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Not one, but three Bay Area counties set new jaw-dropping records as home prices continued to climb to vertigo-inducing heights.

In February, median prices for resale, single-family homes in Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco counties were the highest they’ve ever been — no small feat in a housing market where prices already are among the most expensive in the nation.

The records, unveiled Thursday in a report by housing data company CoreLogic, suggest no cooling in the red-hot market that’s padding sellers’ pockets while squeezing wannabe buyers and forcing many to leave in search of better deals.

Kevin Cole, president of the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors, called February’s price increases “amazing.”

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“It just reflects the ratcheting up of what buyers are able to afford,” he said, “with large down payments, with possibly all cash, with low interest rates.”

In Santa Clara County, the median price for a resale, single family home hit $1.29 million last month — up 34 percent from the same time last year, according to the CoreLogic report. In San Mateo County, the median price reached $1.45 million — up 24 percent, — and in San Francisco it was $1.5 million, up 30 percent.

While those three counties stood out, they weren’t the only ones where values continued their upward march. Single-family, resale homes sold for a median price of $750,000 in Alameda County — up nearly 3 percent from the year before, according to the report. In Contra Costa County, the median price hit $568,000 — a nearly 14 percent increase.

Prices were up across the Bay Area, where they have been rising without pause since April 2012, according to CoreLogic. Last month the median price for all homes (including new and resale single-family homes and condos) rose 5.6 percent from January, and 12.5 percent from February 2017 for homes in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Mateo, Solano and Sonoma counties.

“The demand’s there,” said Andrew LePage, a CoreLogic analyst, “but the supply’s not…with so little supply in the affordable price range, what’s left selling is more expensive, and that drives the median up.”

Last month, the Bay Area saw 1,558 homes sell with price tags of $1 million or more — a record for a February, according to the CoreLogic report. Sales of homes priced at $500,000 or more increased nearly 13 percent year-over-year, while sales of homes priced below $500,000 dropped 18 percent.

Buyers with high-paying jobs and loads of stock options are “ruling the day,” Cole said. But that’s not great news for those without deep pockets.

“I think this also reflects a cry for help for more affordable housing,” Cole said.

Tim Ambrose, president of the Bay East Association of Realtors, sees his clients struggling to afford the homes they want.

“I have buyers that are being priced out because they didn’t buy sooner,” he said. “So we are submitting offers and having to continue to go $50,000 to $100,000 over asking price. And we still, so far…have not been successful in getting our offers accepted.”

Despite the rising prices and the ongoing shortage of inventory, the number of Bay Area homes sold ticked up in February — increasing nearly 2 percent from the same time last year. That’s the first time in four months sales have inched up on a year-over-year basis, according to CoreLogic. The report shows 4,929 homes sold in the Bay Area last month, up 9.5 percent from the month before.

The increase is particularly notable because it came in February, which typically isn’t a busy month for home sales. Deals that close in February often were started in December or January, and many people avoid buying or selling homes during the holidays, LePage said.

Ambrose said he’s seen evidence of more market activity lately, though there’s still a major shortage of available homes.

“This past week I did notice a few more homes on the market than I’d seen,” he said.

Still, sales last month remained nearly 19 percent below the 30-year February average, according to CoreLogic.

Cole said the 9.5 increase in home sales between January and February is nothing to get excited about. He compared it to California’s ongoing drought concerns — a few inches of rain isn’t going to fix the problem.

“You’re only talking like 400 units throughout the whole San Francisco Bay Area,” he said. “While that might be exciting to hang your hat on, I think we’d like to see a 30, 40, 50 percent change to satisfy buyer demand.”

Article source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/22/bay-area-home-prices-keep-going-up-one-county-sets-a-new-record/

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Rising mortgage rates and skimpier tax benefits haven’t slowed Bay Area home prices yet, especially in Santa Clara County, where the median price surpassed $1 million for the first time last month.

For the nine-county region as a whole, the median price paid for a home or condo rose to $750,000 last month, up 5.6 percent from January and 12.5 percent from February 2017, CoreLogic reported Thursday.

The Bay Area’s “greatest strength is also your greatest weakness,” said Jordan Levine, senior economist with the California Association of Realtors. “You are firing on all cylinders, but the housing supply isn’t there. That’s what’s resulting in the high prices and the market conditions where (buyers) are having to move so quickly.”

The association predicted that the federal tax bill passed in December would curb demand for homes because some people would see their mortgage interest and property tax reductions reduced starting this year. Higher mortgage rates also were expected to reduce demand. Freddie Mac said Thursday that the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose to 4.45 percent from 4.44 percent last week and 4.23 percent a year ago. Rates averaged less than 4 percent last year.

