A San Francisco Bay Area homebuilder can't sell all the houses it built in a development in Manteca. Current residents paid up to $630,000 for a 3-hour round-trip commute. But now they're auctioning the remaining homes, starting at a more realistic price of $285,000. [That's a 55% haircut - Ed.]
This headline is going to have a huge impact because it means every homeowner in the SF Bay Area who thinks they have a $630,000 property now will begin to realize that in the end, if they want - or need - to sell that house, they are going to be competing with $285,000 prices. Let that sink in a while.
I live directly across the street from the gigantic new Lennar development - 1600 units - purportedly going into the old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Lennar is committed to making 30% of those units "affordable," whatever that turns out to be when it comes time to market them. The rest - over a thousand units - will be dumped into a market flat on its back around 2009. Given that the City has basically put up nothing but the Shipyard land, which it acquired for zilch, Lennar is shouldering most of the risk on this project. At this point, one realistically has to wonder when - if at all - this thing will actually get built. And even if it is, who will be buying it.
In October, those numbers dropped to 36.1 in Alameda, 36.7 in Contra Costa and 11.9 percent in Solano. The drop in jumbo loans made loans of less than $417,000 rise 12 percent across the Bay Area, LePage said. Although every market showed a drop in all home sales, there are discrepancies among Bay Area counties.
San Francisco had the lowest drop in sales Advertisement with 8.2 percent fewer, and Solano and Napa dropped more than 50 percent from last year.
As I've been predicting all along.
But even San Francisco will continue to drop, albeit considerably more slowly than the rest of the Bay Area, for the foreseeable future. Which is why I don't understand the continued denial I see in the comments of a lot of real estate blogs, to the effect that the time to buy is Right Now, because prices have bottomed.
No, folks, they haven't. Buy a house if you have to for employment or other reasons, but don't buy to get rich quick. Those days are over, at least for a good while yet.
You may not know this - I didn't - but Propert Shark offers fire risk maps for many Bay area locations, including San Francisco. Just find your area, click "maps," and then "hazards."
Good stuff. Believe it or not, some neighborhoods of SF are classified as "extreme threat."
Trulia Inc. said Wednesday it added foreclosure properties to its online database of residential real estate listings.
San Francisco-based Trulia said users who enter their search criteria on homes for sale in any U.S. market will now also get foreclosure information provided through RealtyTrac Inc.
I imagine that foreclosure speculation will be the next wild west frontier of the get-rich-quick scammers in the real estate biz. I also expect that such speculation will be a perfect way to burn yourself into a smoking cinder.
Carol Burnett, a vice president at Alain Pinel Realtors, which has 23 offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, said it's common for brokers in strong markets to send a second agent to high-traffic open houses just to help keep an eye on customers.
Agents also ask sellers to help keep theft opportunities to a minimum.
"I never want to see jewelry out on display," Rochelle Bass, an executive vice president at Bellmarc Realty, another top Manhattan brokerage, wrote in an e-mail.
Other tips: Stash prescription drugs out of sight, even if that means removing them from the medicine cabinet; lock up checkbooks and any sensitive mail; hide items like cameras and watches in a suitcase under the bed.
Stephanie Singer, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Realtors, said sellers posting photos of their homes online might want be careful too. "Make sure the photos are ... not highlighting your prized possessions," she said.
Corcoran's Liebman said brokers shouldn't hesitate to confront someone who arouses suspicion.
Well, maybe. I think you'd be better off with a discrete call to 911, though.
