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Want to buy a house in San Francisco but frustrated at the stubbornly low level of inventory? Lucky for you, some new real estate is coming to market. The cost? In the mere “low $1,000,000s.”

Imgur/Wolcam

That’s right: The supply-and-demand situation in the San Francisco Bay Area is today so out of whack that the people behind a new development in the city’s Lake Merced neighborhood felt they could attract eyeballs with a billboard suggesting their starting–at–$1 million value proposition.

Eyeballs captured, the billboard quickly made the rounds on social media:

Here’s a look at what those “low $1,000,000s” will buy you: a 1,547-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath town home (listed on real estate site Redfin for about $1,012,000).

Redfin

Less near that mythical million-dollar mark is this three-bedroom, 3 ½-bathroom, 2,393-square-foot town house listed for somewhat over $1,649,900.

“You’ll take in the lifestyle of the city but leave all the limitations of San Francisco behind,” according to the development’s website. “So, when your day is done, you’ll pull into the garage, hit the button and walk into a place that’s different from the start.”

Translation: This development is well removed the city’s hustle and bustle, and it’s not in a traditionally sought-after neighborhood. The Lake Merced area is located in the city’s southwest corner. It’s about as far from the Financial District or the charm and attractions of, say, North Beach as one could get and still be within city limits.

This is not the first San Francisco property listing to garner widespread attention of late. Recall the shack that was listed for $350,000 and sold in September 2015 for $408,000, nearly 17% above the asking price. The real-estate agent referred to the house as “above and beyond distressed.” That frank admission signaled that the value was in the land, not the structure standing on it. Fair enough. But the land itself is located in the shadows of both a busy freeway and BART tracks, in a relatively remote and rundown section of the city.

Don’t miss: Mapping the San Francisco–area real estate market, BART station by BART station

If that doesn’t sufficiently impress (or exasperate) you, a perusal of listings in the city’s more central and amenity-rich areas may leave you rethinking Lake Merced and its “low $1,000,000s” town houses.

Take the one-bedroom, two-bath home of 1,428 square feet located near the ATT Park that’s currently on the market for $1,950,000, plus $563.36 in monthly homeowners-association dues.

Redfin

Or this three-bedroom, two-bath home in the hipster enclave Mission Dolores. A significantly more sizable property than the one-bedroom near the ballpark, at 2,580 square feet, this house, previously a two-unit property, has recently taken a “huge price reduction” — all the way down to $2,599,000.

Home prices in San Francisco have risen 10.5% on a year-over-year basis, while U.S. house prices overall were up 5.7% in January compared with a year earlier, the SP/Case-Shiller 20-city index showed in March.

National builder Hovnanian last month announced its intention to up stakes in the Bay Area, pronouncing the market “frothy,” “lofty” and “almost speculative.”

Article source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ridiculousness-of-san-francisco-real-estate-summed-up-in-one-billboard-2016-04-05

If you want to buy a home anywhere in the Bay Area, you will face serious sticker shock. And according to a new map by Estately, the wattage could depend on which BART or Caltrain stop you want leave near.

“It’s no secret Bay Area home prices are among the highest in the country, but Estately wanted to show how those prices vary depending on which BART or Caltrain stop a home is near,”” the company notes. “To do this, Estately Real Estate Search analyzed the last six months of home sales for houses, townhouses, and condos that were within a one-mile radius of each BART and Caltrain transit stop. We then broke them down by price per square foot.”

The five most expensive BART stops:

• Embarcadero (median sale price, $1,150,000; price per square foot, $1,191)
• Montgomery ($1,100,000; $1,149)
• Powell ($1,008,000; $1,099)
• 24th Street ($1,372,500; $1,001)
• 16th Street ($1,239,500; $998)

The five least expensive BART stops:

• Pittsburg/Bay Point ($430,000; price per square foot, $219)
• Richmond ($285,000; $258)
• Coliseum ($285,000; $270)
• North Concord/Martinez ($420,000; $306)
• Concord ($410,000; $317)

And let’s not forget Caltrain. While prices get steep around San Francisco’s 4th Street and King station ($1,120 due to its SoMa location near ATT Park and Muni lines), they dive at San Mateo ($724) and Hayward Park ($770), but then climb back up to seemingly impossible heights in Menlo Park ($1,181) and Palo Alto ($1,354) before plunging dramatically back down at Santa Clara ($615) and Gilroy ($314).

