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Among the counties in the region 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 Santa Clara, up 19% to $1.7 million.

Despite the overblown panic about people leaving for Austin, Miami or elsewhere, those on the front lines of the region’s frenzied housing market say the pressure has been building for months.

“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.

As hot home markets in California shift during pandemic lockdowns and reopenings, even those selling the houses wonder how long prices can keep climbing at the current pace.

Some warn of “buyer fatigue” and bidding wars that shut out less affluent and more diverse qualified applicants. While brokers plan their first open houses in more than a year, Bay Area housing advocates are seizing the moment to push governments to build more homes, often running into staunch resistance.

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, or offer well over the asking price for houses with more square footage, outdoor space and separate offices.

International buyers have also jumped back into the market in recent weeks, Hayder said. Of late, condos close to downtowns have gained currency. 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 townhome 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. Outlying areas like San Benito and Mariposa counties are still way up compared to a year ago, but prices dipped slightly there this spring as cities like San Francisco reopened and made big gains.

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.

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.

First, it 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

The spring home-buying season has kicked off after a year of surprise twists and turns for the real estate market. After a sharp drop-off in interest at the start of the pandemic, Americans newly attuned to work-from-home comforts returned their attention to home-buying with vigor. 

Soon they began snapping up property, sending prices higher in every major metropolitan area in the nation tracked by the National Association of Realtors. At the end of 2020, home prices were about 15% higher than a year earlier, before the pandemic shuttered the U.S. economy, according to NAR data. 

And in about 88% of metropolitan regions, home prices experienced double-digit price growth.

Against that backdrop, some cities are witnessing outsized demand from homebuyers, as area prices are being driven up far beyond the national average. 

The hottest housing markets, where bidding is the most competitive, share a few traits, according to economists and experts. 

First, their housing stock tends to be more affordable than in large cities such as New York and San Francisco. Bigger homes for less money are attracting workers from large coastal cities who can do their jobs remotely and opting to relocate. Second, many of these smaller cities offer lifestyle benefits, such as warm weather or a lively cultural scene.  

Take Austin, Texas, where the median listing price for homes jumped almost 26% from February 2020 — right before the pandemic — to February 2021, according to an analysis from Zillow. The city is experiencing strong population growth as major employers such as Apple and Tesla are building offices and facilities there and hiring thousands of workers in the area. 

In fact, about 150 people are moving to Austin each day, according to local realtor Justin Sheppard, the co-founder and broker at The Agency Texas.

“A lot of people are moving here for jobs,” Sheppard said. “And then, with being able to work from home, there are a ton of people that move here because of that as well.”

Among them are David and Helen Fain, who are in the midst of relocating to Austin from San Francisco. They said they were given approval by their employers to work remotely, freeing them up to move to a less expensive region than the Bay Area.

The couple, who are expecting their first child in a few weeks, are both originally from Texas and wanted to be closer to family. Austin’s lifestyle was also a draw, the couple told CBS MoneyWatch. 

“There’s an energy that’s going on in Austin,” Helen Fain said. “I think there always has been. We both are from Texas, so Austin has always been just one of those really cool, quirky places.”

What’s hot in 2021?

Austin is projected to hold onto its ranking as one of the nation’s hottest markets in 2021, according to a Zillow forecast based on interviews with realtors and other industry experts. More than 8-in-10 experts surveyed by Zillow expect Austin to outperform the national average in home value growth, the study found.

Denver; Phoenix; Nashville, Tennessee; and Tampa, Florida, are also likely to outperform this year, although a smaller share of experts identified those places as potential hot markets for 2021, the real-estate services company said. 

“They sit at the intersection of two trends: one is affordable housing, and number two is their Sun Belt locations,” said Chris Glynn, principal economist with Zillow. “They have nine to 12 months a year of sunny weather and outdoor weather.”

To be sure, not all of the cities that enjoyed the strongest growth during the pandemic are located in the Sun Belt region. Provo, Utah, demonstrated the strongest growth during the pandemic, with home listing prices rising by one-third, Zillow data found. Boise, Idaho, and Rochester, New York, were also among the hottest markets during the past year. 

Boise is attracting buyers who are relocating from Seattle, San Francisco and other pricey markets, Glynn said. Its median listing price stood at about $467,000 at the end of February — a 23% jump from a year earlier, but still a far cry from the median listing price of roughly $984,000 for San Francisco homes. 

Millennial buyers are also driving the increase in home prices, with recent record-low interest rates attracting first-time buyers into the market, economists noted. Markets with lower home prices compared with New York or San Francisco are appealing to these buyers. One such place is Pittsburgh, where the median list price was about $226,333 in February.

Seller’s market

All that buyer demand has created a seller’s market — yet sellers have been slow to put their homes on the market, noted Redfin economist Daryl Fairweather. 