The rate increase hasn’t had an impact yet because it only started in mid-January and may have encouraged some buyers who were on the fence to jump in before rates go even higher, Levine said. And even though homeowners “don’t have as many of the tax advantages they used to have, California has such a chronically undersupplied market and heavy demand that there is still upward pressure on the market.”

Santa Clara County remained the region’s hottest spot. Its median price jumped to a record $1,080,000, up 12.5 percent from January and up a whopping 27.8 percent year over year. That marked the third straight month that prices in the heart of Silicon Valley rose more than 20 percent year over year. The county’s previous peak was $1 million in December.

The median price in San Francisco and San Mateo counties topped $1 million in November 2014 and May 2015, respectively, according to CoreLogic.

For existing single-family homes, the median days on market fell to just eight in Santa Clara County in February, the Realtors association reported this week. That compares with 21.1 days for the entire Bay Area and 26.1 days for the state.

The median days on market is the time between when a home is listed and when an offer is accepted. Eight days means that half of the homes sold in Santa Clara County last month were on the market for that amount of time or less.

That sounds hard to believe, but “I think eight days is inflated to be honest,” said Doug Goss, broker associate with Keller Williams Bay Area Estates in Los Gatos. For most homes in Santa Clara County, “We could sell them on day one. Most brokers will purposely hold off looking for offers” for five to seven days to generate multiple bids.

Typically, agents list a home midweek, have an open house for agents and another for the public over the weekend and set an offer deadline for Tuesday or Wednesday of the next week, said Sandy Jamison, a broker with Tuscana Properties in San Jose. “We review offers. They come in so strong we don’t even spend a day negotiating. We just pick one … usually the one with the highest price and very few if no contingencies.”

This month’s poster child for market insanity was 1062 Plymouth Drive in Sunnyvale. The 848-square-foot home was listed at $1.45 million and sold in two days for $2 million, said Kevin Swartz, a Realtor with the Sereno Group in Saratoga.

“It’s very rare that homes are taking longer than two weeks to sell,” Swartz said. “If it’s more than 14 days, you question if it’s overpriced or termswise there is something strange they are asking.”

The same is true in many parts of the Bay Area and other U.S. cities.

One reason demand exceeds supply is that new-home creation has not kept up with population growth and demographic changes. But the existing-home market is also not as fluid as it used to be.

Many people who bought entry-level homes in the Bay Area would love to move up, but are afraid to sell because they might not be able to buy another home, agents say. And many long-term Bay Area homeowners would like to downsize, but won’t for tax reasons. If their home is worth more than they paid and put into improvements, they’d generally owe capital gains tax on the amount that exceeds $500,000 (married) or $250,000 (single).

And their property taxes might go up, even if they buy a smaller house. In California, under Proposition 13, property is reassessed only when it changes hands, with certain exceptions. In between transfers, its assessed value can’t go up by more than 2 percent a year.

Many longtime homeowners are paying a fraction of what they would pay in property tax if they sold their house and bought another of equal or even lesser value in a different county.

California homeowners who are 55 or older get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to sell their primary residence and buy another of equal or lesser value and transfer the assessed value of their current home to the replacement house, thereby preventing a property tax increase. However, the new home must be in the same county or in one of 11 counties that accept transfers of property tax values.

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The California Realtors Association levied a $100 assessment on its members to finance a ballot initiative that would let homeowners 55 or older transfer their existing property tax to any California county an unlimited number of times. It also would let them transfer it to a more expensive home, although in this case the difference in market value between the old and new homes would be added to the property tax assessment. If they bought a less expensive home, their property tax base would actually be reduced.

The association expects to announce Monday that it has gathered enough signatures to qualify the Property Tax Fairness Initiative for the November ballot. If approved by voters, the law would take effect in January.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that in the first few years, the initiative would cut property taxes by a few hundred million dollars per year, split between schools and local governments. “Over time these losses would grow, likely reaching between $1 billion to a few billion dollars per year (in today’s dollars) in the long term,” it said.

Other Net Worth columns by Kathleen Pender:

San Francisco earns its first triple-A credit rating in about 40 years

California on verge of creating retirement plan for private-sector workers

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Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/Bay-Area-home-prices-up-again-as-Santa-Clara-12774288.php

• San Francisco’s metropolitan area lost more residents than it attracted between 2016 and 2017, according to US census data.
• People are leaving San Francisco because of the out-of-control housing prices. The city’s median-priced home now costs $1.5 million.
• The nation’s tech capital risks losing talent if they can’t afford to live there.

People are leaving San Francisco because, as they say, the rent is too damn high.

US census data shows the region that includes San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward — a city in the East Bay that offers a quicker commute to Silicon Valley — lost more residents than it attracted between 2016 and 2017. And the migration is worsening in the Bay Area’s urban core.

The Wall Street Journal reported that in the year ending July 1, census data shows the area had a net loss of almost 24,000 residents who moved into other parts of California or the US.

