The San Francisco Real Estate Blog



San Francisco Real Estate Blog. It's every bit as interesting as Curbed, the New York Real Estate blog.
-- Max Black - Prairie Fire












| February 2006 »

January 2006




January 08, 2006

Thank you for your patience.  I just finished moving this blog, along with a much larger blog, to a new home at yahoo.com.  The servers appear much faster and more stable, and the cost was considerably less than I had been paying.

 I'll try to get the old archives imported tomorrow sometime, but in the meantime, everything else is pretty much ready to go.

 Again, thanks for your patience.




Time to sell your home? - January 8, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO If you're one of the many Americans who snatched up homes as investment properties in the booming real estate market, now might be the time to sell, according to Jim Keene, co-author of "Retire on the House."

"I'd say sell some of those excess properties, particularly in some of these more volatile up-and-down markets," Keene said in an interview with MarketWatch.

Keene, a chartered financial analyst, is also a regional manager with Wells Fargo's private client services, in Walnut Creek, Calif.

Of course, any real-estate discussion requires a nod to locale: Where you're buying a home makes a difference. But it also matters which part of the market you're looking at, the upper bracket or the low side.

Higher-end homes are likelier to see prices easing while lower-priced homes in less-volatile areas may still enjoy some gains, Keene said.

There aren't all that many "low side" homes inside SF, although I happen to live in one. I think we may see prices slide a bit more steeply outside The City than inside, though. There are other factors working to prop up prices here, including a screaming shortage of homes. The market has softened a bit here, but I haven't noticed any real price depreciation as yet.

That said, it's wise to keep in mind that when you start seeing articles speculating that "maybe it's time to sell," the time to sell was probably three months ago. Or six.




January 11, 2006

SF SUPES APPROVE REAL ESTATE RESTRICTIONS...

The second measure requires real estate agents and owners of two or more unit properties to inform potential buyers, including open house attendees, if previous tenants had been evicted and specify if evicted tenants were elderly or disabled.

Daly said the earlier homebuyers are made aware of these details, which are currently revealed prior to closing escrow, the more opportunity they would have to make a moral decision about whether to purchase a property that was made available under such conditions.

I want to meet the buyer in San Francisco who would turn down a deal because somebody had been evicted to make that deal possible.




January 13, 2006

What California county has a median home price of 96,500? Would you cash out of a Bay Area home and move there?




January 27, 2006

I spent the last week or so moving my various blogs, including this one, to a different host. Yahoo just wasn't working out.

Everything has shifted over now, and posting should resume at its normal desultory pace. Did anybody notice how many ads for sexual enhancers showed up while I wasn't paying attention?




Business 2.0's list of dumbest moments in real estate - February 1, 2006

The year in shenanigans, skulduggery, and just plain stupidity in the world of housing.

67. Can't keep up with the Joneses? Heck, it's bad enough just trying to keep up with the appreciation on their dilapidated Victorians.
In March the median price of a single-family detached home in the San Francisco Bay Area rises more than $1,000 per day. By month's end, it swells to $106,000 above the previous year's median -- 43 percent more than the area's estimated average household income of about $74,000.

Well, I'm annoyed. The best we could manage was only number 67?

Come on, guys, you know we can do better than that!

Great list, by the way.




January 28, 2006

DAILY DIGEST

Contra Costa County had the most sales in the Bay Area, 4,330. San Francisco reported 898 new home sales at a median price of $631,000. The most expensive new homes in the state were in San Mateo County, where the median sales price was $900,000.

DataQuick's numbers includes newly built homes as well as condo conversions.

Without pursuing rigorous hard numbers, my gut hunch is that most of these were condo converts. The price is extremely weak for new construction, and very few new single family freestanding units are being built in the City at all - and most of those are the result of teardowns.