–Signs of a Real Estate Rebound [CBS 5 News]
–Tip From SFHomeBlog
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–Signs of a Real Estate Rebound [CBS 5 News]
–Tip From SFHomeBlog
Is it possible to report anything without hyperbole these days? The market has improved quite a bit since two months ago, sure. But come on. They got it wrong on the way down, and if it’s actually going up (and I think this report is premature at best) they’re gonna get that wrong too.
That is great news for San Francisco. We have been seeing the same thing here in Las Vegas. Let’s just hope this is the sign that the market is beginning to stabilize.
fluj. yes and no.
i wouldnt call this a rebound. But it is an essential step.
Yes, I think this is the bottom in the sense of there are dollars spent at the bottom. ie the threashold when the price becomes an absolute value for a piece of SF land. 300, 400 , 500K sales are creating that bottom lining on which we can start to rescale all the upper values.
once you have established that a SFH in district 10 is worth that much, you can then say. this sunset house is worth that many times as much as that D10 house etc… all the way to the 75 or 80% properties (the remaining top properties have been off scale anyway, and will remain the same. the 65M house will stay a 65M asking – because there is nothing to compare to).
Careful not to say that because the bottom is starting to stabilize – the rest won’t still drop. People still have to decide if sunset is worth 1.5, 1.8, 2, 2.3, 2.5 etc times more than the average bottom property. So all the chunk between .7 and 1.8M will still fluctuate, and in some districts fall… but eventually (this year?) the price stabilization from the bottom will climb the scale and meet the falling price and when the two meet, the new prices will be set up.
For those playing the game of “waiting to buy at the lowest” – I’d ask you to watch VERY CAREFULLY the 20% market just below your own target. When that market picks up (see above video), you might have only a little time (a couple months?) before your market will get hit by the rebound.
With an example: if you want to buy in the 500, you should check agressively (ie: GOOD agent, SPEED of information etc) the 300-400K market. As soon as there are multiple offers on say 20% of that lower market, and stalefish selling, etc .. straighten your buyer power and stand on the edge ready to buy when you see the right property in your own market .
A few things. There’s no SFRs remotely central, and precious few (think Balboa and Mission Terrace, only) even with walking distance of BART for under 600K. Under 500 is going to be in a relatively unsafe neighborhood, and a fixer and/or tenant or other issues. And I feel as if Sunset houses never stopped selling for 700s to 800s this entire time.
People love to hold the Sunset up as a chief indicator. Doing so makes sense logically. But often those same people will make a big statement about it on the Internet and then disappear. There have been 104 sales in the Sunset since 10/15/08. They’ve averaged 537 a foot and 777K a sale. Its performance since the September shakeup is so far removed from “wholescale price capitulation” it isn’t even funny.
although for the last complete month we have data (Feb) the median price in d2 is down 14% or so.
that’s about half way to capitulation, I’d say.
down 14% YOY that is – and further still from it’s peak
OK. But you have to parse that. Number one, I’m pretty sure 30 is the number needed for a dataset if you’re gonna talk about median. (I’m pretty sure that I’ve fielded that criticism on more than one occasion myself.) At a glance 45th was a total fixer and Ortega was an REO sale. On the other hand 46th looks like a nice little house for under 600. But meanwhile, they all sold right along side two in the 900s, two or three in the 800s, and a few in the high 700s. Hard to say.
Mainstream news organizations are typically lagging indicators. By the time the news van and the news man are out on the street, the end is already in the rear view mirror, by 10%.
30 sales? in this market? No chance!
I guess that’s a good out for when sales tank though – there’s not enough data for a sensible comparison!!!
Median is a lousy indicator, in my opinion. It’s drop does not necessarily indicate a drop in specific sales prices but rather indicates where the preponderance of property is selling. The good news about the drop in median is that there is now a lot of inventory in the $500-$600 range and those properties are selling because they are affordable. Yes, the prices on new construction have dropped but not as much as the median would seem to indicate–just enough to become affordable to the average two income family or high earner single person. It’s a GREAT time to be a buyer!
@ Sophie, that’s very perceptive of you. I too have noticed that high end lags the low end and tends to predict its fate. I like your “follow the market 20% below your target” idea.
Socketsite has an interesting post about this vs. seasonality…
Got the link? Haven’t read SS in a while
http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2009/03/socketsite_sees_seasonality_versus_a_rebound.html
but median price changes get headlines ilcor – and this affects the market.
according to a comment towards the end of the link, sales were in fact still hugely down on a YOY basis – and the median price was down as far as 2001 levels.
so expect some negative, really negative headlines soon.
this market isn’t coming back for a while yet, lets face it.
