homesmillbrae.com

Last week, a Chronicle analysis looked at another region in-state that has become popular for Bay Area residents looking to move out and buy elsewhere: Sacramento. In our look at homes under $1 million in San Francisco and Sacramento, a theme emerged: not a lot of inventory, lots of interested buyers and a highly competitive market.

In Seattle, real estate angents say they see a similar trend, though perhaps not as extreme. With droves of people moving into the Emerald City and a reduced inventory as homeowners in the region stay put, homes are flying off the shelves. Zillow data shows January home prices were up 13% from the previous year, and inventory down 25.5%.

Here are two homes, one in San Francisco and one in Seattle, with similar prices. Both have been popular listings, and their differences demonstrate why Seattle might look so appealing to those Californians looking to move on.

A quirky Victorian with a huge lot — but on a busy street

908 Potrero Ave.

List price: $1,187,500

Size: 2,192 square feet

Price per square foot: $542

Amenities: Spacious yard, legal one-bedroom in-law with solid tenant, triple parlor

Just steps away from the bustling 24th Street corridor, this Potrero/Mission home is a quirky Victorian single-family home with many historical details still intact: pocket doors, 10-foot ceilings, and a triple parlor on top of its three full bedrooms.

At the $1.2 million price point, it’s “affordable” for San Francisco, said Vanguard Properties listing agent Kilby Stenkamp, and the owner spent a lot of money to revamp the home.

“We actually at one point were going to do an e-blast to East Bay buyers priced out of the San Francisco market, saying ‘This home is for you,’” Stenkamp said.

But the home, built in 1907, has also been priced with a few things in mind. For one, the home is on a busy street, Potrero Avenue. It’s across the street from San Francisco General Hospital, which means the street can get noisy. And although the house is a single-family home — which are not common at this price point — it doesn’t have a garage. Another detail is important: it comes with a legal one-bedroom “in-law” unit that is occupied with a tenant paying $1,800 a month.

Stenkamp said that while the presence of a tenant and opportunity for rental income was attractive to some buyers, it was a deal breaker for some who wanted a property delivered vacant. But they’ve already had quite a few viewings and have received two offers.

Most other properties at the $1.2 million price point are getting bid up over the asking price, said Stenkamp. Even though there is significantly more inventory at this price point than under $1 million, the competition in San Francisco is still steep, especially for a house with as much space as this one.

But there’s San Francisco space … and then there’s Seattle space.

Five-bedroom Craftsman called the Castle, with skylights galore

2740 38th Ave. S.W.

List price: $1,095,000

Size: 3,510 square feet

Price per square foot: $312

Amenities: Driveway parking, detached garage, unfinished basement, yard

This house — on a quiet street in West Seattle — was originally priced higher. Homesmart listing agent Monica Tracey said she lowered the list price to $1.095 million to get it under the $1.1 million mark, which led to a “flurry of activity,” adding that she got an offer the same day she made the price reduction.

The five-bedroom, two-bathroom Craftsman is a bit of a famous one in the neighborhood, nicknamed “The Castle” for its noticeable exterior stonework in the front. It’s older by Seattle standards, having been built in 1911, which gives it an original feel.

Many of its details — like the molding, lighting, and doorknobs — are part of its traditional charm, she said. The house is also on a very quiet street, and the neighborhood is known for good schools and a community feel.

“This particular street has second and third generations living on it,” said Tracey. “Sometimes the grandkids will come and buy the house back.”

Though the home would need some work, its upside is that it has a lot of space, complete with a large yard, an unfinished basement space and even a recreational room that has two basketball hoops.

And much of the house has been redone. That includes the kitchen, which was made into an open “hosting” space, and one of the bathrooms, where a hall closet was refitted, quite creatively, into a unique shower.

“You could probably find a smaller house (at the same price point) … that’s fully updated with a view,” said Tracey. “But the interest in this house is that big unfinished basement, which adds another thousand square footage of potential.”

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

By Howard Schneider

4 Min Read

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Long one of the nation’s “it” destinations, San Francisco was already a land of unaffordable housing before the coronavirus hit, and with the median single-family home price still hovering above $1.5 million even as of December thousands of residents are leaving the Golden Gate city.

