homesmillbrae.com

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) — It’s the spring selling season, which usually means home sales spike and excited prospective buyers spend their weekends jumping from open house to open house, but since the pandemic hit things have gone quiet.

“I mean, who wants to move now? Nobody,” said Patrick Carlisle, Chief Market Analyst for Compass Real Estate. He’s been watching as sales and new home listings have come to what he describes as “a screeching halt.”

“The number of properties that were pulled off the market jumped by 800% in one week” said Carlisle. “The number of properties going into contract dropped like 75% so these are very drastic effects.”

For weeks, real estate agents have been optimistic that the California real estate market would remain largely unaffected by the coronavirus pandemic.

When asked if he was worried about the future of the housing market in California, real estate agent Uwe Maercz said, “I’m really not.”

“Being invested in real estate, specifically in California and in the Bay Area has been a terrific investment,” said Maercz. “We have ups and downs right now of course, but if you take a two, three, four year outlook, I think everybody’s going to be just fine.”

To Maercz’s point, home prices have not gone down and neither have rents, but Carlisle points out the housing market is usually about three to six weeks behind the stock market so the impacts are just starting to show.

“It seems pretty clear that our up-cycle has come to an end,” Carlisle said.,

Realtor.com reports there are nearly half as many listings on the market now as there were at this time last year. In the Bay Area, there were roughly 9,500 active listings in early March since shelter-in-place took effect; that number dropped below 8,000 and the number of new listings went from around 1,800 to less than 800.

Carlisle’s research shows a typical spring season like 2019, where real estate comes out of its winter slump, but this March he says most people are either afraid to list, or don’t have the money to buy.

“People have to have jobs to be able to afford to buy homes or to rent homes,” Carlisle said.

Listed homes are still selling which is good news for people who have no choice but to sell, such as homeowner Jeannie Morrison.

“I thought the whole year was going to be totally different and surprise. It wasn’t,” Morrison said.

In February, her husband Dennis died of health complications unrelated to COVID-19, so she made the decision to downsize. She’s moving closer to her son, Jay, who helped her sell their family home of 18 years. They had one open house, then were forced to take the sale and tours online.

“I would say, you know, maybe a month or two months ago, I think our posture would have been a little bit different. I think we would have been a little bit more aggressive, but in these current times there’s a little bit more at stake,” said Jay Ayers, Jeannie’s son.

In some cases, buyers are able to tour homes in person, but only if they’re vacant; if someone’s living there, you’re simply not allowed walk-throughs. In most cases, in-person tours only happen when a virtual tour is not an option.

“So it’s been a little crazy, but I think that when someone needs to buy a home, they need to buy a home regardless of what’s going on,” Morrison said.

As for how long the virus will take its toll on the housing market, like everything else it depends on how long the shelter-in-place lasts.

“There’s so many plates spinning that I don’t think anyone can predict how it’s going to shake out yet,” Carlisle said.

Morrison’s story is a reminder that despite the virus, life goes on. She’s moving forward with newfound empathy.

“It was hard to go through all of that, it was really hard, but there’s so many people right now going through this thing, the exact same thing right now. It’s just like, I don’t feel like I’m alone,” Morrison said.

Article source: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/04/27/bay-area-real-estate-during-coronavirus-pandemic-listings-plummet-prices-remain-steady/

Oakland, California (Credit: iStock)

It seemed that San Francisco Bay Area’s incredibly tight housing market was bulletproof. That turned out not to be true, but it took a literal pandemic to put a dent in it.

Zillow economist Jeff Tucker told NBC that home sales across the Bay Area are down 35 percent year-over. It seems people put their house hunts on the backburner when it became clear that coronavirus posed a real threat.

“Starting around March 16th we saw traffic on Zillow listings, on our website and on our apps, plummeted 30 percent pretty much over night starting at that point,” he said.

Just like every other market under lockdown, open houses are impossible in the Bay Area. And just like in other markets, agents are holding online home tours and using 3-D programs to give prospective buyers the chance to see properties, but they can only do so much.

Nova Real Estate agent Kymberly Simmons-Greene said that buyers and sellers are still interested, but are “trying to figure out how they can go about connecting and dealing with the properties and the transactions.”

Others aren’t though. They’re taking breathers to see what happens to interest rates, the economy, and home prices before they pull the trigger on a deal.

A wider economic slowdown could lead banks to tighten up their lending standards like they did during the financial crisis last decade. [NBC] – Dennis Lynch

Article source: https://therealdeal.com/2020/04/12/it-took-a-pandemic-to-slow-down-the-bay-areas-housing-market/

Health officers from seven Bay Area jurisdictions — six counties and the City of Berkeley — are collaborating on a joint extension of shelter-in-place orders to be announced later this week, extending current orders through the month of May.

As most of you know, the current shelter-in-place order, which we all knew would likely be extended, expires on Sunday, May 3. In a release issued Monday, the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Marin confirm that sheltering orders will be extended “through May,” with some loosening of specific restrictions still to be announced.

“Thanks to the collective effort and sacrifice of the 7 million residents across our jurisdictions, we have made substantial progress in slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus, ensuring our local hospitals are not overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases, and saving lives,” the statement reads. “At this stage of the pandemic, however, it is critical that our collective efforts continue so that we do not lose the progress we have achieved together.”

The seven health officers promise the release of “a set of broad indicators that will be used to track progress in preparedness and response to COVID-19,” and these will likely include benchmarks for testing, progress in treatment of the disease, and specific decreases in the number of new cases and hospitalizations.

“Hospitalizations have leveled,” they write, “but more work is needed to safely re-open our communities. Prematurely lifting restrictions could easily lead to a large surge in cases… As effective as our efforts have been, if we move too fast to ease restrictions, the potential of exponential spread could have grave impacts to health and wellness of our residents as well as the economy.”

It remains to be seen which “lower-risk activities” will be given some exemptions under the revised orders, but the health officers say there will be just “a small number.”

Last week, Napa County loosened restrictions on golf courses and real estate showings, as an example.

Also, the video below explains the four-phased reopening of the economy that is likely to happen in many jurisdictions like ours — it’s a kind of best-practices guide that has been worked on by mathematicians and public health officials in order to try to flatten the curve through the fall and winter.

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Foreclosure-sales-continue-in-Bay-Area-during-15225132.php

Having already started to slip earlier this year, prior to the COVID-19 hit, the weighted average asking rent for an apartment in San Francisco dropped around 2 percent in March to $4,000 a month, which is around 1 percent lower on a year-over-year basis and 10 percent below its 2015-era peak of around $4,450 per month, with the average asking rent for a one-bedroom in the city down to around $3,475 per month (which is around 4 percent lower than at the same time last year and 5 percent below peak).

At the same time, the weighted average asking rent for an apartment in Oakland dropped down around 3 percent in March to $2,600 a month, which is less than a percent lower than at the same time last year but around 8 percent below its peak in the second quarter of 2016, with the average asking rent for a one-bedroom down to $2,300 a month (versus closer to $2,500 a month at peak).

As such, the premium for a one-bedroom in San Francisco as compared to Oakland has ticked up to 34 percent (having narrowed to 29 percent at the end of last year but averaged over 40 percent in 2015).

Our latest trends analysis was based on pricing data from nearly 4,300 past and active listings for apartments in San Francisco and Oakland combined, the number of which has jumped over the past month, and for which the “weighted average” apartment totals 2.3 bedrooms when counting a studio as having one.

Article source: http://socketsite.com/archives/2020/04/asking-rents-in-san-francisco-and-oakland-drop-listings-up.html