Although it pains us to admit it, we have to agree with socketsite on this one.
this is the excelsior anyway..so even if there has been a rebound (and the jury is still out I think) it hasn’t happened yet in……The Real SF!
The jury is not still out. We are not even close to “the bottom” in San Francisco. It is still a long way down from here.
i completely agree with socketsite on this one. they put up an even better post today putting seasonality into the mix. everybody needs to simmer down, there is not a “rebound” yet. the market is not healing–not the real estate market, the job market, the stock market or most any other market for that reason. in my opinion, we have not hit bottom, we have not started to recover. don’t believe the hype.
in fact I am not sure we can even begin to see the bottom at the moment.
as for Sophie’s strategy of watching the houses priced 20% below your target – what about this one instead –
watch those priced 20-30% priced ABOVE your target as well. I suspect with price declines accelerating they will soon fall in price enough to move into a buyer’s target range.
Like I said, this report is premature at best. The media these days … ugh. Every single news item is about hyperbole, it seems. But I’ll tell you what, socketsite did not go out of its way to craft charts about singular, (literally in this case ONE) television reports 15 months ago when the news was “Bay Area/ California real estate tanking” while San Francisco was still seeing record-breaking prices. That’s sort of funny. And it’s very telling.
Anyway, though, I made a point over there and I’ll make it here too because not everyone on here is a mean spirited snake in the grass weilding an axe to grind. What about the 42 Excelsior offers, all with 20% down? I think these new credit and lending limits are going to gentrify SF southward even more. I am thinking that areas which might have been succeptible to decline if left alone by the powers that be, might gentrify further? Sub $1M areas, such as parts of Glen Park and Bernal, Mission, Sunnyside, Sunset, and the nicer partss of D10 mentioned in the report.
Loans are not easy to come by right now. These folks are nowadays putting real money down, and a lot of it, to live in the southern parts of the city. Even the southernmost parts of the city. This is a brand new thing. And it’s what’s selling …
So what’s the deal at socketsite? Is that blog also run by a realtor (or realtor turned blogger living off ad revenues?) It’s certainly a highly vocal zoo of bears over there.
[Editor’s note: Don’t get us started.
They’reHe’s certainly not that “hip” if you know what we mean. ;-) ]An interesting quote caught my eye recently in the article link below:
“A study by the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be as many as 22 million unwanted large-lot homes in suburban areas”.
http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/106732/Suburbia-R-I-P
Are we going to see the mass exodus to the cities that we saw during industrialization?
Sounds good there is volume. Volume is step one in the process. If the lower end market stabilizes, that is the most bullish sign. The lower end is more dependent on credit, spend more as a % of their income on living and needless things. We need the low end, and that’s what this report is showing.
At least these guys didn’t put 80-100% of their money in the stock market over the past year and lose 50%.
Dear Editor,
re your comment that Socketsite is not that hip. I don’t know if (s)he is hip or not. But I can tell you that the site is much, much, much smarter than the average SF Blog site including yours and the pathetic SF Schtuff.
[Editor’s Note: It’s actually a total inside joke that only the person who posted the last comment we “noted” would get. And we wanted to see if we’d get a rise…and look at that, we did.]
if you price anything low enough you will generate 42 offers. i hate the media.
“site is much, much, much smarter than”
Is it? “Smarter” ? Do you know what’s easy to present, and what’s difficult to present?
I’d argue that actually creating something compelling contrary to conventional wisdom requires a great deal more intelligence than the easy internet rote smarm of socketsite. Look a little closer. What’s the motive at Socketsite? How are the stories framed, day in and day out? What’s really going on there? He’s been playing to the priced out masses for three years at this point. If that’s what floats your boat, god bless. But the reality is that dude missed the boat back in the early ’90s and he’s got something to say about it. That’s the site in a nutshell.
However, it’s gotta be said. Getting realtors to advertise on his site, tho? I gotta give it up for that. There’s some intelligence there for sure.
Touché, on two counts ^ fluj & Ed. comments
umm you mean calling the RE market correctly for 3 years when RE agents were out there basically fleecing people out of their livelihood/savings by putting into houses they couldn’t afford ? Yeah that took real intelligence. Sure there are people with agendas there you gonna tell me this blog which has posted the “it’s a good time to buy” but only if you can afford line so many times it’s not even funny anymore doesn’t have an agenda ?
Please, spare us the conspiracy theories.
Which conspiracy theory are we to spare you from? Socketsite is chock full of them.
Calling the market correctly for three years? Meaning, calling a correction for three years before it actually came to pass? How is that being correct?
Fluj himself has been calling corrections
since he was w/ the W. Liberty Street Mob.
W. Liberty Street Mob??? Is that a real estate company. I thought fluj was at Zephyr?