Data from high-tech sources like cellphone location trackers to old-school change-of-address forms have started to put some scale around the reversal of fortune the City by the Bay now faces, with anywhere from 1.5% to perhaps 3% of its population exiting for surrounding counties or other states over the past year. Housing prices are beginning to follow suit.

“The Bay Area is hurting,” cellphone data firm Unacast here said in an analysis concluding that about 46,000 people had left the Bay Area’s 10 counties, with more than 13,000 leaving San Francisco itself. “The exodus from both city centers and Silicon Valley is very real,” and may have resulted in a blow to local incomes of around $12 billion.

In a separate analysis, Oxford here Economics, citing U.S. Postal Service change of address information, said the decline in the city’s population may have topped 27,000, the fourth highest in the nation and part of a broader population reshuffle from major cities during the pandemic.

That has been feeding through to higher home sales in places like Texas and North Carolina, where people have been moving.

In San Francisco it meant a nearly 7% drop in the median home price from November to December, a 23% decline in rents over the year, and a 15-year high in available condominiums, according to data posted online by Norada here Real Estate Investments.

The pandemic has triggered a number of changes in housing, work and migration patterns – from major cities to the suburbs, from dense office buildings to working from home – and the persistence of those trends are likely to shape what the economy looks like after the health crisis subsides, according to economists and policymakers.

The Unacast data, for example, is based on vast amounts of information gleaned from cellphones, and in particular to changes in a phone’s overnight location. The firm has noted similar population declines in New York and Houston – the nation’s first and fourth most populous cities.

While those new patterns may reverse, many analysts feel they are likely to endure to some degree – and the adjustment may not be smooth.

Kansas City Federal Reserve bank President Esther George on Tuesday said she saw a “worrying scenario” if jobs, population, and work locations reshuffle to such a degree that homeowners cannot pay mortgages and businesses can’t afford leases.

“Any significant change in the location of economic activity, regardless of its specific form, has the potential to significantly affect the valuations of residential and commercial real estate,” George said, with implications, for example, to the stability of financial institutions.

Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Dan Burns and Bill Berkrot

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Article source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-cities-idUSKBN2AH1O8

But the postal service report doesn’t support the conventional narrative that the bulk of those leaving the city are decamping for cheaper, more business-friendly states like Texas and Florida. Instead, the majority of those escaping the city during the pandemic relocated to other Bay Area counties. The top six destinations were all Bay Area counties: Alameda, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and Sonoma.

Rounding out the top 10 were Los Angeles, San Diego, Napa and Riverside.

The only out-of-state destinations among the top 20 were Travis County in Texas, home of Austin, where 239 households relocated, Denver County (238 households) and Multnomah County (Portland, 175 households). In contrast, 8,131 households relocated to Alameda County and 6,637 households went to San Mateo County. Just 71 households moved to New York City and 78 to Washington, D.C., according to the postal service.

In total, the postal service received 138,717 change-of-address requests from San Francisco households between March and November, of which 57,915 — about 41% — were moves within the city.

San Francisco’s chief economist, Ted Egan, said that while the out-migration patterns are alarming — only Manhattan has had as large an increase in people leaving the city during the pandemic — the fact that many are not going very far could represent “a silver lining” as the economy recovers post-pandemic.

“You are not going to have to worry about getting them to move back from Boise,” he said. “It looks more like normal pre-COVID migration flows. People are settling into nearby Bay Area suburbs. They are going to Sacramento and L.A. Travis County, which is Austin, Texas, is way down the list. Portland is way down the list. New York is way down the list.”

Many San Francisco residents are also taking advantage of lower rents to relocate within the city, Egan said. Nearly 20,000 more San Franciscan households moved within the city during the March-November period of 2020 (58,346) than did so in the same period in 2019 (38,484).

The pattern suggests that San Francisco rent prices could continue to fall as rental and home prices rise in the suburbs. Even if the city’s apartment occupancy goes up, San Francisco could be less dense, as more people can afford to live alone or with one roommate rather than doubling or tripling up.

