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If there was any doubt about Steph Curry’s desire to remain with Golden State for the long term, here’s something to remove it. Shortly after the 2016 season came to a close, the Warriors star and reigning league MVP paid $5.775 million for another estate in the suburbs of San Francisco’s East Bay.

Located behind gates in Alamo, the traditional-style estate sits at the end of a cul-de-sac on a street lined with lighted olive trees. The property includes a main house, a detached guest house, a six-car garage, a formal garden and an infinity-edge swimming pool.

Formula One heiress Petra Stunt lists the Manor for sale at $200 million

Start your engines. On the heels of the Playboy Mansion sale and Beverly House’s new $195-million listing, one of Los Angeles County’s biggest homes is gearing up for a run at a nine-figure sale.

The Manor, the former Candy and Aaron Spelling estate, is listing in the Westside neighborhood of Holmby…

Start your engines. On the heels of the Playboy Mansion sale and Beverly House’s new $195-million listing, one of Los Angeles County’s biggest homes is gearing up for a run at a nine-figure sale.

The Manor, the former Candy and Aaron Spelling estate, is listing in the Westside neighborhood of Holmby…

(Neal J. Leitereg)

The main house, built in 2006, features a library, a billiards room and a chef’s kitchen with an oversized, horseshoe-shaped island. A freestanding two-way fireplace sits between the formal living and dining rooms. Copper finishes and custom racks highlight a climate-controlled wine cellar.

Across the grounds, the guest house has two en suite bedrooms and a Finnish spa. In all, there are five bedroom, 8.5 bathrooms and five fireplaces in more than 10,000 square feet of living space.

NBA star LaMarcus Aldridge makes a $7-million splash in Newport’s Crystal Cove

LaMarcus Aldridge has landed in Southern California after all.

The five-time all-star, who chose the San Antonio Spurs over the Lakers a year ago, has bought a home in Newport Coast for $7 million in a deal done outside the Multiple Listing Service.

Behind gates in affluent Crystal Cove, the 2008…

LaMarcus Aldridge has landed in Southern California after all.

The five-time all-star, who chose the San Antonio Spurs over the Lakers a year ago, has bought a home in Newport Coast for $7 million in a deal done outside the Multiple Listing Service.

Behind gates in affluent Crystal Cove, the 2008…

(Neal J. Leitereg)

The property came to market last year for $7.288 million and was more recently priced at $5.98 million, records show.

Carolyn Gwynn of Paragon Real Estate Group was the listing agent. Christian Carrigg of Proximity Real Estate represented the buyer.

Curry has been in buy and sell mode of late. Late last year, he and wife Ayesha paid $3.2 million for an 8,000-square-foot home in the Walnut Creek area. This past June, the couple turned a tidy profit on their Orinda home, selling the vineyard property for $4.65 million or $755,000 over the asking price.

The 28-year-old point guard notched his second Most Valuable Player award last year, hitting a record 402 three-pointers during the regular season. He is entering the final year of a bargain four-year, $44 million contract he signed in 2012. His next deal is expected to be in the ballpark of $165 million, according to ESPN’s Marc Stein.

neal.leitereg@latimes.com

Twitter: @NJLeitereg

MORE HOT PROPERTIES:

Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell put their Pacific Palisades home up for sale

LACMA co-chair Elaine Wynn seeks $25 million for lodge-retreat in Idaho

Julia Roberts’ beachfront spread in Hawaii now offered for $19.5 million

‘Tool Man’ Tim Allen cuts loose of Hollywood Hills West home

Article source: http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/hot-property/la-fi-hotprop-steph-curry-bay-area-home-20161007-snap-story.html

If there was any doubt about Steph Curry’s desire to remain with Golden State for the long term, here’s something to remove it. Shortly after the 2016 season came to a close, the Warriors star and reigning league MVP paid $5.775 million for another estate in the suburbs of San Francisco’s East Bay.

