Report from SFGate

Home prices paid per square foot have declined in the vast majority of Bay Area ZIP codes; only a scattered handful of ZIPs in affluent areas showed gains compared to last year. Look up your details on your ZIP, including the median price, price change and foreclosure rate. (Source: MDA DataQuick)

James Temple, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

(10-21) 13:37 PDT SAN FRANCISCO
–
Bay Area home sales marked their highest gain in at least two decades
last month, but the price plunge set a record, too, as buyers snatched
up bargains in the communities hardest hit by foreclosures.

A total of 5,449 existing, single-family homes traded hands in the
nine-county region in September, up 74.8 percent from a year ago,
according to MDA DataQuick. The median price paid was $400,000, down
40.3 percent from September 2007. Those are the largest year-over-year
gain and drop, respectively, in the San Diego research firm’s 20 years
of data.

The median figure – which means half of all homes sold for above
that amount, half for less – was dragged down in large part by the
changing mix of sales, DataQuick said. A larger portion of the homes
that moved are lower priced, because it’s harder to obtain loans for
expensive properties, and there are more deals to be had in the less
expensive inland markets. Contra Costa, Napa, Sonoma and Solano
counties accounted for almost 62 percent of all Bay Area homes sales
last month, and nearly 42 percent of all the homes that traded hands
across the region had been foreclosed on within the past year.

Given that, the regional median does not accurately reflect
conditions in coastal areas that haven’t seen high foreclosure numbers,
industry observers say. Notably, in San Francisco, prices were off just
12.7 percent and sales were down 2.3 percent.

“Buyers are most active in the inland market where prices have come
down the most and foreclosures are most common,” DataQuick analyst
Andrew LePage said. “I think it’s fair to say there’s a massive (sales)
recovery under way in those areas, though there’s still no evidence
that prices have firmed up.”

Ken Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban
Economics at UC Berkeley, took exception to the use of the word
recovery in any sense.

“These numbers show a very weak housing market, not a recovering
housing market,” Rosen said. “It’s a buyer’s market without question in
almost every part of the Bay Area.”

He believes that results will be weaker still for October, as the
economic upheaval and screaming financial headlines of the past six
weeks have made people more reluctant to buy even as the rocked credit
markets have made it more difficult to land financing to do so. Rosen
has revised his predictions for the local real estate market downward
based on the recent market news, saying prices will now fall an
additional 4 percent to 5 percent, or as much as 20 percent total even
in the core areas of the region.

The brisk activity in distressed areas is “encouraging,” because it
will eventually translate into stable and even rising prices, said Rick
Turley, president of Coldwell Banker’s San Francisco region.

“The bad thing would be to see the median price down 36 percent and sales down 36 percent,” he said.

Rob Chrisman, director of capital markets for Residential Pacific
Mortgage in Walnut Creek, said more people are buying in outlying
regions because there’s a growing sense that prices may be approaching
a bottom. Despite the seize up of global credit markets in recent
weeks, he and Turley both said that qualified borrowers with money to
put down continue to be able to secure home loans.

“There is no loosening of mortgage credit right now, but it has been stable, it has not been worsening,” Chrisman said.

With a winning bid of just $1.75, a Chicago woman has won an auction for an abandoned home in Saginaw. Joanne Smith, 30, recently was the top bidder for the home during an auction on eBay, The Saginaw News reported. Her bid was one of eight for the home.

“I am going to try and sell it,” she told the newspaper. “I don’t have any plans to move to Saginaw.”

Smith said she hasn’t seen the property or visited Saginaw, which has been hard-hit by economic troubles in recent years.

There’s a notice on the door of the home saying a foreclosure hearing is pending, the newspaper said. She must pay about $850 in back taxes and yard cleanup costs.

The Saginaw News said it could not reach the seller, Southern Investments LLC, for comment.

Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, September 26, 2008

California home sales shot up in August while the median price nose-dived, according to a real estate industry report released Thursday. Both changes were caused by the same trend: a tsunami of foreclosed homes that drew in bargain hunters.

Single-family home sales in the state rose 56.7 percent in August compared with a year ago, while the median price sank 40.5 percent to $350,140, according to the California Association of Realtors. On a seasonally adjusted annualized basis, 490,850 homes closed escrow in the month, compared with 313,310 last August. The median price, which represents the point at which half the homes sold for more and half for less, is heavily influenced by any tilt in the composition of sold homes, such as a greater proportion of lower-priced homes changing hands.

“For the past three months we’ve seen a surge in interest in moderate and low-end properties in areas where we’ve seen price declines,” said Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist for the Realtors group. “You can just eyeball a regional chart and see the Riverside/San Bernardino (sales are) up 143.3 percent, Monterey (County sales are) up 146 percent; that’s where the action in the market is right now.”

The swings were less pronounced in the Bay Area, where sales were up 9.6 percent, while the median fell 25.4 percent to $619,300. CAR defines the Bay Area as the counties of San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Solano, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. It excludes Napa and Sonoma counties.

“The Bay Area has been the strongest part of the California housing market in part because most of the areas surrounding the bay did not have developable land for new construction and the median prices were the highest in the state, so the fluctuations have not been nearly as sharp,” Appleton-Young said.

The Realtors group said its unsold inventory index for August stood at 6.7 months, compared with 10.6 months at the same time last year. The index represents how long it would take to sell all the homes on the market at the current sales rate.

One factor depressing inventory, Appleton-Young said, is that people who do not have to sell their home are staying put.

“You have trade-up buyers who are not selling their homes,” she said. “It’s a general comment on where we are with the national economic financial crisis; there is so much uncertainty, it tends to make a lot of us not do anything. You’ve got homeowners who are in a good position with equity (and) credit who just want to wait this out and see what happens.”

The report does not encompass sales that might have been affected by the crisis on Wall Street, the latest round of which started with the government rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this month. The report covered transactions that closed escrow in August, most of which were negotiated from mid-June through late July.

“They don’t really reflect the intense uncertainty and what’s been going on in the past month or so,” Appleton-Young said. “It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the days ahead.”

The full report is at www.car.org.

LONDON (Reuters) – Citigroup chairman Win Bischoff has warned that house prices in Britain and the United States are likely to keep falling for another two years.

The chairman of one of the world’s most powerful banks told the BBC in an interview that he expects it will take two years for the markets to stabilise.

He also said he expected the credit crunch could continue through until 2009.

Bischoff told the BBC that there would be redundancies at the bank, which employs 12,000 people in Britain, and warned that some of them would be compulsory.

No further details were released of the interview which is due to be broadcast later on Saturday on the BBC News Channel.

Tuesday July 8, 11:50 am ET
By Ben Rooney, CNNMoney.com staff writer