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Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop (On Our Reduced-Price Floor)
Although the real-estate bubblewatchers got a head start on the festivities some time last year, we have been waiting until there's a whole lot of data before we begin the "Woe is us!" chant over our monthly (fixed) mortgage statement. That data has all fallen into our laps in the last two days.
Zillow issued a report on how well the San Francisco Bay Area did, real estate sales-wise, for this year's second quarter. After filtering out extraneous "Z"s from all the jargon and checking out the report (warning! PDF!), here's what we learned: The median price for a family home in the San Franciso Bay Area is $726,607, while the median condo price is $528.783.
SFist Lisa, contributing
And if that weren't enough to make you cry, consider these data points:
- Although house prices appreciated 7.2% over the year-ago period, condo values gained a mere 3.4%.
- This growth still outpaces the rest of the U.S.: nationally, house prices appreciated 6%, while condo valued edged up only 2%.
- However, the median national house price is $268,531 and the median condo goes for $254.418.
There were some other fun factoids tucked into the report. For example, according to Zillow's data tracking, most of the neighborhoods in San Franciso saw teeny, tiny rises in price appreciation - if they saw anything - compared to the year-ago period. Most, we said - the lucky dogs in the Bayview and Financial districts grabbed double-digit price gains. However, if you're living in Presidio Heights, the Inner Sunset or Parkside districts ... well, you had the biggest losses from the year-ago. In this case "big" means "anywhere from 2.5-2.8% lower than this time in 2005."
Also, Zillow tracked how popular it is in certain zip codes, and all we have to say is, someone in 94563 has an awful lot of time on their hands.
Speaking of zip code data, if you are a real estate price geek (and indeed, how can you not be, living here?), we totally encourage you to check out DataQuick Real Estate News's "Chronicle Zip Code Chart," which runs monthly summaries of home sales activity by zip code. June 2006 is currently available. Those Zillow-stalking Orindans make more sense: their median prices are up 12.3%. To $1.207 million. You can see where every .207 counts.
ZipRealty - okay, what is it with the Z thing and real estate research? -- tracked 18 metro areas in the U.S. to see what percentage of houses up for sale had cut their listing price.
The good news: the San Francisco Bay Area ranked 17th out of the 18 metro areas. The bad news: about 28% of houses on the market have recently reduced their listing price. (See today's Wall Street Journal article here: "Going, Going, Gone ...")
Frankly, we're just taking comfort in knowing that it could be worse. In Sacramento, 42.5% of would-be sellers have sliced prices; in the O.C., 42% of sellers have reduced prices; in San Diego, 41% of sellers have cut prices; and in Los Angeles, nearly 35% of sellers have pared the asking price of their house.
So compared to the rest of California, we're not doing too badly. Yet. We're also not doing too badly compared to the rest of the country: according to ACORN, we don't even crack the top ten list of cities most likely to reel after all those adjustable-rate mortgages get adjusted for higher interest rates.
In the end, what does all this data mean? Darned if we know. On the one hand, we know it's dang near impossible to buy a house here -- that's why rents are rising. On the other hand, it's not like people have stopped buying. We're calling it a slowdown, and considering ourselves lucky that it's not so slow as it could be.