Ms. San Francisco Real Estate (Janice Lee)

The Bay Area’s housing market continued to heat up as summer got underway in June, with sales jumping 7.2 percent from a year ago and the median sale price surging to its highest level in nearly four years, according to a report released this week by DataQuick, the La Jolla-based real estate information services firm. According to DataQuick, the median price for all housing rose 10.4 percent in the nine-county Bay Area last month to $417,000, up from $377,750 last June and $400,000 in May. That was the highest median price for the region since August 2008. What’s causing the steady increase in the Bay Area median? While it’s pretty clear that all real estate is starting to appreciate once again, DataQuick analysts also suspect that it’s the result of an ongoing shift in the types of homes selling, slightly improved mortgage loan availability, and continued record low interest rates. My sense is that it’s also a simple matter of supply and demand here in the Ba

The median price paid for a Bay Area home in June jumped to its highest level in almost four years, the result of an ongoing shift in the types of homes selling, slightly improved mortgage availability, and ultra-low interest rates on home loans. Sales increased on a year-over-year basis for the 12th month in a row, a real estate information service reported.  The median price paid for all new and resale houses and condos sold in the nine-county Bay Area last month was $417,000. That was up 4.3 percent from $400,000 in May, and up 10.4 percent from $377,750 in June 2011, according to San Diego-based DataQuick. Last month’s median was the highest since it was $447,000 in August 2008.

Are itty-bitty apartments the next wave for urban dwellers in San Francisco? The city is considering shrinking the minimum size of rental units, prompted by a demographic shift toward one-person households along with rising rents and an acute housing shortage.  "This seems like a logical, necessary response to housing in an extremely high-cost market like San Francisco," said Tim Colen , executive director of the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition , a largely developer-backed nonprofit that is "solidly behind" cutting the size of the smallest allowable apartment by about a third. 

The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University recently released its annual “ State of the Nation’s Housing ” study. The report noted a number of interesting trends, including the fact that the nation’s housing markets are showing definitive signs of a turnaround. But one of the things that really caught my attention was the fact that it’s now considerably cheaper to own a home than to rent the same home – something that was unheard of as recently as 2008.

In real estate, as in many things in life, size and experience do matter. Buying or selling a home is often the single largest financial decision any of us will make in our lives. It's an extremely complex and time-consuming process, with lots of exciting opportunities but plenty of potential pitfalls as well. This is no time to take a chance by working with an amateur.    Especially in today's challenging market, it pays to use the best real estate company in the field. Hiring the top real estate brokerage means you're working with the most successful company in your local market, whose agents have a long and proud track record of efficiently and effectively marketing properties and helping consumers just like you find the home of their dreams. And in the Bay Area, that undisputed real estate market leader is Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage.   Coldwell Banker's record of success dwarfs all other real estate brokerages. The