Real Data SF

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 – [...]

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Another glorious winter’s day in San Francisco.  My family and I biked over the GG Bridge to Sausalito and then took the ferry back to Fisherman’s Wharf. Thirty-five years in this town and I’ve only done that ride twice.   The previous time was a week ago, to celebrate my 10 year old son’s new birthday [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Not long ago I did a guest post at The Front Steps in which I showed that city-wide home prices had fallen back to November 2003 levels. Here’s the chart.

That prompted some discussion about whether the results would be different if you excluded home sales in some of San Francisco’s outlying areas, such as the [...]

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Sorry, folks, but it’s that bad — or good, depending on your perspective.
I tracked average and median prices going back to 2000 for the ten combined MLS districts that comprise the San Francisco Multiple Listing Service — the big database that realtors use to list properties and record sales information .  (The MLS District Map [...]

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A couple of posts ago, we dispensed with Absorption Rate as a good barometer of the market since there appeared to be no correlation between how much inventory was available in relation to sales rates and where median prices were going.  I asked whether there might be a different metric that would correlate better, like [...]

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Thanks, Jean-Claude for making me take a second look at my methodology on my Absorption Chart.  I had anticipated your point about the lag between listing dates and sales but had unfortunately gotten the formula backwards in my chart — basically dividing inventory by lagging sales, rather than forward sales:  moral of the story:  don’t [...]

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That’s what New York Times journalist Ron Lieber discusses in Saturday’s Business Section.  You can find a copy of the article here.  Of course, nobody really knows where the real estate market is headed but Lieber suggests that now could be a good time to buy.  Here are a few of the takeaways:

First-time home-buyers presumably [...]

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Yup, that’s right folks.  According to the well-known and well-respected Case-Shiller Index published by Standard and Poor’s, San Francisco home prices in July 2008 were down a whopping 24.8% from a year previous.  How can this be, when you read right here that median prices were down YOY (year over year) a “mere”  11.3% in [...]

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