While having lunch with a friend recently, she put forth a potentially disarming question: Have San Francisco home prices ever actually gone down for any significant period? Not just wobbly month-to-month dips, but a real drop?
Her tone was one of almost unvarnished disbelief: She was of an age where she could not remember SF housing ever getting cheaper but only spiking to greater and greater heights year after year.
Well of course the answer is yes, even SF home prices do take a tumble sometimes. But when?
We decided to investigate in the most basic possible terms: By compiling the median sale price of all SF homes combined over a 20-year period and letting the chips fall where they may.
This is the average of every property traded on MLS since 2001, no gimmicks and no qualifiers, for better or worse. To be honest, we were not really prepared for the findings:
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2001: $530,000
2002: $550,500
2003: $702,700
2004: $679,000
2005: $761,000
2006: $770,000
2007: $790,500
2008: $760,000
2009: $675,000
2010: $685,000
2011: $640,000
2012: $723,800
2013: $845,000
2014: $975,000
2015: $1.13 million
2016: $1.17 million
2017: $1.25 million
2018: $1.33 million
2019: $1.35 million
2020: $1.38 million
2021: $1.42 million
Now, this is admittedly a very simplistic approach, and it has its limitations: Thanks to inflation, for example, half a million dollars in 2001 is not really the same sum as half a million dollars in 2011.
That said, the year-over-year comparisons each time remain striking: The median price of a San Francisco home hasn’t declined year-to-year in over a decade, NOT EVEN DURING 2020, when the bottom dropped out of basically everything else.
While we did see several drops in the preceding decade, these are perhaps bemusing in their own right, as they signal an incredible financial crisis during that period, one that (we would hope) is unlikely to ever repeat.
During this period there were of course minor lulls, stalls, and price depressions in the short term, but they never lasted–it almost defies economic law.
So the answer is yes, SF prices are indeed vulnerable to market forces, as we always knew they were. But if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t believe it, frankly, you’ve got a lot to work with.
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