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Maltzan has had an illustrious career, winning some of the highest accolades available to his profession: five Progressive Architecture awards; 42 citations from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the 2016 AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal; and the Rudy Bruner Foundation’s Gold Medal for Urban Excellence. In 2015, Time Magazine included Matzan’s work on L.A.’s Star Apartments as one of its 25 best inventions of the year.

Before forming his own firm, Maltzan worked with Frank Gehry. Michael Matzan has designed buildings both internationally (such as Qaumajuq, the Inuit Art Centre in Canada and BookBar in the Jinhua Architecture Park in China), nationally (such as MoMa Queens, New York and the New Vassar Residence Hall at MIT in Massachusetts) and locally (the Disney Concert Hall and the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles).

As his firm is located in Los Angeles, the majority of his work in the state is also in Southern California. This home at 1241 Main Street is the only Bay Area private residence Matzan built. 

Matzan built the 2,470 square-foot home for his sister and her husband, designer Thomas Meyerhoffer.

Meyerhoffer is also a star in his profession, the first designer hired by Apple’s Chief Design Officer. He has since formed his own company, Latch, and has designed for both startups and global brands.

From this seaside home, Meyerhoffer has also designed his alternative-shaped surfboards, “which he tested at the many world-class surf breaks from Santa Cruz to San Francisco,” Compass listing agent Stephanie Sills told SFGATE.

This modern, three-bedroom, two-bathroom ocean view abode has been in the same family since Matzan built it. 

Montara locals have probably walked right past the home, while architecture fans the world over may recognize the home from its feature in Dwell Magazine, California Style, Surfer’s Journal, ID Magazine, Outside Magazine and other publications. 

Anna Marie Erwert writes from both the renter and new buyer perspective, having (finally) achieved both statuses. She focuses on national real estate trends, specializing in the San Francisco Bay Area and Pacific Northwest. Follow Anna on Twitter: @AnnaMarieErwert. 

Article source: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/bay-area-beach-house-with-famous-owner-hits-market-17032127.php

Those in the thick of the region’s frenzied housing market say the barrier to entry has only gotten higher since the coronavirus upended daily life. Prospective buyers are borrowing cash or moving farther away. Residents who already own homes are going to extremes to keep them. Those shut out of homeownership are spending more on rent, widening inequality and increasing fears about essential workers like teachers being priced out for good.

“To be able to qualify for any of these houses anywhere in the Bay Area, you have to have an average annual income of $235,000,” said Tim Yee, a real estate broker and president of RE/MAX Gold Bay Area. “It’s crazy, and for first-time home buyers, it’s extraordinarily hard unless they have very wealthy parents.”

In San Francisco, 47% of homes for sale were affordable to middle-class buyers — defined as those making 80% to 120% of the local median income — as recently as 2010, according to the report. Alameda and Santa Clara counties saw even steeper declines in affordable home sales, from almost 70% and 63% of homes sold in 2010, respectively, to just over 30% in 2019.

Though prices have been rising for decades, economists like Stanford University’s Mark Duggan said “little breaking points” are getting harder to ignore. They range from anecdotes about truck drivers and teachers leaving the state to worker shortages at local institutions like his kids’ own Palo Alto schools.

“My school district couldn’t get bus drivers, so all the parents have to cobble together carpools,” said Duggan, the director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “My view as an economist would just be pay the bus drivers a lot more.”

The pay problem

During the Bay Area’s boom years from 1940 to 1960, the average home sold for around $15,000, equivalent to about $140,000 today, according to the Terner Center report. Rents averaged around $80 a month, or roughly $760 in today’s dollars. Housing costs were largely in line with incomes, allowing factory workers, teachers, nurses and line cooks to spend less than a third of their incomes on housing.

With median home prices hovering around $1 million as of 2019, the report found 39% of middle-class Bay Area homeowners spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

For renters, the cost burden is even higher, showing how being shut out of homeownership can drain savings and reinforce wealth gaps. About 49% of middle-class Bay Area renters spent a higher portion of their earnings on housing in 2019.

“The prospects are dwindling as costs continue to rise and incomes don’t go up,” said Terner Center policy director David Garcia, who has seen the pressure push more Bay Area workers to areas like his hometown of Stockton. “It’s not just kind of a coastal area problem,” he said. “These affordability issues are increasingly kind of seeping into more suburban and rural portions of the state.”

Across California, about 52% percent of middle-income residents owned their home as of 2019, down from more than 59% in 2000. The numbers also mask stark racial divides. Almost two-thirds of Black middle-class households in California rent their homes, compared with 37% of white households, which the report attributes to factors including lower average pay, discrimination in home lending and the legacy of racist housing laws.

