San Francisco Real Estate - Janice Lee

Northern California continues to experience a healthy sellers’ market with median and low priced properties and, in some areas, with reasonably priced luxury properties. Due to the limited inventory and high demand for median priced properties, most reasonably priced listings receive multiple offers above asking price. According to the National Association of Realtors® (NAR), in March there was a 0.8 percent decline in the Pending Home Sales Index based on contract signings from February to March, but there was a 0.8 increase in the Pending Home Sales Index based on contract signings compared to March 2016. “Sellers are in the driver’s seat this spring as the intense competition for the few homes for sale is forcing many buyers to be aggressive in their offers,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist. “Buyers are showing resiliency given the challenging conditions. However, at some point—and the sooner the better—price growth must ease to a healthier rate. Otherwise sales could slow ...

A rooftop deck addition can return double-digit profits in some markets When Conrad Lifsey and his partner, Derek Loftin, who own a luxury RV rental company in Palm Springs, bought a house 2015 in a property development called Sol, what sealed the deal for them wasn’t inside, but up on the roof. “No other property in Palm Springs had a rooftop deck and it really set things apart,” said Lifsey, 52. “It’s a place we like to go at sunrise for yoga and sunset for cocktails,” he said. In fact, three-fourths of the 46 homeowners in Sol have opted to add 150 to 300 square-foot rooftop decks to their property, said Rudy Herrera, principal of Family Development Homes in Palm Desert, Calif. It’s a $50,000 upgrade, but it allows views of the 10,000 foot-high San Jacinto Mountains, the sixth-biggest mountain range in the lower 48 states. “Given the views, it’s criminal not to have one,” he said. They’re not alone. When it comes to improving your home’s value in 2016, homeowne...

Mike James is president of the Bay Area and Hawaii regions for Coldwell Banker, the real estate brokerage that was founded in San Francisco in 1906, in the aftermath of the great earthquake. We decided to ask James what's happening in Bay Area real estate in 2016. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Q How has the market been behaving lately? And give us your predictions for the coming year.

A new report out this week shows that the Bay Area’s housing market continues to gain strength with growing demand and a shortage of listings driving prices sharply higher and boosting sales once again in January. DataQuick, the La Jolla-based real estate information service, reported that the local market turned in its strongest January sales in six years and marked the 10th straight year-over-year increase in the median sale price of a Bay Area home.   A total of 5,501 new and resale single-family homes and condos sold last month in the nine-county Bay Area, up 3.2 percent from January a year ago. Last month’s sales were the strongest since January 2007 before the downturn in the housing market. The real story here, though, is the rapidly increasing median sale price for Bay Area homes. In January, the median price paid for a home in the region jumped to $415,000, surging 27.3 percent from a year ago. DataQuick noted that half of the increase in the med...

The housing market is supposed to slow down as we get deeper into the fall season and inch closer to the holidays, but something very unusual is happening here in the Bay Area. Not only is the market remaining active overall, there’s been a remarkable surge in luxury home buying – in particular, the mega-home sales. A quick look at closed sales at the end of October caught my attention. Our company alone closed an amazing 13 sales over more than $5 million in the Bay Area just in the last two weeks of October! The vast majority of these deals were in San Francisco, the Peninsula and Silicon Valley, although one was in Healdsburg. The homes went for as much as $11.1 million, the price paid for a Los Altos Hills property. In all, we saw the strongest October in sales volume since 2004 for the San Francisco Peninsula Region. And although I can’t share with you Coldwell Banker’s proprietary sales figures, I can tell you that this added up to a 56 percent gain from just last...

By now it’s clear that this will not be an easy economic recovery. For every two steps forward we take one step back, as this week’s mixed economic signals show. On one hand, it was good to see improved GDP growth figures announced Friday. The U.S. economy grew at a better-than-expected 2 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the Commerce Department announced. That’s up from a 1.3 percent growth rate in the second quarter. The improvement was driven in part by greater consumer spending, but also defense spending and the government sector. Many analysts cautioned that the economy is still facing significant headwinds and warned that GDP isn’t likely to climb much above this level through the coming year. On the bright side, real estate continues to be one of the better performing sectors of the economy, as the recent Bay Area housing report from DataQuick reaffirmed. The La Jolla-based real estate research firm reported that Bay Area home prices last month rose to ...

