Real Data SF - Misha Weidman, San Francisco Real Estate - Part 54Real Data SF

July 29, 2009May 13, 2024

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

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:

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.

July 22, 2009July 16, 2013

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.

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.

July 1, 2009July 16, 2013

Went Fishing

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.

June 2, 2009April 17, 2023

Cole and Noe Valley Go Head to Head

It seems only fitting that since my last few posts have focused on Cole Valley and Noe Valley, we should take a look at them head to head. Since Cole Valley has relatively few monthly sales, I’ve compared median values on an annual basis. Here are the results (click):

Say what you want about the two valleys, you’re going to pay more if you live in Cole. About $200,000 more, to be precise. Before you conclude that the premium all but vanished in 2009, remember that there have only been five Cole Valley home sales so far this year. Way too few to conclude anything other than that nothing’s selling or that homeowners are so addicted to the breads and pastries at La Boulange that they can’t leave.

May 28, 2009July 16, 2013

Focus on Cole Valley

Noe Valley has its 24th Street shops and cutesy cafés. Cole Valley has, well, its Cole Street shops and cutesy cafés. The two neighborhoods have been engaged in a friendly battle for the hearts of San Francisco homeowners for as long as I can remember.

After doing a guest post on Noe Valley price trends at theFrontSteps a few weeks ago, Alex, tFS’s friendly editor, suggested that I do a side-by-side comparison of sales trends in Cole Valley and Noe Valley.

Great idea, I thought! Trouble is, Cole Valley sits within a tiny subdistrict of the MLS (see the pink area below?) and as a result, there very few transactions from month to month.

That makes data crunching hard. Maybe even meaningless. Check out the white bars in this chart (click). They represent the number of single-family home sales per month back to January 2003. (Number of sales is tracked on the right side of the chart; percentage change from “high” is tracked on the left side.)

You can see that there are many months where only one or two houses sold. There are some months where there were no sales at all. It’s tough to extrapolate monthly sales trends under those circumstances and dangerous to assume that an “all-time high” is meaningful when it’s based on only one or two data points.

So instead of running percentage changes off of median monthly values, as I had done for Noe Valley, I ran the percentage changes off the “95th Percentile” value of all sales occurring between January 2003 and April 2009. The 95th Percentile value represents a “high”, while excluding the potentially aberrational top 5% of sales. Aren’t you glad you asked? (Special thanks to my wife, Nina, who looks over my shoulder at a lot of my statistical analyses — she’s the one with the one with the PhD in data-crunching.)

After looking at this chart, I sort of threw up my hands. With only 179 sales in over 6 years, it’s not sensible in my view to draw conclusions about monthly trends in Cole Valley, let alone to compare them to Noe Valley, where the “core” area alone — Subdistrict 5C — had over 900 sales during the same period.

So I re-ran the numbers and calculated medians based on annual sales. The second chart (click) shows the results.

I think this is much easier to understand. Again, with so few sales, one should be careful about drawing any conclusions, and with only 5 sales in 2009 so far, I think it’s too early to conclude that the apparent drop in median prices for 2009 will continue to be accurate. Rather, I’d say that Cole Valley seems to have been holding up pretty well.

Stay tuned. I can’t help myself. Coming up, Cole Valley and Noe Valley go head to head.

May 6, 2009July 16, 2013

Noe Valley Postscript: Median Price Chart

I’ve been having an interesting discussion with a regular reader of theFrontsteps, where I first posted my chart on Noe Valley Percentage Change from All-Time High. He disputes the fact that Noe Valley has fallen by 30% from its all-time high (reached in March of 2008) because he claims — I think — that March was aberrational. I’ve looked again at the data for that month and I disagree. What’s more I think that if you look simply at median prices (moving averages), they show a pretty extended upward trend from the beginning of 2006 through March 2008, with the exception of a dip during the Fall of 2007. Here’s the chart (click to enlarge). Enough said. I’m moving on to another subdistrict.