Income aside, the report highlights a severe lack of new homes and disproportionately expensive housing in areas that are building. As it stands, California ranks No. 49 for the fewest homes per capita, with 358 existing homes per 1,000 people, compared with the national average of 419 homes.

That imbalance is increasing pressure on lawmakers to consider more radical reforms. In addition to recent moves away from single-family zoning and increasing penalties for communities that refuse to build new housing, state Assembly Member Alex Lee, D-Milpitas, also sees an opportunity to increase support for “social housing” concepts already popular overseas in places like Vienna and Singapore.

The Bay Area could increase housing for workers, students and others, he says, by repurposing public infrastructure like parking lots and shuttered schools and turning them into mixed-income housing. Under his bill, AB2053, a new California Housing Authority would both buy existing housing and build homes where higher-earning residents’ payments would help subsidize lower rents for neighbors.

“I hope social housing would give a competitive option,” Lee said. “All the options are pretty bad right now.”

Stay or go?

In the sweltering heat and paralyzing uncertainty of August 2020, Sharon Dolan had a big decision to make.

Her now-ex-husband had moved out of the Oakland fixer-upper they bought in 2008. So the longtime nonprofit and theater executive had to decide if she was going to find a way to keep the house, downsize or leave the Bay Area like many other artists she knows.

With wildfire smoke choking out the sun, she got in her car and drove. First to a friend’s in Western Massachusetts, then down the Atlantic coast, then into the West’s vast natural parks.

“I was kind of thinking about, ‘Where would I live if I could live anywhere?’” Dolan recalled. “The conclusion I came to was I’m happy in the Bay Area.”

With the help of a retired real estate agent, a plan emerged to refinance the house, buy out her ex and install a kitchenette to rent out the upstairs. Dolan said she was fortunate to find a good housemate.

The $2,500-a-month mortgage, plus property taxes and other ownership costs, would have been out of reach on Dolan’s pay alone, which in recent years has averaged slightly above Oakland’s $80,000 median household income.

“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to stay in the Bay Area or ever retire,” said Dolan, 62. “But I have some equity.”

Entire online subcultures exist for other Bay Area residents interested in various forms of “house hacking” to pay high mortgages or keep up an inherited family home. Other corners of Facebook and Reddit are populated by fed-up families mapping out exits to lower-cost states, plus all manner of hustlers looking to break into the market by taking out risky loans or targeting distressed properties.

There’s also the option of leaving. Though as a former Bay Area resident himself, Davis Realtor Greg Stidham knows it can be difficult to give up big coastal cities for more affordable inland areas.

Some first-time buyers are swayed, he said, by the chance to own the kind of three-bed, two-bath home where they can raise a family. He also sees transplants looking to cash out on Bay Area homes bought long ago, driving up the local market, but also offering a chance to put down roots before weddings, graduations, retirements and other milestones.

“All those life events are still happening,” he said, “and this market doesn’t care.”

Whoever buys this 1,940-square-foot Usonian home will have minimal upkeep, a testament to the sturdiness of Wright’s designs.

This partial hexagon-design property was built in 1952 for the Mathews family, seven years before Wright’s death. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Wright “only designed a couple (of homes) in the Bay Area,” says the listing agent, Monique Lombardelli of Modern Homes Realty, “including the Hanna House on the Stanford University campus.”

Paul and Jean Hanna commissioned that design in 1936 and gifted it to the university in 1975. It’s open twice a year to the public.

While interior photos of the three-bedroom, two-bathroom Mathews House are still being taken and will be released shortly, Lombardelli says it’s in impeccable shape.

Constructed with concrete, glass, and redwood, it features Philippine mahogany built-ins inside. Two other major selling points are the home’s indoor-outdoor flow and outdoor pool.

MORE FROM REALTOR:

• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Freeman House Is Listed in Hollywood Hills for $4.25M
• One of Indiana’s 7 Remaining Frank Lloyd Wright Homes Is Listed for $750K
• Houston’s Only Home Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Sells for $2.7M

It’s set on about an acre of land—in a town where property goes for a serious premium.

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“The home is in amazing condition. [The sellers] have maintained it perfectly. They put on a new roof and have done different work to make sure the flooring is perfect,” Lombardelli says. “It was a family home, and the kids are grown and have their own homes and their own families now.”

Well-known landscaper Thomas Church built the gardens when the home was first unveiled.

“These homes are like collector items,” Lombardelli says. “There are people who collect these homes like they would art. We have people who will wait to find something like this. They can’t live in any other style of home.”