Whew. Quite the rollercoaster ride. Behold:

• Bay Area Home Prices by Transit Stop [Estately]
• This BART real estate map shows how costly it will be to follow your Silicon Valley startup dream [Venture Beat]

Article source: http://sf.curbed.com/2016/4/4/11362564/map-bay-area-home-prices-bart-public-transit

Moving to the bright lights of Silicon Valley is the dream of every entrepreneur around the world who believes they can be the next MarkSteveElonMuskJobsZuckerberg.

But it’s getting quite crowded around these parts. Housing is scarce and cars are gumming up the highways and byways.

In the past, the antidote was to take the Bay Area Regional Transit system that links the region, or Caltrain along the Peninsula. Just get a place within walking distance of BART or Caltrain, and zip into the city. Boom.

Alas, you’re going to have to live pretty far out to find something reasonable, according to a new map published by Estately, a San Francisco-based home buying site.

“It’s no secret Bay Area home prices are among the highest in the country, but Estately wanted to show how those prices vary depending on which BART or Caltrain stop a home is near,” the company writes. “To do this, Estately Real Estate Search analyzed the last six months of home sales for houses, townhouses, and condos that were within a one-mile radius of each BART and Caltrain transit stop. We then broke them down by price per square foot.”

Your best bet for the Bay Area is living near the Pittsburgh/Bay Point stop. Average cost per square foot is $219, lowest in the region. But according to BART’s website, that’s a 52-minute train ride to downtown San Francisco at a cost of $6.55 each direction.

Woof.

Of course, if you want to save time, you could look near the downtown Embarcadero stop. But that’s the priciest in the region, at $1,191 per square foot.

Caltrain, the north-south train line that connects San Francisco with Silicon Valley and San Jose is also beyond pricey when it comes to real estate. If you want to live in Palo Alto near a station, you’ll cough up $1,630 per square foot.

The cheaper bet is Gilroy (the garlic capital!). At $314 per square foot, it’s still nutty, though. It’s doable if you’re going to work in San Jose, or maybe even Palo Alto. But it’s a two-hour train ride to San Francisco, and a $17.50 ticket each way.

So, by all means, dream those dreams. But better start saving now to afford the box under a freeway that you will likely be calling home.

Article source: http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/04/this-bart-real-estate-map-shows-how-costly-it-will-be-to-follow-your-silicon-valley-startup-dream/

One Bay Area company is thinking out of the box when it comes to the real estate problem – by putting people in a box.

San Francisco startup Campsyte is using shipping containers to make office spaces. The result: money addresses for a fraction of the price. The SOMA-based company hopes the concept will attract businesses priced out of San Francisco real estate.

It’s first prototype, a one-story, 320 sq. ft. space made from two recycled shipping container boasts large windows, a small deck, heat, air-conditioning, spray-form insulation, sound proofing, adjustable desks and locks and alarms controlled by smart phones.

“We wanted to turn these otherwise dumb storage boxes into smart, workable, livable spaces,” Campsyte CEO Dennis Wong said.

This year, San Francisco office rents passed Manhattan’s for most expensive in the country. Campsyte’s rents are about half the price, according to Wong, and are flexible: $30 per hour, $150 per day and pricing for short-term leases too.

“You’re not paying for times you’re not using it, like nights and weekends. So you’re only booking on-demand for the time you actually need,” Wong said, explaining the company is also working on even cheaper spaces for artists, displaced by high rents.

The artist spaces will be “yurt-style structures” blended into the urban environment, not made from shipping containers like the spaces designed for startups.

