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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – Small landlords across the Bay Area are warning they’ve reached a breaking point.

With rent collection taking a dive and the end of an eviction moratorium approaching, small property owners are saying if they can’t collect rent soon, they’ll have no choice but to evict tenants.

“We are here waking up every day, trying to figure out how to house people, we are not in the eviction business,” Sid Lakireddy a small landlord and the President of the California Rental Housing association said.

Lakireddi worries lack of rent payments will create a domino effect that could devastate the state’s economy and the real estate industry as a whole.

Investors and small landlords are finding themselves using language often reserved for tenant’s rights groups. “I think shelter is a human right, and I think that we’re the richest country in the world and we can afford to shelter our people,” Jillienne Helman, CEO of Realty Mogul said.

“Eviction is a last resort. I mean, it costs tens of thousands of dollars, it takes an inordinate amount of time and energy, especially if you’re doing it yourself. Nobody wants to do an eviction,” Lakireddy said.

They’re urging lawmakers to give their tenants cash or rental vouchers so they don’t have to push people out.

“This isn’t going to break the real estate industry for the large landlords. It might ruin the retirement and ruin the livelihood of a small landlord, and that’s a real risk,” Helman said.

The Center for Disease Control’s eviction moratorium expires on December 31st, California’s eviction moratorium expires at the end of January.

Rent collection has dropped from 80.4% nationally at this time last year to 75.4% at the start of December. Meanwhile tenants are fleeing urban centers left and right.

“I’ve even seen properties where they’ve dropped the rent 50% and they still can’t fill up the units,” Lakireddy said.

“San Francisco has a very big problem now. With Twitter announcing they’re going to be remote and Facebook allowing for remote and Salesforce allowing for remote, you’re going to have a lot of folks that choose not to come back to San Francisco,” Helman said.

State Sen. Scott Wiener told KPIX 5, “The risk is that we have a cascading disaster.”

Wiener (D-San Francisco) said his main concern is low-income tenants being pushed out, but understands that if small landlords aren’t protected, there could be a repeat of what happened after the crash in 2008: small landlords being pushed out and investors buying even more property here.

“And that’s not healthy for our rental market and for our real estate industry, so this is about protecting renters and also protecting our small mom-and-pop landlords to make sure that they can continue to exist,” Wiener said.

“It’s telling me it’s not just an affordability problem out the gate, you know? There’s something wrong with the system as a whole,” Lakireddy said.

Article source: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/12/10/project-home-evictions-small-landlords-seek-federal-help-moratorium/

Bay Area luxury homes have become a hotter commodity than ever during the coronavirus pandemic — including those at the very top of the market.

After a huge plunge right after shelter-in-place went into effect in March, general home sales have rebounded across the Bay Area. And sales of luxury and ultra-luxury homes in particular have jumped to historic highs in almost every part of the region, according to new data from the brokerage firm Compass Real Estate and the California Association of Realtors.

In the Bay Area, real estate agents define luxury homes as those valued above $3 million and ultra-luxury homes as those valued above $5 million.

According to Compass’ report, luxury home sales in the Bay Area jumped 46% this year. Affluent and ultra-affluent buyers have substantially increased as a percentage of sales since the pandemic began, helping pull up the median prices to record highs for the region as well.

That data closely aligns with numbers from the California Association of Realtors, which reports that sales in the luxury home sector this year have increased by 41.4%.

The findings underscore the widening equity gap in the Bay Area and beyond: For lower-income groups, the pandemic has upended tens of millions of lives with job and wage losses; for the wealthy, luxury seems even more within reach.

Affluent buyers, or what agents call super-affluent buyers, have made up a much larger percentage of the buyer pool since the pandemic struck, said Compass chief market analyst Patrick Carlisle. “They were the ones who were the least affected by the pandemic,” he said.

“What was already a significant divide in social stratification has just gotten much wider. It’s almost like two parallel universes, two completely different realities depending on what class people are in.”

More affordable sections of the market — or units under $1 million — are staying flat or declining. This year, sales in that section declined by 1.1%. Part of that might be because of supply, said Oscar Wei, an economist for the Realtors association. Available homes within those affordable markets dropped by 40% in the last few months. Within the luxury segment, supply increased by 3%.

Carlisle said the findings reflect “stupendous” jumps in outlying counties, including Sonoma — despite this season’s devastating wildfires — and in regions slightly outside the Bay Area, such as Santa Cruz, Monterey and Lake Tahoe. The jump in sales for the latter was more than 180%, he said. (Luxury home sales boomed in Napa and Sonoma but declined in the ultra-luxury market, perhaps due to how many of those highest-end properties are in wildfire zones.)

However, not all areas of the luxury market increased: The luxury condominium market saw a decline in sales during the pandemic, according to Compass.

“It’s tied into the whole idea of density,” Carlisle said. “People didn’t want to walk through a common entryway, they didn’t want to get in an elevator with people, and having dedicated space outside became a premium.”

