Category: Blog

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Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival – September 8-9

This family-friendly event features prominent local chefs creating chocolate inventions during cooking demonstrations, live musical entertainment, children’s activities and the popular “Earthquake” Ice Cream Sundae Eating Contest. Over 30 different booths from local restaurants, bakeries and chocolate companies will provide dessert samples during the two-day event. All proceeds from the event are donated to Project Open Hand, a non-profit organization that provides food and compassion to people living HIV/AIDS, homebound and critically ill people, as well as seniors in San Francisco.

Click here for more information!

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2012 Olympics Event Schedule

The official, interactive, Olympics Event Schedule may be found here: London 2012

Network broadcasting information may be found here: NBC Olympics

Forget the world’s troubles for a little while and sit back on a comfortable sofa with your friends, family, pets, a refreshing beverage and tasty edibles and enjoy your favorite Olympic events!

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San Francisco Marathon – July 29th

In July of 2010, The Wall Street Journal coined The San Francisco Marathon® “The Race Even Marathoners Fear”. Approximately 25,000 runners will flood the streets of San Francisco to take the ultimate challenge in the San Francisco Marathon, Half Marathon, and 5K events. Join the fun with your neighbors, companies, clubs, schools, teams, churches, or groups and celebrate with us!

Click here for more information!

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Jewish Film Festival – July 19 – August 6

Our hallmark program is a renowned three-week summer Festival, screening in four Bay Area venues, featuring the highest quality Jewish films from around the world. As the first of more than 100 Jewish film festivals worldwide—and still the largest, with some 30,000 attendees—SFJFF is an influential showcase bringing together filmmakers and audiences to celebrate Jewish cinema and explore its new frontiers.

Click here for more information!

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SF AIDS Walk – July 15

In 1987, the first AIDS Walk San Francisco was an extraordinary and much-needed success that also helped shatter the silence. At a time when the nation was inattentive to the looming crisis, these courageous walkers brought their message visibly to the streets: We are here to fight AIDS! Over the years, more and more members of the Bay Area community have participated in the event. They have raised nearly $74 million to help people with HIV and AIDS; to educate the community about HIV and prevent its spread; and to lobby the government to increase its support of HIV care, prevention, and the search for a cure.

Click here for more information!

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Rent or Buy: The Best Calculator

A belated Happy New Year everyone.  One of my new year’s resolutions is to blog more frequently.  I love blogging about real estate!  I just need to get faster at it.  This can be a challenge if you care about getting the facts right.  For example, I just spent about 4 hours over 2 days unearthing a discrepancy between my 2010 data on San Francisco home sales and the data provided by my generally excellent real estate feed, which you can find under the Market Trends tab.  Turns out they’d incorrectly included sales from the northern part of San Mateo County, which resulted in a much lower median home sales price for 2010 and a very inaccurate read on what had happened in the SF Market over the last year. My next blog will cover those results.

Meanwhile, here is the best “rent vs. buy” calculator that I’ve seen, courtesy of the NY Times.  A lot of the calculators out there are either too simple or too complex.  This one hits the right balance and wraps it all up with a nice graphic.  Here’s a screenshot. Continue reading “Rent or Buy: The Best Calculator”

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Size Doesn’t Matter

Say you want to spend around a million bucks to buy a house.  Wouldn’t it be useful to know how much houses typically go for per square foot in that price range?  Then you could take the square footage of the house you’re looking at, multiply it by the price per square foot and come up with a rough idea of value.

Now say you’re in the happy position of having $2 million dollars to spend.  Could be that $2 million dollar houses cost that much just because they’re bigger than $1 million houses, in which case their price per square foot would be the same.  Or they might cost more because of the area they’re in, or their finishes and amenities.  Whatever the reason, it would be useful to know how much they go for on a per square foot basis. Continue reading “Size Doesn’t Matter”

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New Year’s Greetings

new years 2010

Another glorious winter’s day in San Francisco.  My family and I biked over the GG Bridge to Sausalito and then took the ferry back to Fisherman’s Wharf. Thirty-five years in this town and I’ve only done that ride twice.   The previous time was a week ago, to celebrate my 10 year old son’s new birthday bike.

2009 was not a kind year.  I feel very grateful that my family has come through in reasonable shape.  It makes it easy to appreciate the fine views and the fine weather.

Exactly a year ago, I officially launched this blog. It’s been enormously gratifying writing it.  First, it’s made me feel plugged into the market in ways both large and small.  Secondly, because I’m a visual kinda guy, those charts that I’ve tried to make a central part of  this blog have helped me understand and retain what’s going on in ways that columns of numbers just don’t.   Plus, I’ve learned a heck of a lot more about Excel — and, alas, its limitations as a database —  than I ever knew before.)

And finally, it’s been great to feel appreciated!   Though I sometimes joke that I have a readership of 7½, it is a loyal, thoughtful and appreciative one.  Well, that’s three of you anyway. 🙂

Happy New Year everyone!  My best wishes to each of you, and thank you for your support.