“It is as if everybody is saying, ‘Forget that overpriced place, I’m going to move across the street and save a grand a month,’” Egan said.

For Piper LaGrelius, a mother of four and an arts specialist in the Palo Alto school district, it was the San Francisco Unified School District’s lack of focus on reopening schools that drove a recent decision to relocate from Noe Valley to Lafayette in the East Bay. San Francisco public schools have been closed since last March and a final reopening plan has not been announced. The family has a fifth-grader, a second-grader and twins in preschool.

“There are a lot of reasons to go but the driver is we wanted to be in a community that is centered around families and schools,” she said. “(In Lafayette) the conversations at the school board are all about how do we get creative and open the schools as fast as possible. That has not been the priority at the San Francisco school board.”

LaGrelius is sad because she loved living in the city, but it seemed like the right move. “COVID has forced a lot of people to reevaluate. It’s not just about the pandemic. It’s given us time and space to evaluate our priorities and figure out what we need to be successful as a family.”

But while many city residents left for the outer Bay Area counties, the region also lost population during the pandemic, according to the postal service data. In March to November of 2019, nearly 61,000 more change of address requests were made out of the nine counties than into them. In the same period in 2020, 111,350 more requests were made out of the nine counties than into them.

Enrico Moretti, an economist at UC Berkeley, said the out-migration is being driven by a combination of the high cost of living and perceived quality-of-life challenges.

“There are cities that compete on price and cities that compete on quality,” he said. “When you look at the Bay Area, it doesn’t compete on price, and when you look at the quality of our public schools and how we manage public spaces — homelessness and crime — it’s not on par with what people pay to live here.”

After a few months of subletting, Cindy Huynh and a roommate left their Polk Street apartment and put their stuff in storage. Huynh, a public relations specialist working remotely, has been living with her mom in Battle Creek, Mich., since the middle of last year. She and her roommate had been paying $3,400 a month.

“That was way more than I was willing to pay for a room I wasn’t coming back to at night,” Huynh said.

She has enjoyed saving money and her mom’s homemade pho, but still plans to return to the city. She misses the restaurants, her friends, and the California sunshine. And she envisions one day returning, even though her employer has indicated remote work will continue into 2022.

“I’m still pretty bullish about moving back to San Francisco,” she said.

Chronicle staff writer Susie Neilson contributed to this report.

J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com

Philip Watson

“We are excited and proud to announce our partnership with Sereno and look forward to our continued relationship with our clients.” Phillip Watson

LOS GATOS, Calif. (PRWEB)
March 01, 2021

Sereno is pleased to announce that The Watson Marshall Group, led by Philip Watson and Stephan Marshall, has joined forces with the company. The Watson Marshall Group includes 15 agents who will work from a newly renovated space in downtown Burlingame.

This expansion reflects Sereno’s commitment to preserving the spirit of the independent brokerage to better serve agents, clients, and communities. This latest move follows the firm’s advancement into the East Bay area through its acquisition of J. Rockcliff Realtors (now branded as Sereno,) the Lake Tahoe region with the Granger Group, and the Sierra Foothills with the Margaretich Group. Sereno is now Northern California’s largest, locally owned and operated independently branded residential real estate company.

“The spirit of independence is alive and well in the hearts and minds of leading agents. We believe there is no stopping the move away from larger, impersonal organizations to powerful independents,” expressed Chris Trapani, Co-founder and CEO of Sereno.

With over 40 years of combined experience in the San Francisco Bay Area real estate market, The Watson Marshall Group has over one billion dollars in combined sales and consistently ranks in the top 100 in California sales. The company is known for its hands-on client services, outside-the-box marketing strategies, and dedication to the communities it serves.

“As a local business themselves, Sereno understands and respects the importance of serving locally as well. From their charitable foundation to their highly respected group of agents, Sereno is and will continue to be immersed in the fabric of our neighborhoods and communities for years to come,” said Phillip Watson.