Most of the places where luxury home sales soared were counties with more rural areas, which also translated to dollars per square foot. San Francisco saw a smaller jump than other counties, Compass reported, though the biggest home in the city closed for $24 million in Sea Cliff. According to more granular data from the Realtors association, units sold within the first 10 months of 2020 compared to that range in 2019 increased in the county by only 3.4%, from 235 to 243 units.

In Sonoma, that increase was 118%, but with far fewer units sold: 28 in 2019, to 61 in 2020. Marin County saw a 50% increase, from 156 in 2019 to 234 in 2020.

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

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/Luxury-home-sales-are-skyrocketing-in-the-Bay-15786142.php

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Article source: https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article247238271.html

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The Ultimate Bay Area Guide to the Holidays, 2020

Everything you need to merrily eat, drink, and shop your way through the rest of 2020

Article source: https://sf.eater.com/2020/12/7/22159812/tomas-aragon-san-francisco-dominique-crenn

Despite ups and downs, San Francisco’s housing market has seemed invincible in recent years, such that it would take a crisis of unprecedented proportions to call its fundamentals into question. Then one happened.

Only two weeks ago, realtors and analysts were cautious yet confident about the short-term future of the business, telling Curbed SF that, while the novel coronavirus outbreak was bad for some home listings and that high-end luxury markets might suffer after stock market woes, when push comes to shove a San Francisco home is still an incredibly valuable commodity.

But that was before San Francisco, soon followed by the entire state of California, issued a shelter-in-place order that, in effect, turns listed homes into the equivalent of buried treasure: valuable, but nigh impossible to reach.

A housebound realtor can no longer show homes in person, nor can appraisers visit homes on the market to make assessments. Stagers and photographers can’t travel to properties. And, of course, even if such tasks could be accomplished, no potential buyers would want to visit for tours.

“With open houses and public meetings banned [and] keeping six feet away a must, new listings all but vanished,” Alexander Clark of the Front Steps says via email, noting that he’s “cursing my choice not to put more money in San Francisco real estate over the past couple of years instead of the stock market” after the beating that trade shares took in recent weeks.

Last week the San Francisco Association of Realtors banned all in-person showings of homes and shut its offices. The agency also advised, “Please encourage realtors not to judge or publicly chastise people who have a difference of opinion on how to address this crisis.”

The California Association of Realtors (CAR) polled its members last week and found that large majorities expect the outbreak to quash prices, home sales, and inventory. Socketsite reports that SF’s listing inventory dropped 20 percent in just three days on account of so many people suddenly pulling homes off the market.

“Before the coronavirus outbreak hit the state so severely, California’s housing market was getting a strong foothold,” CAR reported in its February market summary, with sales across the Bay Area down somewhat at 1.3 percent, but median prices up five percent. In San Francisco, the year-over-year price bump was more than ten percent last month.

However, according to CAR economist Leslie Appleton-Young, “the housing market condition is expected to deteriorate” in the coming months. She projects that sellers will hold off listing new homes until pastures grow greener again.

That downturn will almost certainly be national. Real estate site Redfin, who lists California as one of six states where home tours are off limits, barred open houses on all of its listings nationwide last week. In places where in-person showings are still allowed, “anyone with a sniffle” should be turned away, CEO Glen Kelman tells agents.

Despite every possible ill omen, some parties remain hopeful for a rally—or perhaps just sticking to the basic principles of salesmanship by not confessing potential weakness.

Brett Jennings, founder of Real Estate Experts, writes that “our market is still thriving” in Santa Clara County, seeing only a few cancellations despite shelter-in-place conditions and the fact that “we have one of the highest counts of active COVID-19 cases in California.”

Michelle Kim of Mosaik Real Estate says lenders “are experiencing a surge in demand” as opportunistic buyers move to take advantage of low mortgage rates.

And Clark of the Front Steps—who bases his analysis on the current predicament as analogous to seasonal market slowdowns during the holidays rather than the potential a much longer-term freeze—puts on a brave face, saying, “a shutdown is not forever, and a shutdown does not mean things have tanked.”

Of course, sales can only happen if buyers get some kind of access to homes. Redfin has pushed agents to adopt virtual open houses using navigable 3D models of homes. The SF-based rental platform Zumper has followed suit by adding videos and virtual walkthroughs to listings on its site.

While this tech is hardly new, it’s always been seen as secondary to in-person showings—now the future of the entire market might depend on making potential buyers feel it’s an acceptable substitute.

There’s some history that suggests that hope for a rebound isn’t just wishful thinking. Svenja Gudell, chief economist for Zillow, examined pandemic histories ranging from the 1918 flu epidemic to the 2003 SARS outbreak and noted that economies “snapped back quickly once the epidemic was over.”

When Hong Kong, a hyper-lux market like the Bay Area, faced the threat of SARS, a disease that called for similar isolation practices we’re now facing, Gudell found that although transaction volume plummeted up to 72 percent, “house prices did not fall significantly”—nor did they fall in China during novel coronavirus spread there only a few months ago.