Consumer confidence has long been a leading economic indicator for the housing market. The more we feel good about the direction of the economy, the stock market, home values, and improvements in the job market, the more likely we are to take the leap and buy a home. So it was encouraging to see Friday’s announcement that a key consumer sentiment index moved to a four-month high in September. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan sentiment index rose to 78.3 this month from 74.3 in August, the highest level since May and one more sign that our slow but steady economic recovery remains on track. Consumer confidence gains can be attributed to a number of factors, according to a report in Bloomberg news: Rising property values, higher stock prices and a stabilization in the cost of gasoline could all be combining to lift our view of the economy.  (by the way, I’m late in getting this report out, and when I started a little over a week ago gas prices seeme...

  There was some welcome news for the housing market this week, both here in the Bay Area and nationally. The biggest headlines came on Thursday when the Federal Reserve, as expected, announced plans for further stimulus for the sluggish economy. And here at home, the local housing market continued to gain strength with luxury home sales improving once again last month (more on that later). The Fed surprised no one when it said it plans more economic stimulus. But what did take some by surprise was the approach Chairman Ben Bernanke and fellow governors chose. With its new quantitative easing, or QE3 effort, the Fed said it plans to begin an open-ended program to purchase mortgage-backed securities – a move aimed at bolstering the housing recovery and the overall economy as well. The Fed will buy $40 billion of mortgage debt each month until job growth picks up, a move that was greeted with enthusiasm by the financial markets Thursday with the Dow rallying ...

So much for a summer slowdown in the housing market! Bay Area home prices surged to a four-year high in July and the region turned in its 13th consecutive month of year-over year sales increases, according to a new report out this week from DataQuick, the La Jolla-based real estate information services company. . The median sale price for all new and existing homes in the nine-county Bay Area jumped 12.6 percent to $421,000 from $374,000 a year ago and the highest price since August 2008. Sales gains were even more dramatic with 8,461 properties changing hands, nearly 23 percent more than a year ago. If there was any doubt left that our housing market is on the rise I think this spring and summer’s performance should put that to an end. The median price increase can be attributed to fewer distressed home sales and more “normal” market activity. Additionally, the shortage of inventory for sale is resulting in buyers bidding up prices on the relative few homes ou...

Summer is typically the time of year that our housing market slows down as buyers, sellers and agents all take time to enjoy the great weather and go on holiday before school resumes. But for the most part, we are still seeing a vibrant market around the Bay as the calendar turns to August and the final month of summer.  From the entry-level market to the Previews luxury end, sales remain very strong for this time of year. Lack of inventory remains the number one challenge for many parts of the Bay, especially San Francisco, the Peninsula and Silicon Valley, although we are seeing listings gradually creep up in parts of the South Bay and East Bay. A couple of highlights from our most recent office reports tell the story of a resilient housing market around the Bay:  The Previews market in Marin is strong with several multi-million sales in contract in Ross and Kentfield.  Our local manager reported that just this week we closed an $8.35 million sa...

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 Bay Area’s housing market certainly has come a long way since the recession, with sales recovering in every price segment from entry-level distressed properties through multi-million-dollar Previews estates. And although prices took a hit from 2008 through 2010, valuations have also turned the corner and have been heading higher once again as well. While the market improvement is to be celebrated, I’m constantly reminded of just how fragile this recovery is – and why we shouldn’t take it for granted. Don’t get me wrong: I’m the last guy to see the cup as half empty. But we continue to face serious economic headwinds that could slow down or even reverse the encouraging gains we’ve seen in the market over the past year or so. I was interviewed by the San Jose Mercury on Wednesday and told reporter Pete Carey that improvement in the Bay Area housing market could quickly turn in the other direction if consumer sentiment grows worse over Euro-zone f...