At $8 million, it’s also priced competitively in Atherton, where the median listing price is $11.2 million. The sale will include the home’s original Danish modern furnishings and built-ins.

There are a few other restored midcentury modern homes in this exclusive community, including Joseph Eichler’s former residence. “But a Frank Lloyd Wright home is on a different scale, unlike anything else,” says Lombardelli.

The post Rare Frank Lloyd Wright House in Atherton, CA, Available for $8M appeared first on Real Estate News Insights | realtor.com®.

Article source: https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Rare-Frank-Lloyd-Wright-House-in-Atherton-CA-17001695.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight

The company calculates its “compete scores” by combining data on the number of competing offers, contingencies waived by the buyer, the sale to list ratio (the final sale price divided by the last list price), and number of days on market. It uses a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the most competitive in an area.

While buyers duke it out in the suburbs, the city centers have been relatively quiet, according to Redfin. “Within the country’s large metro areas … the pattern is pretty consistent,” said Redfin economist Taylor Marr. “The more urban you get, the less competitive it is.”

We looked at the compete scores for Bay Area neighborhoods for the period from Nov. 14-Dec. 14, 2021, and narrowed it down to only those areas where at least 50 homes were sold. That excluded many neighborhoods, but allowed us to examine only neighborhoods for which robust data was available.

North Fremont reigns

North Fremont, which is primarily the 94555 ZIP code, topped the list with the highest compete score of 91, calculated by an average sale-to-list ratio of 108%, a median 9 days on market and 87% of homes sold above listing.

Denise Kashyap, a Fremont realtor with Realty One Group, said North Fremont’s central location is appealing to a lot of home buyers, with its proximity to the Dumbarton Bridge and Interstate 880.

“It’s accessible to go north to the city, south to San Jose and to the Peninsula, or even further out to the East Bay,” she said. “No matter where people are working or what direction they’re going, the North Fremont area is so central.”

According to the U.S. Census, the 94555 ZIP code has a median age of 37.2 years old, is 72% Asian, 14% white, 6% Hispanic and 3% Black. The median household income is just over $161,000, and 2.8% of residents live below the poverty line.

Kashyap said she is seeing either current residents looking to stay in the area and “move up for more square footage,” or buyers from the South Bay and Peninsula who are working remotely and are looking for “award-winning public schools” and “more square footage than their current residences for the same price point.” And, she added, the commute is still reasonable if they have to go to the office once or twice a week.

Many of the new buyers are families with school-age children looking for more space and highly ranked schools. She said at a recent open house, every prospective buyer asked about American High, a top ranked high school in the Bay Area.

Some homes in the area with bigger lots were built in the mid-1980s to early ’90s, while others are bigger homes with smaller lots that were built from 2016 to 2019, and interest in both types of houses is split, Kashyap said.

Other Silicon Valley hot spots

The next highest scores were all in Silicon Valley neighborhoods, with Sunnyvale West coming in second with a compete score of 90, and San Jose’s Blossom Valley coming in third with 89.

Four more San Jose neighborhoods — Berryessa, Cambrian-Pioneer, West Valley and Almaden Valley — ranked next on the list with compete scores of 87 to 88. East End in Alameda, Irvington in Fremont and North Hills in Oakland rounded out the top 10.

“These hot spots are all really close to each other, and not too far east, not too far north or south,” Marr said. Many of the neighborhoods are suburbs closer to Bay Area city centers, making the occasional commute to the office doable, he said.

He said there is a “strong relationship between some very desirable suburbs that usually have good school districts,” which is what we’re seeing in many of the South Bay suburban areas that are highly competitive.

“Home buyers are most likely to face multiple offer situations, and homes typically sit on the market a very short amount of time,” Marr said. That’s in contrast to city centers including San Francisco, where “homes are less likely to see over asking,” and there are many condos that are “not as desirable.”

Available and pending homes on Redfin in the North Fremont show include a 1,830-square-foot home built in 1992 listed March 23 for $1.79 million, with a pending sale at $2.18 million. Another home at nearly 2,000 square feet was built in 2018, and is going for $2.1 million.

Recent dynamic shows signs of slowdown

Marr said back in 2017, the pattern was the “exact opposite”: Most of the competition was in walkable neighborhoods that were close to jobs in major cities including San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles. But then the pandemic caused a “major acceleration” in the other direction, he said.

“It dramatically pulled competition in the city center and core cities … and drove demand toward the suburbs,” he said. This class of buyers was selling their homes in urban areas and looking to “buy up” by moving outward and finding bigger homes with more space.

“This in effect created much stronger competition in the desirable suburbs,” Marr said.

