Signs of Real Estate Rebound in San Francisco
Before you scream it’s real estate agent spin, take a look at the video report and note my favorite quote ‘It’s not some spin from Realtors’. All I have to say is it’s too close to call a bottom but when there finally is one – we’ll only know in retrospect. Meanwhile the open houses are busy and anything in the low end is moving, quickly and often over asking. It’s a sign things are starting to creep, and this is a city that does not like to sit down long when it comes to property values.
For months, housing prices have plummeted in the Bay Area. But there are now signs of a serious real estate rebound in San Francisco. The real estate tracing firm Terradatum ran some numbers for CBS 5, which show that more San Francisco properties have gone into escrow in the last two weeks than at anytime in the last six months. One reason is prices are down 10 percent city-wide, which has unleashed pent up demand. Adding to this are low interest rates, with 30-year-fixed rates now hovering around 5 percent. Our video report has more.
Signs Of Real Estate Rebound In San Francisco [cbs5.com]
555 Edinburgh 42 offers (YES 42) sold $100k over asking [MLS]
160 Naglee listed at $525,000 went over $600,000 with no contingencies 10 offers [MLS]
Have We Hit Bottom? Answers Short and Long [The Wall Street Journal]
Foreclosures Hit Nationwide High in February [SF Business Times]
Some of these properties, such as 555 Excelsior, are deliberately underpriced so as to induce bidding wars. If this property was listed at $600K, it wouldn’t have 42 offers. This is a tactic by real estate agents to pump up the market.
Anonymous at March 12th, 2009 at 4:28 pm ( )Oooops…that’s “555 Edinburgh”
Anonymous at March 12th, 2009 at 4:40 pm ( )well, Anonymous, consider the reality of what you’re implying… if the seller needed to sell right now, how should they have priced it? when properties are being put on the market at prices that seem ‘fair’ to listing agents and/or sellers (at prices well below where they would have been priced even a few months ago), yet they fail to sell (in a climate with very tough lending, etc), who is that helping?
when a listing agent does their best to anticipate how the market will respond to a particular property based on the most recently sold comps, yet the property still sits on the market for a month or more, gets reduced, and ultimately sells for a lot less than it appears it should have, does that make you feel better (assuming that’s what you’re really looking for here)?
in the late 1990s, the housing market in SF was on a dramatic upswing. buyers (myself included) could not have guessed how to write an offer that would result in a successful ratification of that contract. I’d look at comps and try to best guess what a property was worth, and I came up short ten times before I finally found a situation where I was able to get into contract.
this market is currently doing the opposite. and although not all listing agents are acting honorably, nor do I speak to the Edinburgh situation directly, I would advise a seller who needed to sell immediately to price the property as low as possible.
we are, after all, in a free market (despite Chris Daly’s best attempts), and buyers have every right to write the offer that they think is fair. what if Edinburgh had been priced at $1, letting the free market decide what it’s worth? isn’t that basically what happened there?
so, is the listing agent or seller ‘wrong’ here because they did what they needed to do to get the property sold? or are the 41 unsuccessful bidders wrong for not doing their homework and writing unreasonably low offers?
all I can say is that all bets are off right now, in all directions.
does that make anybody wrong?
Matt Lanning at March 12th, 2009 at 5:53 pm ( )socketsite has much better commentary about the “ahem” bottom that this blog. Check it out and read from a smart blogger instead of a shill.
Anonymous at March 13th, 2009 at 10:10 pm ( )Humm, I don’t see anyone saying this is a bottom, just that it is newsworthy same as the fact this is a buyers market is newsworthy. What are you suggesting?
Meredith Martin at March 13th, 2009 at 10:15 pm ( )Shill, good word, made me look it up. Well, is it your opinion all real estate agents are Shills? Pretty broad brush to paint us all with, but ok…if it works for you enjoy it.
Meredith Martin at March 13th, 2009 at 10:17 pm ( )In any market, it is a matter of identifying the buyers who think that there is an opportunity for their specific situation. You have to remember that Real Estate in San Francisco is a limited commodity, and there are lots of people who are waiting in the wings for the right opportunity. What classifies that “opportunity” is in their own mind’s and emotions. Please ti in context of the price point history for their particular market and work with them. Sellers in this amrket are by definition, somewhat desperate. No one would list their house right now unless they “had” to and buyers are testing the waters to see what they can get away with.
joe homegrown at April 30th, 2009 at 6:42 pm ( )