Located behind gates in Alamo, the traditional-style estate sits at the end of a cul-de-sac on a street lined with lighted olive trees. The property includes a main house, a detached guest house, a six-car garage, a formal garden and an infinity-edge swimming pool.

Formula One heiress Petra Stunt lists the Manor for sale at $200 million

Start your engines. On the heels of the Playboy Mansion sale and Beverly House’s new $195-million listing, one of Los Angeles County’s biggest homes is gearing up for a run at a nine-figure sale.

The Manor, the former Candy and Aaron Spelling estate, is listing in the Westside neighborhood of Holmby…

Start your engines. On the heels of the Playboy Mansion sale and Beverly House’s new $195-million listing, one of Los Angeles County’s biggest homes is gearing up for a run at a nine-figure sale.

The Manor, the former Candy and Aaron Spelling estate, is listing in the Westside neighborhood of Holmby…

(Neal J. Leitereg)

The main house, built in 2006, features a library, a billiards room and a chef’s kitchen with an oversized, horseshoe-shaped island. A freestanding two-way fireplace sits between the formal living and dining rooms. Copper finishes and custom racks highlight a climate-controlled wine cellar.

Across the grounds, the guest house has two en suite bedrooms and a Finnish spa. In all, there are five bedroom, 8.5 bathrooms and five fireplaces in more than 10,000 square feet of living space.

NBA star LaMarcus Aldridge makes a $7-million splash in Newport’s Crystal Cove

LaMarcus Aldridge has landed in Southern California after all.

The five-time all-star, who chose the San Antonio Spurs over the Lakers a year ago, has bought a home in Newport Coast for $7 million in a deal done outside the Multiple Listing Service.

Behind gates in affluent Crystal Cove, the 2008…

LaMarcus Aldridge has landed in Southern California after all.

The five-time all-star, who chose the San Antonio Spurs over the Lakers a year ago, has bought a home in Newport Coast for $7 million in a deal done outside the Multiple Listing Service.

Behind gates in affluent Crystal Cove, the 2008…

(Neal J. Leitereg)

The property came to market last year for $7.288 million and was more recently priced at $5.98 million, records show.

Carolyn Gwynn of Paragon Real Estate Group was the listing agent. Christian Carrigg of Proximity Real Estate represented the buyer.

Curry has been in buy and sell mode of late. Late last year, he and wife Ayesha paid $3.2 million for an 8,000-square-foot home in the Walnut Creek area. This past June, the couple turned a tidy profit on their Orinda home, selling the vineyard property for $4.65 million or $755,000 over the asking price.

The 28-year-old point guard notched his second Most Valuable Player award last year, hitting a record 402 three-pointers during the regular season. He is entering the final year of a bargain four-year, $44 million contract he signed in 2012. His next deal is expected to be in the ballpark of $165 million, according to ESPN’s Marc Stein.

neal.leitereg@latimes.com

Twitter: @NJLeitereg

MORE HOT PROPERTIES:

Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell put their Pacific Palisades home up for sale

LACMA co-chair Elaine Wynn seeks $25 million for lodge-retreat in Idaho

Julia Roberts’ beachfront spread in Hawaii now offered for $19.5 million

‘Tool Man’ Tim Allen cuts loose of Hollywood Hills West home

Article source: http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/hot-property/la-fi-hotprop-steph-curry-bay-area-home-20161007-snap-story.html

The Sunset District may be losing its cool.

The oft-foggy locale has been named San Francisco’s hottest neighborhood for home-selling over asking price in a recent real estate market report.

Home appreciation in the Sunset-Parkside neighborhood rose
8 percent, compared to the first eight months of 2015, according to a report released by San Francisco-based Paragon Real Estate Group on Wednesday.

The report found that some 270 homes were sold so far this year and, for the second straight year, prices of homes sold have exceeded list prices by 20 percent, with the median price of homes sold at $1,239,000.

“I’ve never [before] been able to say that the Sunset is the hottest market in The City,” said Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst for the Paragon Real Estate Group.