The San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metropolitan area lost only half that many residents the year prior. As recently as 2013 – 2014, the region saw net annual gains of about 15,000 people.

A critical lack of affordable housing and sky-high rent prices have made the San Francisco Bay Area unlivable for many artists, artisans, longtime residents, and even tech entrepreneurs.

The median-priced home in San Francisco sells for $1.5 million, according to Paragon Real Estate Group. It’s not uncommon for buyers to bid hundreds of thousands above asking and pay in all cash.

The situation has forced many to rent longer than they would like. In March, San Francisco’s median two-bedroom rent of $3,040 was about two and a half times as high as the national average. Still, people are finding ways to make it work. They cram into communal housing, or “co-living” units, that offer perks like maid service and free internet in lieu of space. Some give up their internet, cable, and cars, while others take home wherever they go by living in vans.

The housing crisis could put Silicon Valley at risk

The San Francisco Bay Area, recognized as a global hub of tech finance and innovation, may be at risk of losing top tech workers if they can’t afford to live there, even on six-figure salaries.

A recent report from Paragon Real Estate Group showed that the household income required to buy a median-priced home in San Francisco reached an all-time high of $303,000 in December.

Katherine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which is based in San Francisco, responded to the report on Twitter, saying: “As a non-profit employer, I cannot see how we reconcile this with a future for our organization in San Francisco.”

She added: “Our local employees, particularly the younger ones, struggle to make ends meet. They leave when they start families. How can we be an equitable employer when only those who can afford to work for us, do?”

Brian Brennan, senior vice president at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, told the Wall Street Journal that while the area’s high-paying jobs and lifestyle still bring tech workers to the Bay Area, “it is hard to get the best talent outside of this region to come here and stay here.”

Article source: http://www.businessinsider.com/people-leaving-san-francisco-census-data-2018-3

If a “For Sale” sign pops up outside a San Francisco house, it’s advisable to run rather than walk and to skip unnecessary chores along the way, or else the place might not still be around when you get there.

Insurance company Nationwide released a report this week compiling MLS data about home sales in the U.S. and determined that San Francisco had the fourth fastest-selling homes in the country in 2017.

Altogether, the average San Francisco home spent 35 days on the market, according to Nationwide and it source, the data firm CoreLogic.

Only Colorado Springs (34 days); the Denver metro area (33 days); and the Kennewick-Richland, Washington area (31 days) beat SF in terms of speed of sale. Note that Kennewick has a population of only about 80,000 and thus a smaller sample size of home sales to draw on than a place like San Francisco or Denver.

Nationally, the report concludes that the average number of days on the market for the U.S. in general was 67 days, down from 120 in 2011.

Unfortunately, since last year’s report around the same time, Nationwide doesn’t include this particular statistic, so it’s impossible to compare whether it increased or decreased year over year using the same methods.

However, we can look at an alternative source: The listing site Realtor.com, which updates its statistics about home sales in each metro area monthly.

As of Realtor reports that the average San Francisco home sold in a heartstopping 21 days, roughly a quarter the national average of 83 days.

By comparison, in June of 2017 the same statistic on Realtor was just 24 days, which was already perilously fast in that case. That figure was flat year over year at the time but has somehow managed to decline since then.

The wide margin between the two different reports could be because Nationwide and CoreLogic took the average for all of 2017, whereas Realtor employs only figures for the beginning of 2018.

Note also that while Realtor uses the SF-Oakland-Hayward metro area, Nationwide’s figures represent the separate and drastically different SF-Redwood City metro. Finally, Realtor only concerns itself with listings on its own site, which are not 100 percent comprehensive, whereas CoreLogic rounded up homes on MLS.

For a third opinion, the real estate group Paragon’s most recent Bay Area housing report provided an average of just 23 days on the market for a house in San Francisco, and 36 days for a condo.

That’s an increase of two days for SF condos year over year, but a decline of an incredible nine days in how long a house sticks around compared to last year.

• Home Report, Q1 2018 [Nationwide]
• Home Report, Q1 2017 [Nationwide]
• [Realtor]
• San Jose Homes Sell Faster [Curbed SF]
• Bay Area Market Report [Paragon]

Article source: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/21/17146318/average-time-market-san-francisco-2018-home-sales

The Bay Area first showed up on European maps amid an imperial scramble to control the Americas’ indigenous lands, lives and resources. Between 1776 and 1833, the Spanish built 21 Catholic missions in California to claim Native lands and convert Native souls. By the end of their reign, Franciscan missionaries had baptized 81,586 California Indians and buried some 62,600, who perished from disease, displacement and starvation. Gould’s ancestors were among them.

Article source: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/native-women-oakland-land_us_5ab0f175e4b0e862383b503c