“People are more eager to buy a home with more space and that just supercharged the housing market,” Fairweather said. “At the same time, though, home sellers have still been reluctant to sell — especially during a pandemic. If you’re not really eager to move, you are gonna stay put, because why risk moving when there’s a virus out there?”

With low inventory across much of the nation, buyers are making concessions to convince sellers to accept their offers. 

“It used to be, before the pandemic, that was only in places like the Bay area, or Seattle, where buyers were going above and beyond,” Fairweather noted. “But now that is so much more widespread. I was just talking to an agent in Atlanta who was telling me that buyers are even offering just, like, bribes — essentially, cash to sellers.”

To secure deals in hot markets, some buyers are offering free leasebacks, essentially allowing the seller to live in the house for free for a short period after the closing. That’s something the Fains agreed to in their purchase contract in Austin. 

The Fains said they have advice for people who are searching for a home in a hot market: Find a great real estate agent who can guide you through the process. Also, be prepared for emotional ups and downs. Helen Fain recounted losing out on an offer after there were 40 other bids on the property. 

“It was hard to kind of accept that,” Helen Fain noted. “What we just had to tell ourselves, and what our realtor assured us, is there will be something else that will be out there.”

Article source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/housing-market-hot-why/

However, Sammons said, activity is picking up. Tenant demand is at the highest since before the pandemic began, indicating that more companies are shopping for space. Sammons said that a direct lease, through a landlord, of 200,000 square feet is about to be announced, which will be the largest since the pre-Covid days.

“Some had pulled out and put on pause any sort of expansions, and we’re starting to see them reenter the market,” Sammons said.

There’s also been recent movement in subleases. Design software company Figma just took over 100,000 square feet of downtown space from Credit Karma, which moved its headquarters to Oakland.

And Dropbox has been finding takers for large chunks of its vacant space.

BridgeBio, a drug developer, recently took close to 53,000 square feet from Dropbox, and Vir Biotechnology, another life sciences company, agreed late last year to sublease about 134,000 square feet of the complex.

Vir’s price per square foot starts at $47.77 this year and rises 3% annually to $68.11 in 2032, according to the lease agreement. When Dropbox signed its original 15-year lease in 2017, the company agreed to pay $62 per square foot in year one, which climbed to $93.78 in the final year. In leasing 736,000 square feet at that price, Dropbox was then reportedly signing the largest office deal ever in San Francisco.

While Dropbox may have to rely on discounts and other perks to lure potential tenants, the company is in a unique position to attract biotech firms. Its complex is in an area called Mission Bay that’s filled with medical centers and is zoned for life sciences companies.

Demand for space is so high in the booming biotech industry that earlier this year private equity firm KKR purchased the property for about $1.1 billion, with Dropbox still responsible for the remainder of its lease.

“Life sciences companies are now looking at the city because they see this opportunity,” Sammons said. The Dropbox building “has the floor plates and the floor plans, and everything is built and ready for life sciences companies.”

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/14/san-francisco-tech-companies-sitting-on-record-amounts-of-empty-space.html

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

The listing goes on to explain that the land is underwater and the street address is fictitious, since there’s no network of underwater streets in the area, and no place to put a mailbox.

The property is officially in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, sitting about three blocks off of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area. It’s not clear how far down the land is, which would vary depending on the tide.

Trent Zhu, the Daly City realtor selling the land, is also its owner. He says he’s never donned snorkeling or diving gear to take a look at his property, nor even paddled out to peer down from a boat.

He bought the 50,000-square foot lot for $5,000, along with some adjoining parcels during a foreclosure auction about five years ago. He had no real plans for the land, he said, though he figured it might have some value, since major development is planned at the former home of Candlestick Park.

“It was more of a fun thing to buy a piece of land underwater,” he said.

A few years, he said, his firm sold an underwater piece of land in South San Francisco to a biotech firm. It’s still undeveloped.

So what would someone do with a piece of land in the bay? A pier might be a possibility, said Zhu, who said he owns other underwater land, including some smaller parcels, in the area.

“San Francisco has more than 40 piers along the waterfront,” he said. “But there is nothing in this corner on the southeast side of the city.”

The land is zoned to allow a single dwelling unit on the lot, though it could also be used for a residential care facility, a child care center, open space for horticulture or recreation or a public structure, according to city zoning regulations. With city approval, it could also be used for a hospital, a school, a nursery or a public building.

While the listing has only been posted for a few days, at handful of people have inquired about the submerged property, Zhu said.

One man thought he might buy it to anchor his two houseboats instead of continuing to pay rent in Marin. Another wondered if they could build a slightly offshore restaurant. And others have suggested that it could be the site for a future ferry landing.

Zhu refers all of those questions to the city.

“I have no idea, really,” he admitted.

His listing ends with a similar admission: “Seller is not sure if this land can be developed into a pier or anything at all.”

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan