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Article source: https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/07/25/home-foreclosure-spike-in-bay-area/
Realtors are popping a little less Champagne, and buyers are no longer offering hundreds of thousands over asking price, as home prices are dropping notably in SF, Oakland, and especially San Jose.
Hey, you know all those stories you’ve been seeing about home buyers offering hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the asking price, and Bay Area home prices skyrocketing by double-digit percentages? You may not see any more of those stories for a while. A Wednesday Chronicle report analyzes data from both Zillow and Redfin, and finds that Bay Area home prices are now dropping noticeably, and that four Bay Area cities (including SF) made the most recent top ten “fastest-cooling housing markets” list.
“Would-be buyers are shying away because they simply have less money, both for down payments and monthly payments,” SF real estate agent Joanna Rose said in that Redfin report. “More than half the buyers I see in San Francisco are tech workers, and many of them have seen their employers’ stock prices tumble over the past few months — in a lot of cases, that has cost people six figures.”
It’s more a correction than a crisis, but it’s happening in a market that has historically seemed immune to major corrections. Tech stocks had boomed during the pandemic, perhaps to artificially inflated levels, and that sector is now seeing significant layoffs. Couple the nosedive in tech stocks with mortgage and interest rates going up, and you get an appreciable decrease in how much money tech folk are willing to throw at buying houses.
This is not just a Bay Area phenomenon, but it is largely a Bay Area phenomenon, with NorCal dominating the Redfin top ten list of where home prices are dropping the most precipitously. The Chronicle reports that Redfin “lists five California cities among its ‘fastest-cooling housing markets.’ San Jose (1st), Sacramento (2nd), Oakland (3rd), Stockton (5th) and San Francisco (10th) made up half of that top 10 in a report by Redfin.”
On a local level, this is consistent with new reporting from Socketsite saying that pending single-family home and condo sales are down eight percent compared to this time last year, and that the number of SF homes on the market is up 35% over that same period.
San Jose is seeing the biggest drop in pending home sales of any Bay Area city, down 21% over the past year. (Though the biggest drop in the nation, at 39%, is… Boise, Idaho?) Oakland sales are down 16%, and San Francisco sales are down 14%.
“These areas are either among the most expensive places to buy, or have seen some of the largest home value increases over the past two years,” Zillow data spokesperson Matt Kreamer told the Chronicle. “Because the combination of home price growth and the recent rise in mortgage rates are pushing monthly payments past what many buyers can afford, you’re seeing inventory gains in these markets and competition among buyers ease the fastest.”
But analysts still feel it’s just a normal market correction, and will not be as disastrous as the 2008 financial crisis. “This is definitely a different situation,” Kreamer told the Chronicle “What we’re seeing now is the start of a rebalancing of a market that we’ve been saying was unsustainable.”
Related: ‘Full House’ House Gets Fraudulently Listed For $37M, Local Broadcaster Mistakes It As Real [SFist]
Image: @aldric via Unsplash
Article source: https://sfist.com/2022/07/14/bay-area-home-prices-actually-dropping-cities-here-dominate-the-fastest-cooling-housing-markets-list/
In the early part of the pandemic, more wealthy residents who could work remotely left San Francisco, taking a large chunk of the economy with them.
From 2019 to 2020, IRS data showed that the number of people listed on tax returns in the city fell by 4.5%. Residents who left made an average of about $138,000 per year in 2019, up 67% from the previous year, when departing residents had an average annual income of around $82,000. San Francisco’s net outmigration nearly tripled in one year.
Fewer people living in the city means less business for local shops and directly contributed to the plunge in sales tax revenue from $165 million in 2019 to $88 million in 2020. City officials don’t expect sales tax revenue to recover to pre-pandemic levels until the fiscal year starting in July 2025.
Read more from Roland Li and Susie Neilson.
Firefighters battle the Lincoln Fire in Sausalito this month.
Marin County’s wildfire activity has been remarkably limited, with just 6,000 acres burned in the past 20 years. Most recently, the Woodward Fire in 2020 scorched 4,000 acres.
That’s in sharp contrast to its neighbor, Sonoma County, which has seen major fires almost every year including Glass and Walbridge fires in 2020, Kincade Fire in 2019 and Tubbs Fire of 2017.
“We’ve just been lucky that we haven’t had the ignition in the wrong time and the wrong place,” said Mark Brown, executive officer of the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority.
Even so, the risk is high, particularly along the southeast slopes of Mount Tamalpais. And the lack of previous burn scars adds to that risk, Emma Talley writes.
• The latest on the Oak Fire in Mariposa County and air quality conditions that could affect parts of the Bay Area.
• These maps show severe fires are morphing California forests into something we won’t recognize.
• See an interactive map of the latest wildfires burning across the Bay Area and California on the Chronicle Fire Tracker.
A rendering of Core’s culinary “lab” in San Francisco.
Next year, a flashy new restaurant inside San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid will open, featuring a former Giorgio Armani restaurant executive chef, an extensive wine library and a culinary “lab” where famous chefs will come cook.
But there’s a catch: To eat here, you’ll first have to pony up between $15,000 to $100,000 in initiation fees to become a member of a private international club called Core, which has locations in Milan and New York City.
Several nearby restaurant owners said they don’t feel threatened by the exclusive club and encourage more foot traffic to the area, while Core is betting big on downtown’s recovery, writes Elena Kadvany.
Maurice Caldwell (right), who spent 20 years in prison for a wrongful murder conviction, thanks Alex Serrano for a haircut in Sacramento.
• Seeking justice: After spending 20 years in prison for a wrongful murder conviction, a man says S.F. cheated him out of $1 million.
• Housing tech gold rush: The Bay Area’s housing crisis spawns creative tech startups that fill niches. Also:
What it’s like to live in the hottest Bay Area real estate neighborhoods now.
• A triumphant comeback: More than 24,000 runners made their way through foggy weather Sunday, marking the return of the San Francisco Marathon without pandemic restrictions.
• Radicalized online: Inside a far-right militia member’s plan to start civil war from the Bay Area. Listen to Chronicle reporter Joshua Sharpe discuss the story with “Fifth Mission” podcast cost Cecilia Lei.
• Resignation sought: San Francisco’s NAACP branch calls for school board member Ann Hsu to step down over her “hurtful, racist” comments.
• Chronicle editorial board: Anger over S.F. property crimes isn’t worth throwing away our privacy rights. More opinion: Why is S.F.’s drug crisis so out of control? Stop blaming Chesa Boudin, and look at Walgreens.
• Zuckerberg sells S.F. home: The sprawling mansion in the Dolores Heights neighborhood went for $31 million, more than triple the Facebook co-founder’s purchase price.
• Are you ready for some football? Here are 25 predictions for the upcoming 49ers season. Also: The five biggest questions surrounding the 49ers.
Limestone spires known as tufa towers are illuminated by the moon outside Lee Vining (Mono County).
Mono Lake on the remote east side of the Sierra Nevada is unique in a number of ways, from its unusual rock formations to its salt-filled waters.
But now, amid a third year of drought, the lake is also in trouble, and the surrounding towns and wildlife inhabitants are feeling the pinch.
“It affects everybody, that lake — we all live around it,” said Marianne Denny, a 40-year resident of the basin. “Hopefully we’ll live to see more water.”
Parts of the lake popular with visitors have dried up, and fierce dust storms blowing off the exposed lake bottom are producing bad air pollution, writes Kurtis Alexander.
More climate news:
• Could high-tech clothing combat climate change? This Bay Area startup thinks so.
Bay Briefing is written by Kellie Hwang and Anna Buchmann and sent to readers’ email inboxes on weekday mornings. Sign up for the newsletter here, and contact the writers at kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com and anna.buchmann@sfchronicle.com.
Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Briefing-Richer-people-left-S-F-during-17326368.php
It was late last year when Larrimore heard about a San Francisco startup, Aalto, that would let them test the Bay Area market with no up-front Realtor contracts or crowded open houses. Instead, the couple discreetly listed a small rental property they owned in Mill Valley on Aalto’s website, set their own sale price, then chose when they wanted to close the deal, giving them time to buy another place to eventually retire.
It didn’t take long for the messages to pour in from prequalified Bay Area buyers hoping to hack the cutthroat COVID housing market.
“It was sort of like dating on Match or something,” Larrimore said. “It weeded out so much.”
Aalto, which was launched by a Bay Area native last year after his own high-pressure home search, is part of a wave of tech companies that have sprung from the housing crisis in California and other competitive markets. Venture capitalists call them residential “PropTech” companies — yes, a combination of “property” and “technology” — which is already a nearly $21 billion industry, according to a 2021 report by analysts at Prime Indexes.
They range from home sales startups like Aalto to online mortgage and appraisal platforms, rent-to-own or “fractional” ownership companies, plus “iBuyers” that purchase and flip homes. Then there are Airbnb-inspired companies promising to help homeowners pay high mortgages or maintenance costs by renting out parts of their properties: pools, backyards, garages, even laundry machines or cars in the driveway.
The companies’ founders say they are democratizing access to homeownership or modernizing the long, paperwork-intensive process of buying a home. Some test how far people who have managed to buy a home in an increasingly cost-prohibitive era are willing to go for extra income — be it letting strangers’ dogs poop on your expensive land, inviting people you’ve never met to sleep outside your house or permitting fellow app users to keep their junk in your attic.
The housing tech gold rush also raises bigger questions about who wins and who loses as homes get further out of reach for more people. Amid a reckoning over mass homelessness, the legacy of housing discrimination and fallout from the foreclosure crisis, equity advocates fear that some loosely regulated technologies could compound a shift toward treating homes as a financial asset rather than a human necessity, widening inequality.
“All of these companies, what they’re capitalizing on is some level of desperation,” said Catherine Bracy, executive director of Oakland’s TechEquity Collaborative. “Some of them are more problematic than others.”
A recent report by TechEquity Collaborative, called “Sold to the Highest Bidder: How Tech is Cashing In on the American Dream,” traces the housing tech boom back to the foreclosure crisis. Large investors seized on turmoil — especially in historically marginalized nonwhite neighborhoods like East Oakland — to buy up thousands of homes, then rented “them out to the very people whom they have priced out of the market,” the report found.
Some private-equity firms then bought or developed algorithms to surface new investment homes, or software to manage growing numbers of rentals. In the years since, venture capital-backed “iBuyers,” an industry term for instant buyers like Redfin and Opendoor, have entered the fray, making cash offers to buy and flip homes. Fractional ownership companies that allow customers to buy one share of a home owned by multiple people, including $1 billion San Francisco startup Pacaso, have also gained a foothold in areas including Wine Country.
Like corporate investors, iBuyers and fractional ownership have grown quickly but still make up a relatively small share of overall Bay Area homeowners. Bracy said such offerings, along with rent-to-own housing startups that target lower-cost markets, require more vetting to ensure that they don’t evolve to perpetuate forms of familiar predatory lending or de facto segregation.
“If we don’t get ahead of what’s happening in the tech sector,” Bracy said, “we’re likely to see the same negative outcomes that we saw in the housing booms and busts of the past.”
Chief among those outcomes: a racial housing gap that is more extreme in California today than it was when housing discrimination was legal. Across California, about 37% of Black families own their homes — a decline from 42% in 1960, according to the Public Policy Institute of California and the California Housing Finance Agency. California’s share of Latino homeowners, who average 40 times the wealth of Latino renters, has also dropped. Many first-time buyers of all races found themselves shut out of Bay Area COVID bidding wars.
Institutions including UC Berkeley have also attempted to measure whether long-standing housing inequities extend to new tech platforms. One 2019 report found mortgage and refinancing tech companies consistently charged “otherwise-equivalent” Latino and Black loan applicants higher interest rates due to “creditworthiness” exempted from fair lending laws, totaling $765 million in extra costs per year.
Now, as Bay Area home prices start to drop, TechEquity is in the process of recommending ethical guidelines for housing tech companies, along with public policy proposals and suggestions for how housing might be explicitly factored into debate about reparations. In the meantime, companies are largely left to their own devices to avoid potential fair housing pitfalls.
For Aalto CEO Nick Narodny, step one was to “just think about it, and to acknowledge” deep disparities in the American housing market. Then he made “fairness” a product objective. As the startup raised more than $17 million from investors, Narodny aimed to mitigate “unconscious bias” by anonymizing potential buyers, showing initials instead of full names. The site also matches buyers and sellers by financial qualifications and purchase timelines only, he said.
Still, it was personal frustration that first sparked the idea for the startup. In 2018, Narodny was looking for what he thought would be a straightforward three-bedroom, two-bathroom Bay Area house. After finding “like three options” in his budget, he heard about a “pocket,” or off-market, listing from his mom, a longtime Realtor. He saw an opportunity in the awkward, almost “clandestine” experience of touring a house not listed on the public market.
“I was like, ‘Does the homeowner even know we’re here?’” Narodny recalled.