The Sunset is not considered by its residents to be particularly edgy or trendy. The neighborhood, consisting primarily of single-family homes, has been a popular spot for families for decades. Bread-and-butter businesses, like grocery and hardware stores, offer a more small-town vibe.

Weather is also considered a less desirable aspect, as the area is part of the fog belt that often leads to overcast skies.

Yet, it appears rising demand for single-family homes with a yard has trumped the weather issue. Affordability is the chief factor cited for the neighborhood’s newfound popularity.

“Nobody is building [single-family] homes in The City,” Carlisle said. “Houses are becoming a rare commodity. The Sunset offers the greatest section of homes.”

Carlisle said no more than 10 new single-family homes were built in The City last year.

The trend of neighborhood transportation has also changed over the years. Two decades ago, for instance, more Sunset residents were reportedly traveling downtown for work.

However, with the advent of the technology giants like Apple, Google and Genentech located on the Peninsula, ready access to major highways leading south from the Sunset makes the area especially attractive today.

Supervisor Katy Tang, who represents the Sunset, acknowledged the increasing challenge in affordability and has been working to keep families living in San Francisco.

“The Sunset District has been an attractive place for families to live for many generations,” Supervisor Katy Tang said in an email to the San Francisco Examiner. “Of course, the danger with rising house prices is that many families are not able to continue living in The City.”

Woody LaBounty of the Western Neighborhoods Project is a long-time historian of what was once known as “The Outside Lands,” which includes the Sunset. He said the neighborhood was first settled by Irish and Italians with their large families moving from the Mission District and other parts of The City in the 1920s. More recently, Asian residents have settled in the area.

The neighborhood decades ago was known for affordable, chock-a-block housing with a suburban-like feel. The Sunset’s easy access to Ocean Beach and Golden Gate Park also drew artists, beach-enthusiasts and other bohemian-lifestyle lovers.

LaBounty noted the area’s reputation began changing from a Coney Island feel to a more upscale spot in the mid-2000s when several establishments opened featuring craft beers and finer cuisine.

“The Sunset District has always been an unappreciated jewel in San Francisco,” LaBounty said. “I think a lot of people are a little wary of the change. We want it to stay ‘the neighborhood.’ It has always been a neighborhood—not a trendy neighborhood. Most residents want it to stay that way.”

Article source: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sunset-district-real-estate-sizzling-sf-neighborhood/

NEW YORK Even with a good salary as a data scientist at a San Francisco technology firm, Yang Guo, 30, knew he couldn’t afford a home in the Bay Area, among the priciest U.S. markets.

He still wanted to own property in addition to stocks, however, and soon found a way to buy cheap rental houses in faraway cities – and to outsource the associated hassles to HomeUnion, a three-year-old startup in Irvine, California.

The firm is among a small crop of new companies, including competitors Investability and Roofstock, that offer ways to buy, renovate and manage properties in markets that command relatively strong rents compared to their low home prices.

The risks remain the same as any landlord faces, from vacancies to broken appliances to the potential for a rent- or home-price downturn. And using such services places a lot of faith in young companies with short track records.

But the firms, launched after the housing crisis, say they can take much of the worry and work out of owning out-of-state rentals, for fees that typically run from 7 percent to 10 percent for property management and 3 percent for acquisition. Their clients usually buy one or two homes to supplement their incomes and investment portfolios.

The companies are pulling in money from clients in costly coastal markets that is boosting demand and home prices in the lower-cost cities they target. “In the last 12 months, I’ve seen more cash buyers from California than I’ve ever seen in my career, and I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” said Anne Callahan, a real estate agent in Cleveland, Ohio, where the average rent for a single-family home is up 4.2 percent over the last year, according to Zillow Research.

Earlier this year, Guo bought and fixed up a small home in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama that he found through HomeUnion. He purchased another home in the suburbs of Columbia, South Carolina – spending about $60,000 on the pair.

Now, from his apartment in San Francisco’s trendy South of Market neighborhood, Guo collects monthly checks from tenants he has never met in properties that he has never seen, all located more than 2,000 miles away.

