First, a look back (in anger?) at the make-up of Noe Valley sales in 2009.

Note that there were more than twice as many condos sold as TICs, and more homes sold than condos and TICs put together. (What’s a TIC?  — Check out my series of posts on Tenancy-In-Common Interests, starting here.)

Also, that absurdly long DOM for TICs was distorted by 3 TICs at 201 Hoffman that took 410 days to sell.  Still, without those sales, DOM for TICs (tired of the acronyms yet?) was still 99 days.  And I’d be somewhat skeptical of the whopping difference in price between TICs and condos as well:  TICs sales often don’t have a price per square foot listed, so there are very few data points — and there are very few sales to begin with.

Here’s how condos and TICs have been doing as a combined group, versus their all-time highs.

That precipitous plunge (actually a huge increase since the scale is reversed) in DOM at the end of 2009 was also due to the lingering effects of 201 Hoffman.

For a shorter term view, prices through February 2010 are up 11% from January 2009 and are up a whopping 31% from the trough of June 2009.  Since I use trailing 3 month averages, I think this is a belated reflection of the deep credit freeze of Spring 2009 when we thought the world might come to an end.

And here’s how condos and TICs stacked up against homes.

For what it’s worth, it feels like spring has really sprung.  Nice-looking condos/tics are swarming with people and are moving fast — no kidding.  Whether it will last is anybody’s guess.

Condo/TICs hit their all-time highs about a year later than homes did — in July 2008.  But they’ve fallen from their highs almost exactly as much as homes have.  Condos/TICs were down 17%, just one percent better than single family homes.

For those who prefer their data on a per square foot basis, the picture is pretty much the same.  The all-time high was $711 — reached in November 2008 and the price per square foot stood at $592 at year’s end, also a drop of 17%.

While condos/TICs ended the year at the same point, the pattern has not been the same. Condos/TICs have been stuck near the bottom of their 2009 range after bouncing up in the first quarter. Homes, on the other hand, appear to have bounced up and stayed up.

What’s in store for 2010 remains anybody’s guess, but on the streets it certainly feels like spring is in the air.  There are more listings coming onto the market and more people looking at them.  Will that translate into sales and higher prices?  That’ll depend on macro-economic trends I’ve discussed elsewhere, but one thing’s pretty clear:  interest rates are heading higher, as evidenced by the Fed’s recent increase in the discount rate. If the economy continues to strengthen, that trend will continue.  And, for many people, that will result in less buying power and reduced affordability.

That’s useful if you’re looking at an average-priced TIC and you’re curious about how much of a premium you’d have to pay for an average-priced condo.  But how about reducing that to a per square foot premium?

For those who just want the bottom line, here’s the answer, but it’s worth reading on for the caveats.

$37 a foot doesn’t sound like much of a condo premium to me, that’s for sure.  And as my astute readers will note, the drop in price on a per square foot (from around $225 per sf) is obviously much more than the drop in median sales prices shown in the previous chart.

What’s going on?  It’s really simple:  there’s a lot less information on sales price per square foot for TICs.

All my data comes from the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) that real estate brokers use to find and market properties.  When a sale’s completed, they are required to enter the sales price.  If there’s information on the square footage of the property — provided by the owner or more frequently from the property records — the database calculates a per square foot price.  Roughly 80% of condo sales have a recorded price per square foot in the MLS.  Only 45% of TIC sales have a recorded price per square foot. How bad is that? In September 09, there were just 27 TIC sales.  Only 9 of them had a recorded price per square foot.  For all of 2009 through September, there were 275 TIC sales.  Only 113 – 41% – show a per square foot price.

There are lots of people — mostly on other blogs   — who love to trash statistics and say they’re meaningless.  Medians don’t reflect home values, etc etc.  I disagree.  Provided you have enough data  and you understand what you’re measuring, statistics help make sense out of what is otherwise undifferentiated data.  But I am afraid that in the case of measuring the condo premium on a per square foot basis, we are in dangerous low on data.

One final reminder:  For this series of posts, my TIC data includes the handful of stock cooperative sales that occur in this market.

And thanks for sticking with me on this long series of posts….

Look at that!  Excluding those wonderfully regular dips every Xmas, condo sales are generally at around 200 units per month.  TICs rarely break 40.

Here’s how TIC and condo median prices stack up against each other on a monthly basis.

Dueling spaghetti you say?  That was my reaction, too.  The huge variability in prices from month to month on the TIC line is a direct result of the paucity of sales.  And this chart certainly doesn’t help get at the key question, which is this:

Given that TICs are riskier and less flexible than condos, what’s the premium that you pay for buying a condo vs.  a TIC?

In fact many TIC buyers do so with the hope of being able to realize this “premium” by converting their TICs into condos down the road.  Fat chance unless you’re buying a TIC in a two unit building which — for now at least — remain exempt from San Francisco’s byzantine annual lottery system.

Luckily, I have a bona fide statistician mathematical genius phd for a wife, and she always lends a hand on methodology when I need it.  She suggested that where one set of data (condos) is so much larger than another, using averages provides a more reliable “apples to apples” comparison than medians.   Also, with so few monthly TIC sales, I decided to look at annual rather than monthly trends.

Here’s attempt number two.