Off-market listings inherently limit how many people know a home is available, but Narodny said his goal is to double or triple the number of homes for sale in an area by making it faster and easier to list homes. Aalto, which started in San Francisco and Marin and now operates in several surrounding Bay Area counties, also provides a financial incentive: it undercuts traditional 3% Realtor fees by charging a 1% commission.
“There’s so much opportunity,” Narodny said. “We want to unlock a ton of new inventory.”
Fellow startup founder David Adams has also grappled with tech’s role in the housing crisis. He came up with the idea for a more niche PropTech company called Sniffspot while living in San Francisco with his dog, Soba.
The startup operates in the corner of the gig economy targeting homeowners — in Sniffspot’s case, those willing to turn their backyards into rent-by-the-hour private dog parks. As the company scaled up to work with homeowners in 2,000 cities, Adams watched closely while real estate tech luminary Airbnb evolved into a publicly traded global company that sparked backlash over concerns about speculation and displacing long-term tenants.
“It went too far, and it created issues. Companies learned from that,” Adams said, adding that, “Nobody’s not living in their property because they’re renting it out for dogs.”
At her 13-acre ranch in Briones, Kelley O’Sullivan has always been a dog lover. The animals took on a new significance after her daughter, Tara, an officer with the Sacramento Police Department, was killed in the line of duty in 2019 and O’Sullivan took in her pitbull mix, Nero.
She Googled around for ways to connect with other dog owners and found Sniffspot. O’Sullivan and her husband, Denis, now earn $450 to $1,300 a month by renting out 1 acre of their property to yardless tenants and road-trippers looking for a dog park that they can book via app.
While O’Sullivan works as a personal trainer and said the extra income isn’t absolutely necessary to pay the mortgage, she sees how others make it a more lucrative gig.
“Oh my god, they add agility (courses), they add signs, dog treats — they personalize it to the people coming,” O’Sullivan said. “If we really, really put effort into it and made it super bougie, we could make more money.”
Adams stressed that Sniffspot is primarily in the business of addressing the ills of “the modern dog world:” obesity, boredom, apartment-dwelling owners stressed about finding safe outdoor space. But in the process, the company has become one of many opening up new income streams for homeowners in widely varied economic situations.
Swimply, for example, specializes in by-the-hour home pool rentals. There’s also Neighbor for selling storage space, Hipcamp for private camping land and SudShare for doing other people’s laundry.
“We have hosts making over $3,000. It’s real money,” Adams said of Sniffspot. “Certainly anecdotally, we see folks that are aging in place because they have this income stream. People are covering their property tax.”
When it came to actually buying and selling homes for the North Bay’s Rev. Larrimore last year, he said listing on Aalto led to two offers. Once he and his husband settled on a buyer, they started shopping for their own retirement home on both Aalto and public listing sites.
They were beat out on four homes in their $1.3 million to $1.7 million budget in Sausalito, he said, before closing on a two-bedroom condo in Tiburon this month.
Whenever retirement day comes, it will be difficult to leave the town where they’ve become part of the community. But in the fog of bidding wars and endless online scrolling, Larrimore stuck to a mantra that chalked it all up to a higher power.
“Well,” he recited, “that one wasn’t meant to be.”
Lauren Hepler (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hepler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LAHepler
Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/bay-area-housing-apps-17322849.php
The data showed a continued slowdown in the wake of the “explosion of home values” tied to the pandemic — when remote workers no longer tethered to city centers fled to suburban and exurban areas, driving up prices, according to Zillow data spokesperson Matt Kreamer. Home value growth in the six-month period from January to June was less than half the year-over-year growth in nearly all the ZIP codes examined, he said.
But a number of Marin County ZIP codes — including several established coastal vacation areas — signaled their enduring popularity by topping both the 2022 and year-over-year lists.
Their dominance reflects a shift in buyers’ priorities during the pandemic, according to realtors Sarah Kowalczyk and Lotte Moore, a team with Compass in Marin County. Many were drawn to Marin for the same goals, they said: a better lifestyle, good weather and access to outdoor spaces.
Woodacre, a tiny unincorporated community in Marin County’s San Geronimo Valley northwest of Fairfax, had the Bay Area’s highest 2022 growth in home values, at 15.4%, rising from $1.06 million in January to $1.29 million in June.
The pandemic opened buyers’ eyes to an area that previously was considered “too far out,” Kowalczyk said. “Now buyers are seeing what they can get, and they have no problem with the commute.”