May 5, 2009July 16, 2013

Noe Valley Goes Down

Author: Jack French -- Used under Creative Commons Permission 2.0 — Photo: Jack French -- Used under Creative Commons Permission 2.0

Noe Valley’s been my home since 1991 so I’ll admit that I track it with more attention than other neighborhoods. For quite a few years now it’s also had a reputation for maintaining home values even as the rest of the city stumbles. The question is whether that’s still true.
Back when I bought my two-unit home at a probate sale with one other bidder in attendance, the “hood” was closer to its working class roots. Lots of single-story cottages in the 1200 square foot range and lots of duplexes. It had a thriving lesbian community and was popular with singles who couldn’t afford to rent in the Marina. It was San Francisco’s stealth neighborhood, just out of yuppy radar range.
By the mid-90’s it was growing increasingly popular with young families who were drawn to its slightly sleepy streets, decent weather, cute parks. The shops along 24th Street had everything you could possibly need, but without the attitude of Fillmore Street or the grunge of the Haight. All this, and decent Muni service downtown to boot.
When the dot-commers discovered that it also had great access to 280 and points south, prices took off. Two-unit buildings started converting to single family homes (that’s what we did). Little cottages would suddenly grow an extra floor, or a built-out basement, or both. Suddenly, we started seeing 2,500 foot homes and even the occasional trip-K (3,000 sf).
Prices inflated along with the floor-plans. The million dollar mark was crossed some time around 2000. The dot-com bust barely caused a blip. By 2005 we were seeing feeding frenzies over houses approaching $1,000 per foot. Even after the market started cooling off in 2007, Noe Valley prices seemed to defy gravity.
There’s nothing more local than real estate. Could it be that Noe Valley was situated in some sort of socio-economic sweet-spot? Many thought so, including me. And until recently it was true. But no longer. Take a look (click to enlarge):

The data reflects sales of single family homes for MLS subdistrict 5C only. Though the subdistrict includes areas as far up as Diamond Heights Boulevard and as far out as Guerrero Street, it captures the neighborhood pretty precisely. Here’s the MLS district map.

For the data-geeks among you – and I say that with the deepest affection – I should point out that the volatility of the line for Noe Valley prices is related to the much smaller volume of monthly transactions relative to the All-Districts data, and this is particularly evident around January of each year, when transaction volume really falls off. Also, the three-month moving average is not weighted to reflect the number of transactions in any given month – it’s a simple average, as is the moving average for All-Districts.
These caveats aside, the trend seems pretty clear. Noe Valley home prices continued to climb for nearly a year after the city’s as a whole had reached their peak. But, starting in March 2008, they’ve dropped like a stone. As of March, they’re actually doing slightly worse, on a percentage basis, than the city as a whole.
I’m not exactly thrilled about the thought that my house is worth about 30% less than it was a year or so ago (and, being both an optimist and a home-owner, I don’t really believe that’s true ☺). Nor would it surprise me if Noe Valley recovered more quickly than some other neighborhoods. But, at least for now, its gravity-defying days seem to be over.

May 2, 2009July 16, 2013

Districts 3 and 10, R.I.P.

The Excelsior, Bayview, Hunter’s Point, Oceanview, Ingleside: these are some of the neighborhoods included in the San Francisco Association of Realtors’ MLS (Multiple Listing Service) Districts 3 and 10. It’s been suggested here and elsewhere that perhaps these non-“core” San Francisco neighborhoods have been pulling down San Francisco’s home prices disproportionately. The theory, plausible enough, is that these more modestly-priced neighborhoods would be feeling the effects of the economic slowdown more than the tonier “core” neighborhoods, whose denizens’ bank accounts might provide a little more padding against hard times.
I recently published a chart that compared the percentage change of Districts 3 and 10 from their all-time highs to that of the city as a whole. Some readers of theFrontSteps expressed an interest in seeing what the chart would look like if you excluded those districts from the data set for the city as a whole. (Districts 3 and 10 make up over 20% of the city’s single family home sales for the 5 year period covered by the chart.) I aim to please, so I ran the numbers again and here are the results.

The chart confirms, once and for all, that however you want to cut it – with or without Districts 3 and 10 – home values for the the “core” San Francisco Districts have fallen almost as far as those for the outer Districts. They just took a little longer to start falling, that’s all.

Bottom line: We don’t have Districts 3 and 10 to kick around any more. I’m going to start rolling out comparisons of specific districts and neighborhoods to the city as a whole (ie. “All Districts”), starting with some that have supposedly weathered the market reasonably well. I think you’ll find the results surprising. I know I did.

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