Much more useful!  (By the way, the fact that TICs were more expensive than condos in 2003 and 2004 can be explained by a few massively (in excess of $8 million) expensive TIC sales in those years.  This is a great example of how using medians or averages can really affect the results.)

So, can we drill down further and come up with a condo premium per square foot? Stay tuned….

Ken Rosen, Chair of the Fisher School For Urban Economics over at UC Berkeley, has good news for San Francisco home owners.  “The recent rise in home prices and sales activity lead us to believe that the worst part of the correction in home prices is behind us and that housing market conditions are showing signs of improvement.”

This report, based on June results, is the first of what will be a monthly analysis of the San Francisco real estate market undertaken by The  Rosen Consulting Group on behalf of The San Francisco Association of Realtors.  You can download it here.

I’m a big fan of Rosen.   I listen to him speak once or twice a year at a real estate symposium put on by the Fisher School; he and others bring a level of sophistication and breadth of view to the analysis of the real estate market that is hard to find when we are toiling in our own back yards.  I blogged on his predictions about the market  in a couple of posts entitled The View From Space at the end of last year.  Does that mean you won’t be needing me to crunch the numbers any more, gentle reader?  Not necessarily:  I believe the report miscalculated the median year-over-year price change for single family homes from June 08 to 09.  Rosen says it’s 6.8% down.  SFAR’s own numbers put it at 4.9%.  (I have us down 5.7%:  some discrepancies, alas, are inevitable — a result of delays in agents and brokers putting “sold” information into the MLS system from which all this data is derived.)  Anyway, I’ve notified SFAR — we’ll see what happens.  Besides, I’ll continue to try to get as fine-grained as I can in my analyses.  Rosen is a big picture guy.

Quibbles notwithstanding, Rosen makes some interesting points and one of them has caused me to rethink a previous post of mine.

His report points out that nearly a quarter of active and closed sales in June were in District 10, which encompasses “distressed” areas like the Bayview and Hunters Point.  Back in May, I argued against the commonly-heard thesis that District 10, along with District 3, were dragging down values in the city as a whole.  My chart showed that the City taken as a whole was about as far off its all-time high as Districts 3 and 10 were off of theirs.  Well, I was right.  And wrong.

It turns out that both statements are true:  Districts 3 and 10 were doing no worse than the city as a whole in terms of where they were relative to their all-time highs.  But it’s also true that the high volume of low-priced sales in those districts, combined with many fewer sales at the top end of the market, did pull down the median value for the City as a whole.   How did I miss it?  I didn’t look at the distribution of sales across the various districts. Rather, I compared the medians for each data set without looking at relative sales volumes.

Data analysis is tricky stuff.  It’s easy to pick and choose your metrics to match your agenda.  But it’s just as easy to miss a detail that changes the picture considerably.

Here are some more tidbits from the report:

• Despite the concentration of low-price sales in Districts 10, there has been a significant jump in sales volume in high priced Districts 5 and 7, which encompass neighborhoods like Noe Valley and the Marina.
• The large number of condos on the market from new down-town and SOMA high rise projects is continuing to put downward pressure on condo values.
• Rosen expects home prices to be soft but to continue to improve through the remainder of the year.  “With for-sale inventory still at elevated levels and expectations for a continued rise in the unemployment rate through the end of this year, buyers will still have good purchasing opportunities.”

I got that part right.

I looked at percentage change from all time highs for condos and single family homes (sfd’s) since January 2003 and here are the results for the city as a whole.

Until June 2008, condo and home prices were in lock-step in terms of price appreciation and decline.   Thereafter, homes fell first and further. (Do I hear a lithp?) In March 2009, the delta between condos and home prices was a whopping 13%.  Since then, however, home prices have recovered smartly:  as of June, homes are about 4.5% further off their all-time highs than condos.

What does this all mean?  First of all, I wouldn’t take too much consolation just yet in the upward spike in both condo and home prices since the beginning of the year.  If you take a look at the chart, this happens every Jan/Feb when people start buying out of the winter doldrums.  I wouldn’t predict a bottom until we see what happens this winter.

Secondly, given the woeful condition of the economy and the credit markets, together with the fact that San Francisco is not a badly overbuilt housing market, it sort of makes sense that condos are holding their value relatively well as people are finding themselves priced out of more expensive single family homes.

Still, the current delta of only $100,000 between median condo and median home prices seems rather small.  If people are just begging to know what the historical average is, let me know and I’ll find out.

This chart, from the lead-in page, shows unit sales and median prices for both homes and condos are up from Jan 09, but down year over year.

But not so fast.  Much as I’d love to believe we’ve hit bottom, it’s hard to know whether this is anything more than the usual seasonal uptick in sales now that we’re coming out of the winter doldrums.  Here’s the chart for single family homes sales.  See those incredibly regular troughs right around Jan/Feb each year?  I’d say it’s way to early to declare a bottom.

The moving average “flattens” fluctuations, but the raw numbers show the March median and average condo prices at all time highs of $765,575 and $914,187, respectively. And this is while volume in terms of units sold is down. Why?

My theory, which is mine and belongs to me — Monty Python fans, you need to go back a long way to pick up that reference — is that it’s precisely because single family home prices have remained high AND buyers are finding it harder to get loans that condos are looking particularly attractive as a relatively –ahem — affordable option. Kind of counter-intuitive, but I think it makes a crazy kind of sense. Let me know what you think!