topping San Francisco’s high-rolling Pacific Heights, where the median is $5.6 million, and Hillsborough’s $4.6 million. 

This week, one gated Atherton house at 191 Britton Avenue is on the market for $32 million, according to Zillow. Why is Atherton the king of the castle? 

“You’ve got big homes on big lots, which is unusual. You’re right in between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. And who doesn’t want to say they live in Atherton?” said Michelle Runzler, an agent for David Lyng Real Estate. 

“To be a seller, it’s a fantastic time … better than it’s ever been. There no inventory. It’s May, high peak season. And we (still) don’t have the inventory for buyers. If you want to sell your home you will get top dollars, most likely with no contingencies, and a lot of people are getting all cash. It’s unbelievable. No one has seen anything like this,” Runzler said.

In Los Altos, one David Lyng Real Estate agent listed a house for $2.4 million.

It sold within days for $3.2 million.

In Walnut Creek, a seller asking for $950,000 was flooded with so many offers that she received $1.6 million from the top bidder. 

“For a lot of people who work in tech, their jobs were affected by the pandemic — they worked from home. But financially, they’re still doing OK. Their stock has risen so they actually have cash to spend,” Runzler said. 

Article source: https://www.kron4.com/news/real-estate/bidding-wars-why-multi-million-dollar-bay-area-mansions-are-selling-over-asking-price/

Meanwhile, interest rates for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages dropped to a record low 2.6 percent from as high as 6.5 percent in 2006 and 2007, Wei said.

“We have never seen that before,” Wei said. “So that’s why people were rushing into the market.”

Low interest rates often drive housing market shifts, according to Investopedia.

The real estate group published a report Monday finding that home sales soared as expected in March and April compared to last year, when the pandemic shutdown in the spring triggered a drop in housing sales, according to the association. So far this year, monthly home sales increased for three consecutive months.

Prices increased all over California.

• The median price of an existing single-family detached home in the Los Angeles area rose to $725,000 in April, an increase of $45,000 from a month earlier. The L.A. area’s median home price was $550,000 just a year ago.
• The San Francisco Bay Area saw its median home price jump to a staggering $1.328 million in April from $1.225 million in March.
• Orange County saw its median home price increase to $1.1 million in April from $1.025 million in March. It was $861,000 in April 2020.

San Bernardino County bucked the trend by showing a decrease in median home price to $405,000 in April from $412,000 in March.

Statewide, April home sales increased 2.6 percent in April to 458,170 from 446,410 in March, the association said. That was a 65.1 percent increase over the 277,440 homes sold a year earlier on an annualized basis.

The metrics are bad news for low-income Californians and even for middle-class residents who are looking to buy a home.

“Not only do skyrocketing home prices threaten already-low homeownership levels and make it harder for those who don’t already have a home to purchase one, it also brings to question the sustainability of this market cycle,” said Jordan Levine, the association’s vice president and chief economist.

Statewide housing affordability reached its lowest level since mid-2018, the association reported last week. The percentage of home buyers who can afford to purchase a median-priced existing single-family home in California in the first quarter of 2021 dropped to 27 percent from 35 percent in the first quarter of 2020, the association said.

Wei predicted that home pricing could remain high for the rest of 2021 because of a shortage of housing. And the state likely won’t see a big enough jump in housing development to fill the gap, Wei said.

As the economy reopens, lower-priced housing may start to come back onto the housing market, Wei said. But interest rates may also go up.

“At some point, interest rates are going to start rising, especially since the economy is going to start picking up,” he said. “The pace of growth is going to probably be a little slower in May or Juen.”

The California Association of Realtors has more than 200,000 members and is headquartered in Los Angeles. Read its full report here.

City News Service contributed to this report.

Article source: https://patch.com/california/san-francisco/housing-prices-surge-across-san-francisco

“It makes us want to just stop,” said Rhuberg, 43, whose family of six is currently paying around $6,000 a month for a five-bedroom rental home in Corte Madera. “If I had known this was going to be such a big deal, maybe I would have thought twice about having so many kids.”

