San Francisco Real Estate - Janice Lee

  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...

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...