Month: July 2009

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Case Shiller Chimes in With Good News: US Down only 17%!

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Case-Shiller published its closely watched indices yesterday.  Hooray! The broadest CS index shows that the rate of decline in the nation’s largest housing markets has reversed in recent months.  Now we’re only going down 16% year over year instead of 20%.

They also point out that we are now back to 2003 values, which also holds true of San Francisco.  Here’s my chart from an April blog:

Core Area Medians vs All Districts

Before you go out and celebrate, Case-Shiller has “San Francisco” down a whopping 26.1% year over year.  Why the quotes?  Because it’s really the “San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area” and it includes ALL of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo, and … San Francisco County. That’s 5 counties folks, a factoid often omitted even by such august publications as the New York Times (see today’s front page article).

Now here’s the “good” news.  My data says that the San Francisco we live in was down “just” 5.7% in June 09 year over year for homes.  Take a look under the Market Trends tab for annual and monthly data for the City and specific MLS Districts.  (By contrast, condos are down 15% year over year.  That also happens to be how much they’re down from their all-time highs, which occurred right about a year ago.  See my previous post.

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Surprise! Condos are Holding Up Better Than Homes

For the quarter century (gulp!) that I’ve been involved in real estate, the conventional wisdom has always been that condo values generally do worse in down markets than homes.  Why?  To be honest, I’m not sure, but I think it’s because it’s easier to overbuild the condo market than the single family home market.  It goes back to that famous quote:  “Buy land – they aren’t making any more of it.”  Just take a look at Miami, Chicago – or downtown San Francisco.  One new high-rise can hold hundreds of condos in the sky.  Try building just one new home in SF, let alone hundreds – it aint happening.Of course, more supply  + less demand in a down market means prices fall.  Has that been the case in San Francisco?

I looked at percentage change from all time highs for condos and single family homes (sfd’s) since January 2003 and here are the results for the city as a whole.

Condos vs. SFDs All Districts Chart

Until June 2008, condo and home prices were in lock-step in terms of price appreciation and decline.   Thereafter, homes fell first and further. (Do I hear a lithp?) In March 2009, the delta between condos and home prices was a whopping 13%.  Since then, however, home prices have recovered smartly:  as of June, homes are about 4.5% further off their all-time highs than condos.

What does this all mean?  First of all, I wouldn’t take too much consolation just yet in the upward spike in both condo and home prices since the beginning of the year.  If you take a look at the chart, this happens every Jan/Feb when people start buying out of the winter doldrums.  I wouldn’t predict a bottom until we see what happens this winter.

Secondly, given the woeful condition of the economy and the credit markets, together with the fact that San Francisco is not a badly overbuilt housing market, it sort of makes sense that condos are holding their value relatively well as people are finding themselves priced out of more expensive single family homes.

Still, the current delta of only $100,000 between median condo and median home prices seems rather small.  If people are just begging to know what the historical average is, let me know and I’ll find out.

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Went Fishing

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For the three-and-a-half readers who may have wondered what happened to me, I’ve been up in the Sierras near Yosemite with my family at the wonderful San Francisco treasure, Camp Mather, a 9 mile bike-ride from Hetch-Hetchy reservoir, where San Francisco gets its world-class water from, and about a 45 minute drive from Yosemite.

No cell-phone service, no wi-fi.  Just lots of trees, sun, rock, and river.

Spent about 7 hours fly-fishing over two days and caught 3 fry and 1 bona-fide fish, probably not bigger than 9″.  (All were released.)

Fly-fishing has to be one of mankind’s greatest exercises in frustration.  How could we possibly make fishing more complicated.  Don’t use real bait, use tiny strings, beads, and feathers instead.  Don’t pick the right pattern, don’t get a fish.  Don’t “present” the fly naturally on the water, don’t get a fish.  Do all this will flinging 15 to 30 feet of line over your head while waist-deep in freezing water, surrounded by bushes, trees, rocks, and all manner of other obstacles that want to do nothing more than EAT YOUR FLY.

I had a blast!

The database for SF condos is almost complete, so I’ll be able to start reporting on that part of the market soon.  Still working on automating my district charts to that I can generate compartive charts more quickly.

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