Author: Jack French -- Used under Creative Commons Permission 2.0

Back in May 2009, I showed that Noe Valley was not immune from the slump in prices affecting the rest of the city, despite suggestions to the contrary from real estate agents, mavens and media.

Have things gotten any better?  Well, no.  And maybe.

Here’s a chart showing percentage change in single family home prices for the last 14 months, relative to their all-time highs  (click to enlarge).  (All figures are 3 month moving averages.)

After reaching an all time high in March 2008, prices plummeted.  Just a year later, in the midst of fears of a global Depression, home prices were down 30%.  Did things get better?  No, they got substantially worse.  Despite an impressive  city-wide recovery in 2009, with prices going from 30% down to around 18% down for single family homes at  year’s end (see more detail here) , Noe Valley home prices continued to retreat.  In October and November 2009, prices were down 35%.  At year’s end, they’d barely clawed back two percentage points. Not surprisingly, days on market (DOM) remained stubbornly high for all of 2009.

Still, with cherry blossoms busting loose all over Noe Valley’s quiet streets, there certainly seems to be a change in the air.  There are many more listings coming onto the market and there’s even the occasional feeding frenzy over a clean, well-priced home.  These go in a matter of days, not weeks. Maybe that upturn in prices for January and February suggests a continued warming trend.

In the next few posts, I’ll look at Noe Valley in more detail, including how condos have fared.

Bear in mind that “Noe Valley” means a very small area.  What’s more, there were only 7 sales in August, down from 14 in May and June, and 22 in July.   Sure, there’s been a bit of an improvement over the previous month, but there’s still an 11% difference between how far prices have fallen for the city as a whole (19%) versus Noe Valley (30%).

Arrian Binnings over at Inside SF Real Estate also did a recent update on Noe Valley, looking at median prices in a different way.  (I’ve forgiven him for appropriating my term, “getting granular” to discuss what I now have to refer to as “focusing” on a particular area. Sniff.)  Here’s one of his charts.

Not much comfort there either.

People will continue to point out that this doesn’t mean that your beloved home has fallen in value as far as the data suggests  — and that’s probably true, unless you bought a median-priced home at the top of the market.  Still, Noe Valley seems unseasonably cold right now, and it’s not just the fog whipping down off Diamond Heights.