theFrontSteps – San Francisco

Back on February 15th, 2008 (yes, theFrontSteps has been around that long) we were asked by a reader if we knew of any good maps showing areas in San Francisco that are either bedrock or landfill. You’d be amazed how many people, to this day, read that post, and how many more emails we get [...]

  I used to look at houses in Portland, OR like this 2/2 SFH in one of the most gorgeous neighborhoods, Sellwood, listed at $440K. And then I would look for somthing similar in SF. And then I would need a very large martini. We all know, even after the martini, that a comparable home [...]

A real email exchange from moments ago (edited for privacy, of course): Dear [buyer], Thank you for your emails regarding [some of the condos] we had seen with you and wanting to see them again. We set up some times for Friday from 1-3 pm. Are you available during that time to tour? Sincerely, [Realtor] [...]

By Home Girl, aka real-estate blogger Tracey Taylor If you are selling your home, Berkeley is the place to be doing it, according to a piece in Forbes which ranks the ten best suburbs to sell a home. (Suburb? Ouch that hurts.) This is how they put it: Berkeley known sometimes as a hippie haven, [...]

From the Chronicle: Home prices down in 90% of Bay Area Zip codes. A bold statement indeed, and thank God we don’t live in 90% of the Bay Area, but what’s this? One of the few standouts was the 94114 ZIP in San Francisco, home of Noe Valley, where houses go for well over a [...]

  I’ve heard from multiple sources that SF real estate is, for the most part, immune to the havoc wreaked on other parts of the US. But sales at our most recent condo complexes show that happy-smile-don’t-worry line of rhetoric is about as reliable as the clown’s was in Poltergeist (Happy Halloween!).     Socketsite [...]

Did we read that headline correctly? Is that quite possibly the first headline in over two years about the housing/mortgage market that doesn’t spell disaster? Or is it the shot of Tequila and can of Tecate (a bit of lime squeezed in and a touch of salt on the rim) talking? Home loan applications are [...]

More doom and gloom data for you to ponder. We won’t even point out the silver lining to the always dark cloud of real estate reporting, but it’s in there…rest assured. From sfgate: The price of a typical single-family home in the San Francisco area plunged 22.1 percent compared with a year earlier, according to [...]

Lots of people yapping on and on about how San Francisco listing inventory is through the roof, sales volume is in the toilet, and both median and average home prices have plummeted, but the Fluj says: Seemingly the perception is that there is a lot of inventory, but is there, really? And as for prices, [...]

Recently, we’ve been contacted by more than a dozen Realtors asking if we could “plug” their listings. Typically, this is not something we do as it defeats the purpose, honesty, and transparency of this blog, but we got to thinking…why not? We could make a little $$ from it, and help get the word out [...]