Campstye is now waiting on approval from the San Francisco Planning Commission to build multi-floor offices with plumbing and pop-up shops. However, because the concept is so new, city codes for temporary spaces have not quite caught up yet.

“Just like food trucks, for example, when they first took off, the planning commission really needed a way to deal with food trucks,” Wong said.

Plus, where to put them? Wong says the pop-up offices will go on the vacant plots of land and unused parking lots. This includes lots owned by families who cannot afford to develop them, offices that have unused parking lots, etc.

Parking lot operators say they have not heard of the offices, but say there is hardly a space that goes unused at the moment.

“This lot — every day is crazy. We fill up all the way to the end of the street,” California Parking attendant Rolando Condes said. “I don’t think you can find an empty lot.”

Campsyte hopes to have their pop-up offices up and leased by this summer. It’s also in talks with the Mayor’s office to come up with ideas to house the homeless.

Article source: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Office-Space-2-Shipping-Container-Workspaces-Seek-to-Change-San-Francisco-Real-Estate-Landscape-372285622.html

The conversation that is going around the real estate industry water cooler is, “Are we in the bubble in the Bay Area and when is it going to burst?” Are Newark residents now playing poker with their mortgages? Instead of giving my opinion, I have gathered some of the top minds in the real estate world and asked them “is the Bay Area real estate bubble real?”

“This is not a bubble,” says Chris Thornberg, an economist in Los Angeles. “The money flooding the Bay Area isn’t built on speculation like the last boom. These are people with real money, with real incomes. They have enough money to live in whatever cities and neighborhoods they want, so if there’s not enough high-end housing, they’ll just gentrify lower-income neighborhoods.”

Fitch Ratings’ Managing Director Grant Bailey has no doubt that homes here are overvalued and pointed to a fairly recent run-up to describe the current market.

“The last time the Bay Area experienced this kind of home price growth was during the dot-com era from 1997-2000,” Bailey said. Prices continue to go up in many markets throughout the country, but home prices in the Bay Area have “risen to a level unsupportable by area income,” according to Fitch Ratings which also found that San Francisco home prices “hit an all-time high in third-quarter 2015 and are now 62 percent above their post-recession low in early 2012.”

Ken Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley, said, “The high-tech boom we have is unsustainable. Job growth is unsustainable. There will be, in the next three years, a correction. These unicorns (private companies valued at more than $1 billion) will have to cut jobs. That will have by far the most important impact” on the housing market. The only question, he said, “is whether it’s a minor decline or something more substantial.”

“I can safely say that the pace of growth we are having is not sustainable,” said Cynthia Kroll, chief economist with the Association of Bay Area Governments. “I don’t know if we are poised for the kind of bust we had in 2000 or 2001, but at some point this has to at least slow down.”

Big investors and hedge funds have largely left the building when it comes to investing in residential real estate. They started in 2014 and largely made a full exit in 2015. Today, you have a bunch of aspirational house humpers trying to make their money on the edge of a frothy housing market. Flippers are flipping and families are overextending. While the tech sector hits a snag, you have the median-priced house in San Francisco selling for $1.2 million. Many millennials, the next large group of potential house buyers, are unable to buy because they are simply broke. They are living with parents as grown adults or have become one of the 10 million new renter households over the last decade. At this point, with sky-high home prices, house lusting families are willing to do anything to buy even if this means they are setting themselves up for the next wave of foreclosures. Quicken Loan is pushing the rocket mortgage which you can “Push Button, Get Stuff” — sounds about right for a marketing slogan for a Twitter addicted audience that probably has totally forgotten the sins caused by the first Great Recession. Now you can get a mortgage while sitting on the can or going zero down up to $2 million. What can possibly go wrong? So feel free to buy that $1.2 million shack in San Francisco with a 30-year $1 million mortgage. I’m sure that startup will be around in 30 years.

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Adam Modzeleski is a real estate professional with Rainbow Funding and Realty, located in Newark for more than 30 years at 6658 Thornton Ave.

Article source: http://www.contracostatimes.com/my-town/ci_29695617/real-estate-is-bubble-going-burst