The Rhubergs are far from the only would-be home buyers feeling defeated by the region’s record-breaking real estate market.

In the nine-county Bay Area, the median home price soared to an all-time high of $1.3 million in April — and helped propel the state’s median price above $800,000 for the first time ever. That’s according to new data from the California Association of Realtors, which found that home prices where the family lives in Marin County shot up 18% this spring compared to last, to a median $1.6 million.

Among the Bay Area counties that saw sale prices jump the most between this April and last: Contra Costa, up 39% to a median $990,000; Napa, up 27% to $950,000; Alameda, up 26% to $1.3 million; and San Mateo, up 22% to $2 million. In San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, where prices have long been among the highest in the nation, they climbed 6% and 19%, respectively, to a median $1.8 and $1.7 million.

Now, even those selling the houses wonder how long prices can keep climbing at the current pace.

More all-cash offers are rolling in for scarce inventory, supercharging bidding wars that shut out less-affluent and more diverse qualified applicants. Buyers fatigue is setting in for would-be first-time buyers like Rhuberg, whose family has paused their search rather than looking farther north or inland for lower prices.

“If we are going to start over in a new community with new schools, we are more likely to do that back east, in Chicago, where my wife’s family is,” he said.

While anxiety about people leaving for the Midwest, Austin or Miami has so far proven overblown, those on the front lines of the region’s hectic housing market say the pressure has been building for years.

“We’ve actually had more people move here from the East Coast than any other year,” said Haneen Hayder, a Realtor who specializes in the affluent Peninsula region home to tech giants like Facebook and Oracle.

Hayder, who leads the Haneen Hayder Associates team at real estate brokerage Compass, is mostly working with first-time buyers between the ages of 35 and 50. Many cash in stocks or borrow from their families to up their down payments, she said, or offer well over the asking price for houses with more square footage, outdoor space and separate offices.

Condos close to downtowns are also gaining currency, Hayder said. Take a $2.4 million downtown San Mateo penthouse that she just sold after it sat on the market for a year in pandemic limbo.

“We just closed escrow last week,” Hayder said. “Four all-cash offers.”

Statewide, single-family home prices jumped to a median $813,980 in April, compared to $606,410 when pandemic lockdowns were in effect last April. Condo and town home prices are up 127%, to a median $570,000 statewide, in what is likely a sign of overflow from the cutthroat market for houses, said Jordan Levine, vice president and chief economist of the California Association of Realtors.

“You want to get your foot on the property ladder,” Levine said. “You take what’s available.”

More striking to him is the shifting geography of demand. First it was a feared exodus from Bay Area cities fueling bidding wars in wine country, Lake Tahoe and along the coast. Then it was a home-buying boom in Oakland and surrounding suburbs. In recent months, prices have again soared in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

As of April, outlying areas like San Benito and Mariposa counties are still way up compared to a year ago, but home prices dipped slightly there as cities began to reopen.

The state also set a record last month for the shortest median number of days a home is on the market before it goes into contract: seven. It’s a testament, Levine said, to the “imbalance” between housing supply and demand across California — a dynamic that Bay Area housing advocates are seizing to push governments to build more homes, and which is spilling over into local battles over how to handle homeless encampments.

To David Oliphant, the founder of Half Moon Bay’s Ocean Blue Real Estate, parts of the past year have felt strangely familiar. Just as he saw prices skyrocket in the ski town of Truckee during the dot-com boom, Oliphant has watched demand for coastal Bay Area real estate explode during the pandemic.

Initially, the frenzy was concentrated in Half Moon Bay, near the highway over the hill to Silicon Valley. He’s now seeing an influx in surrounding areas like Moss Beach and El Granada. Some longtime locals have cashed out and moved up the coast to Oregon or into the Sierra. Many aspiring first-time buyers have been shut out.

“I actually don’t love the market the way it is,” Oliphant said.

Lauren Hepler is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hepler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LAHepler