She said her team has been seeing an increase in buyers from more-populated parts of southern or central Marin County, whose property values have increased to near-San Francisco levels. In Woodacre, they can “still find relative value” and get a large home with a lot of acreage, and “total privacy.”
A view of 110 Carson Road in Woodacre, a home currently listed by Mark Machado of Attain Real Estate.
While Woodacre has a “sleepy country environment” — there’s no gas station, and you have to drive a little farther for groceries — the town is still accessible, Kowalczyk said, and the area is served by top public school districts.
“There’s a learning curve, but 95% of people who move there figure it out…and are beyond thrilled by how safe it is, how quiet it is,” she said.
Realtor Mark Machado, a co-founder of San Rafael-based Attain Real Estate, said the community is tight-knit and friendly with a “serene, tranquil” feel. The only downside, he said, is that homes are on septic and propane systems, which can take some getting used to.
To the west of Woodacre on the Marin County coast is Point Reyes Station, a popular tourist town acting as the primary gateway to Point Reyes National Seashore. It saw the third-highest growth in home values this year, 14.2%, rising from $1.57 million in January to $1.79 million in June.
The Compass realtor team said they’ve mainly seen older buyers who want second homes, perhaps initially looking in Wine Country to the east, or Bolinas or Stinson Beach to the south, and then widening their search.
30 Knob Hill Road in Point Reyes Station, a home sold by Compass agents Sarah Kowalczyk and Lotte Moore.
A major draw for Point Reyes Station is its farm-to-table and artisanal culture, Moore said. It also serves as a hub for many activities and attractions, she added — but for residents, that can be a downside because the town fills up with tourists on weekends and holidays.
Coastal Marin County towns like Point Reyes Station have long been popular day-trip or weekend destinations for Bay Area residents seeking a quick getaway to enjoy nature and small-town life, Kreamer said. But the pandemic has transformed them into places where people are looking to put down roots. “It makes sense that a fair number of people would look to relocate there if they don’t have to commute to the office every day,” she said.
Another small coastal community, Sea Ranch in Sonoma County, continues to lead the Bay Area and California in home-value growth. A Chronicle analysis of Zillow data earlier this month found Sea Ranch had the highest year-over-year increase from May 2021 to May 2022 statewide.
The most recent data showed Sea Ranch had highest year-over-year percentage increase in home values in the Bay Area as of June, at 43.87%, and the region’s second highest increase for the January-to-June period, at 15.37%.
Realtors in the area said the uniqueness of the architecture, proximity to the coast, recent addition of high-speed internet and a private airstrip attracted well-to-do buyers who can work remotely.
A home in Sea Ranch that sold for $1.8 million in August 2021.
For many, though, it’s about affordability and getting more bang for their buck. Kreamer said. Generally, buying a home in the cities of San Francisco or San Jose is more expensive than in the nearby Bay Area suburbs.
Three Tri-Valley ZIP codes in San Ramon and Danville and a ZIP code in Union City all saw significant year-over-year home value growth, each rising just over 24% from June 2021 to June 2022. ZIP codes in Dublin, Pleasanton and Livermore also made the top 15 list for year-over-year home value increases.
“A buyer can certainly get more space for their money in some of the outlying areas,” Kreamer said. “If you’re a first-time buyer in the Bay Area, it makes sense you’d look at places like Livermore or Union City, where homes are relatively affordable and you can get more space and a yard for the price of a small condo closer to the city.”
Many Bay Area home buyers have had more freedom during the pandemic and in the past year to expand their choices, whether it’s the location, type of home or other amenities that are important to their lifestyles.
“What’s happening in the Bay Area is that many people are freer than ever to seek out homes that most closely fit their preferences, and to make fewer tradeoffs,” Kreamer said.
So nature lovers and those looking for a more peaceful life look to Marin and Sonoma counties, while families seeking larger homes, amenities and a backyard for the kids may be drawn to suburbs such as San Ramon and Danville.
Zillow’s Home Value Index measures a region’s typical home value and housing market appreciation based on multiple data sources, including seasonal variations and the values of homes nearby. Home value estimates are not based just on the prices of recently sold homes, but rather estimate the value of all homes within the selected region, whether they were sold or not.
The approach differs from that used by many Realtors, whose data comes from regional Realtor and broker databases called multiple listing services; the methodologies can differ and the analyses would not be directly comparable.
Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KellieHwang
Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-home-prices-Zillow-17323979.php
