Real Data SF

Pretty much everything I said about how single family homes fared in 2009 also applies to the condo/TIC market.   (TIC’s, aka Tenancy In Commons are similar to condos.  For more information on TICs, see my three-part series starting here.)
Condo/TICs hit their all-time highs about a year later than homes did — in July 2008.  But [...]

[Read more →]

Less than two months into the new year and a brand new decade and already 2009 may seem as far away as a bad dream – assuming you still have a job.
It’s hard to remember just how close to the brink of catastrophe we seemed to be just a year ago.  Major financial institutions – [...]

[Read more →]

Catching up on the endless paper-work the other night, I came across that rare thing:  a property that sells twice in a relatively short time with no major renovations performed in the interim.
This “sales matching” technique is what the folks at Case-Shiller use to create their Indexes of property values across the country.  Part of [...]

[Read more →]

Last post, we determined that the current difference between the average (annual) price of a condo and that of a TIC is  $86,000, down from a high of $124,364 in 2006.  (That’s a 30%+ drop, by the way.)  Here’s the chart again (sorry for the funky transparency on the sales volume bars).

That’s useful if you’re [...]

[Read more →]

There are weeks when I look through the new listings on the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and it seems like there are more TICs for sale than condominiums.  Turns out, this just isn’t true.  Here’s a chart showing relative sales volumes since 2003 (click to enlarge).

Look at that!  Excluding those wonderfully regular dips every Xmas, [...]

[Read more →]

That was the title of an October 27 article in the New York Times, and, as one of my readers and clients pointed out, it’s what I’ve been tentatively suggesting as a possible scenario for this winter. See here, for example.
And, ironically, the gloomy head-line announced yet another “positive” month of data from the Case-Shiller [...]

[Read more →]

Several readers and clients have asked me recently about price per square foot metrics.  Certainly, if you’re trying to figure out how much a home is worth, it helps to get a sense of value by knowing what houses (or condos) are going for in the area on a per square foot basis and multiplying [...]

[Read more →]

It’s been a few months since I took a look at my own stompin’ ground, Noe Valley, and how prices have been doing compared to the city as a whole.  We dispensed with the notion that Noe Valley was somehow “immune” some time ago.  Sadly — at least for home-owners — and happily for buyers, [...]

[Read more →]

For the quarter century (gulp!) that I’ve been involved in real estate, the conventional wisdom has always been that condo values generally do worse in down markets than homes.  Why?  To be honest, I’m not sure, but I think it’s because it’s easier to overbuild the condo market than the single family home market.  It [...]

[Read more →]

It seems only fitting that since my last few posts have focused on Cole Valley and Noe Valley, we should take a look at them head to head. Since Cole Valley has relatively few monthly sales, I’ve compared median values on an annual basis. Here are the results (click):

Say what you want about the two [...]

[Read more →]