Still, this pattern already appears to be slowing down. Marr said broadly speaking, rising mortgage interest rates and a volatile stock market show signs of easing the competition a bit across the board.

“We’re seeing some early signs of people touring fewer homes, according to showing time data in California,” he said, and Google searches for home listings appear to be declining, which “may change the magnitude in competition.”

The company calculates its “compete scores” by combining data on the number of competing offers, contingencies waived by the buyer, the sale to list ratio (the final sale price divided by the last list price), and number of days on market. It uses a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being the most competitive in an area.

While buyers duke it out in the suburbs, the city centers have been relatively quiet, according to Redfin. “Within the country’s large metro areas … the pattern is pretty consistent,” said Redfin economist Taylor Marr. “The more urban you get, the less competitive it is.”

We looked at the compete scores for Bay Area neighborhoods for the period from Nov. 14-Dec. 14, 2021, and narrowed it down to only those areas where at least 50 homes were sold. That excluded many neighborhoods, but allowed us to examine only neighborhoods for which robust data was available.

North Fremont reigns

North Fremont, which is primarily the 94555 ZIP code, topped the list with the highest compete score of 91, calculated by an average sale-to-list ratio of 108%, a median 9 days on market and 87% of homes sold above listing.

Denise Kashyap, a Fremont realtor with Realty One Group, said North Fremont’s central location is appealing to a lot of home buyers, with its proximity to the Dumbarton Bridge and Interstate 880.

“It’s accessible to go north to the city, south to San Jose and to the Peninsula, or even further out to the East Bay,” she said. “No matter where people are working or what direction they’re going, the North Fremont area is so central.”

According to the U.S. Census, the 94555 ZIP code has a median age of 37.2 years old, is 72% Asian, 14% white, 6% Hispanic and 3% Black. The median household income is just over $161,000, and 2.8% of residents live below the poverty line.

Kashyap said she is seeing either current residents looking to stay in the area and “move up for more square footage,” or buyers from the South Bay and Peninsula who are working remotely and are looking for “award-winning public schools” and “more square footage than their current residences for the same price point.” And, she added, the commute is still reasonable if they have to go to the office once or twice a week.

Many of the new buyers are families with school-age children looking for more space and highly ranked schools. She said at a recent open house, every prospective buyer asked about American High, a top ranked high school in the Bay Area.

Some homes in the area with bigger lots were built in the mid-1980s to early ’90s, while others are bigger homes with smaller lots that were built from 2016 to 2019, and interest in both types of houses is split, Kashyap said.

Other Silicon Valley hot spots

The next highest scores were all in Silicon Valley neighborhoods, with Sunnyvale West coming in second with a compete score of 90, and San Jose’s Blossom Valley coming in third with 89.

Four more San Jose neighborhoods — Berryessa, Cambrian-Pioneer, West Valley and Almaden Valley — ranked next on the list with compete scores of 87 to 88. East End in Alameda, Irvington in Fremont and North Hills in Oakland rounded out the top 10.

“These hot spots are all really close to each other, and not too far east, not too far north or south,” Marr said. Many of the neighborhoods are suburbs closer to Bay Area city centers, making the occasional commute to the office doable, he said.

He said there is a “strong relationship between some very desirable suburbs that usually have good school districts,” which is what we’re seeing in many of the South Bay suburban areas that are highly competitive.

“Home buyers are most likely to face multiple offer situations, and homes typically sit on the market a very short amount of time,” Marr said. That’s in contrast to city centers including San Francisco, where “homes are less likely to see over asking,” and there are many condos that are “not as desirable.”

Available and pending homes on Redfin in the North Fremont show include a 1,830-square-foot home built in 1992 listed March 23 for $1.79 million, with a pending sale at $2.18 million. Another home at nearly 2,000 square feet was built in 2018, and is going for $2.1 million.

Recent dynamic shows signs of slowdown

Marr said back in 2017, the pattern was the “exact opposite”: Most of the competition was in walkable neighborhoods that were close to jobs in major cities including San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles. But then the pandemic caused a “major acceleration” in the other direction, he said.

“It dramatically pulled competition in the city center and core cities … and drove demand toward the suburbs,” he said. This class of buyers was selling their homes in urban areas and looking to “buy up” by moving outward and finding bigger homes with more space.

“This in effect created much stronger competition in the desirable suburbs,” Marr said.

Still, this pattern already appears to be slowing down. Marr said broadly speaking, rising mortgage interest rates and a volatile stock market show signs of easing the competition a bit across the board.

“We’re seeing some early signs of people touring fewer homes, according to showing time data in California,” he said, and Google searches for home listings appear to be declining, which “may change the magnitude in competition.”