Housing watchers love stats and they love comparing neighborhoods, so we’re giving the people what they want: A monthly breakdown of housing demand, divvied up neighborhood by neighborhood to determine which corner of SF was the top earner, starting with February.

But how do we measure demand? The obvious metric is price, but that’s not all there is to the housing game; to present a more nuanced view, we also tallied the number of homes sold in each neighborhood.

But wait, is that fair? After all, some of these neighborhoods are enormous (more on that in a minute), so of course they’d sell more than smaller ones; so we also calculated the number of homes sold as a percentage of the overall housing stock in that neighborhood.

Finally, we threw in the median number of days on the market, just to make things nuts.

Some qualifiers: First, this is MLS data, so only publicly listed homes count. The figures represent all homes sold, house and condos included.

Second, we only included neighborhoods with at least four sales in February–even that’s probably too small of a sample for those places, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

Finally, to discover the overall number of housing units in every neighborhood we referred to Planning Department tallies, but this means we were at the mercy of how Planning defines a neighborhood; some places you might expect are missing, while others are combined in surprising ways. We may have to refine this methodology in months ahead.

But for now, here are February’s top dog and underdogs:

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1. For sheer volume of cash, the hottest neighborhood was Noe Valley, with a median of $2.3M; cheapest was the Tenderloin, the only place where the median price still sits below a million–$900K in this case.
2. Greatest number of sales was in the Sunset, with 30 homes sold; that’s not surprising, since Planning combines almost all of the Sunset and Parkside into one gigantic neighborhood (again, we will have to tinker with these boundaries ourselves in the future), but note that the much smaller South Beach area had 29.
3. The number of homes sold as a percentage of overall housing stock doesn’t look very impressive in any case, but South Beach’s 0.23 percent actually is a huge tipping point for one month–and a short month to boot.
4. Finally, the top spot for days on market goes to the Castro, with a median of just seven days before a home for sale netted a prospect. Seven. That is completely out of hand.

For comparison, 376 homes sold across the entire city, the median SF price was $1.45M, and the median days on market was just 13. Yow.

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