“There’s too much risk with buying property in the Bay Area,” Guo said. “As long as the cash flow is coming and hitting my bank account, I basically don’t care about seeing them in person.”

Buyers like Guo are attracted to less glamorous regions where home prices and rents have risen at modest rates in the housing recovery. They’re eyeing steady income rather than rapid home-price appreciation.

In suburban Atlanta, the average landlord of a single-family home reaps a 25.8 percent gross annual yield, a measure of annual rent divided by median sales price, not including other potential costs, according to real estate data firm RealtyTrac. That compares with just a 3.4 percent yield in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the median home price was $675,000 in August, according to data provider CoreLogic.

“It’s all people from the coasts coming to us and saying, ‘We want to find a way to buy properties out of state,’” said Don Ganguly, the chief executive of HomeUnion. LEARNING TO BE A LANDLORD

Most homes purchased through the firms go for between $50,000 and $150,000, the companies said, or about typical for first-time home buyers in the same markets.

Florida has long been the most popular state for out-of-state investors, in large part because of its beaches, but lower-priced states such as Georgia, Tennessee, and Ohio are emerging as destinations for buyers from beyond their borders, according to RealtyTrac.

For a graphic showing top markets for out-of-state landlords, see: tmsnrt.rs/2dvEq7l

While these investors have identified a real opportunity, their inexperience and lack of local market knowledge can lead to some mistakes, real estate agents said.

“You see these people coming from California and what I like to call ‘yuppie-ing up a place,’ but they don’t realize it’s not in the best area because they didn’t do their homework,” said Tony Kazanas, a real estate agent in Cleveland.

Guo, the San Francisco investor, had no experience as a landlord and is already realizing that it is not as simple as he imagined.

His property near Birmingham – in a metro area whose 14.4 percent vacancy doubles the 6.9 percent average nationwide – sat empty for a few months before he landed a tenant. The high cost of property insurance, meanwhile, is making him wary of buying in areas susceptible to hurricanes and other natural disasters.

There are signs, too, that the rental industry is cooling off. After the housing crash, hedge funds raced into beaten down markets including Las Vegas and Los Angeles, buying up large blocs of single family homes to rent out. But some institutional investors are now eyeing an exit strategy. Blackstone Group LP’s Invitation Homes announced in July that it expects to sell about 5 percent of its about 50,000 homes to current renters.

In addition, while U.S. rents have risen by an average of 4.1 percent since 2010, average rents in New York, San Francisco and San Jose fell in the third quarter for the first time during that period. The decrease in expensive markets could presage broader weakness rent prices nationally.

BUYING WITH RETIREMENT FUNDS Many investors still see a long-term play. They are turning to self-directed individual retirement accounts, which allow investors to buy property and let their rental income build tax-free as long the home is kept for investment, not personal use. Some buyers use their IRAs to pay cash for rental properties, but others get mortgages from niche lenders that offer them on properties held in retirement accounts.

“Self-directed IRAs are becoming a more critical piece of property sales as an investment,” said Dennis Cisterna, chief revenue officer at Investability. Major asset management firms like Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade do not allow account holders to buy property directly using their IRAs. Smaller firms such as Oakland-based The Entrust Group, which manages about $2.2 billion in assets, say that about a third of clients use their self-directed IRAs to buy real estate, with Kentucky, Alabama, and Arizona among the most popular markets for California-based clients. Guo, the San Francisco investor, used cash savings and took out a mortgage on each property. The monthly notes for both houses total less than what he pays in rent in San Francisco, he said.

He takes some of out every paycheck and earmarks it for real estate, hoping to build a portfolio of at least 10 rental properties for less than what it would cost to buy a single home in the Bay Area.

“There’s nothing like the competition that you see in San Francisco,” he said.

(Reporting by David Randall; Edited by Dan Burns and Brian Thevenot)

Article source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-housing-investors-idUSKCN1271FL

Article source: https://www.timeout.com/san-francisco/blog/bay-area-real-estate-is-so-hot-some-people-shop-from-the-air-100416