“Client satisfaction is our ultimate goal and transparency our top priority. We make certain that each and every client is thoroughly informed throughout every stage of their transaction. Sereno has proven to provide this same individualized service to each of their clients and it feels natural that they should be home for WMG,” commented Stephan Marshall.

To learn more about The Watson Marshall Group, visit watsonmarshall.com

About Sereno

Founded in 2006, Sereno is the largest, locally owned and operated, independent real estate company in Northern California with 13 offices and 520 agents in Silicon Valley, the SF peninsula, Santa Cruz, the East Bay, Lake Tahoe, and Sierra Foothills producing nearly $5 Billion in annual sales volume. Sereno is ranked among the top 5 in the nation for both per agent productivity and highest average sales price. The company offers a highly curated support platform and provides agents with concierge services to strengthen client relationships, as well as world-class technology for well-executed transactions. Its agent-driven Sereno 1% For Good Charitable Foundation is changing lives in local communities, and to date, generated over $3.5 million in charitable donations given to 246 local organizations.

To learn more, visit serenogroup.com.

Article source: https://www.prweb.com/releases/top_ranked_compass_team_joins_sereno_san_francisco_bay_areas_largest_independent_brokerage/prweb17753893.htm

1. CRE lenders’ growing fear: Office workers won’t come back “More square footage is going unoccupied, delinquencies have started edging up, new loans are dwindling and borrowing costs are creeping higher, all signs that the business is growing riskier. Now, many banks are planning to pull back from financing office projects this year, executives said, and opinions vary on when, or even if, the office market will bounce back.” (American Banker)
2. CoStar Group Submits Revised Proposal to Acquire CoreLogic with Increased Value and Improved Certainty of Closing “Under the terms of the new proposal, CoreLogic shareholders would receive $6.00 per share in cash and 0.1019 shares of CoStar Group common stock in exchange for each share of CoreLogic common stock, representing a value of approximately $90 per share based on CoStar Group’s closing share price on February 26, 2021 and approximately $97 per share based on the latest 30-day volume-weighted average CoStar share price.” (Via press release)
3. Anyone Who’s Anyone Has a SPAC Right Now “The celebrities aren’t so much the financial decision makers but rather the promoters brought in to attract investors (‘strategic advisers,’ in prospectus parlance). Like marketers of soft drinks or sneakers, SPAC managers are tapping into the power of celebrity to sell a product — in this case, a financial instrument The New York Times has likened to an ‘empty shell.’” (The New York Times)
4. Fry’s Electronics collapse frees up prime Bay Area real estate “Tech campuses, housing, auto dealerships, research, manufacturing — almost anything other than big-box retail — are among the kinds of projects that have been proposed, could be feasible or are on a community’s wish list for the properties.” (The Mercury News)
5. Investors pile into risky commercial real estate debt, even as Fed warns of trouble “One of Wall Street’s hottest ‘reopening’ trades has been playing out in the $600 billion commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) market, through bets on risky slices of property debt that could end up with big losses, or rewards, if hotels fill back up with business travelers, workers return to the office and shoppers wander back to shops as the COVID-19 threat subsides.” (Marketwatch)
6. Golden Opportunity For S.F. Bay Area To Hit Refresh On Growth Strategy “The theory is that in the absence of the virus’s hold on society, the underlying fundamentals should still be healthy. Among other metrics alluding to this, the median Bay Area home price went up by 20% during the pandemic, according to Wunderman.” (Bisnow)
7. How the Recent Snowstorm Affects the Dallas Office Market “Seeing how unprepared the entire state of Texas was in dealing with this type of event, owners and operators everywhere should take this as an example to be better prepared for the future no matter what the location or obstacle.” (Commercial Property Executive)
8. Beyond #CancelRent: Real Estate Industry Moves To Flexible Payment Model “Since COVID-19 sent the economy into a tailspin a year ago, much has been written about the movement to cancel rent and the importance of continuing eviction moratoriums. But some in the real estate industry have pointed to solution that may be more viable in the long term for both residential and commercial tenants: flexible rent.” (Forbes)

Article source: https://www.wealthmanagement.com/cre-wire/eight-must-reads-cre-industry-march-1-2021