Tag: apples

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TICs, San Francisco’s Involuntary Reflex: Part 2 — The Data

There are weeks when I look through the new listings on the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and it seems like there are more TICs for sale than condominiums.  Turns out, this just isn’t true.  Here’s a chart showing relative sales volumes since 2003 (click to enlarge).

Units Sold By Month
Look at that!  Excluding those wonderfully regular dips every Xmas, condo sales are generally at around 200 units per month.  TICs rarely break 40.

Here’s how TIC and condo median prices stack up against each other on a monthly basis.

Condo vs TICs Median Prices By Month
Dueling spaghetti you say?  That was my reaction, too.  The huge variability in prices from month to month on the TIC line is a direct result of the paucity of sales.  And this chart certainly doesn’t help get at the key question, which is this:

Given that TICs are riskier and less flexible than condos, what’s the premium that you pay for buying a condo vs.  a TIC?

In fact many TIC buyers do so with the hope of being able to realize this “premium” by converting their TICs into condos down the road.  Fat chance unless you’re buying a TIC in a two unit building which — for now at least — remain exempt from San Francisco’s byzantine annual lottery system.

Luckily, I have a bona fide statistician mathematical genius phd for a wife, and she always lends a hand on methodology when I need it.  She suggested that where one set of data (condos) is so much larger than another, using averages provides a more reliable “apples to apples” comparison than medians.   Also, with so few monthly TIC sales, I decided to look at annual rather than monthly trends.

Here’s attempt number two.

Condos vs. Tics Annual Average Sales Prices

Much more useful!  (By the way, the fact that TICs were more expensive than condos in 2003 and 2004 can be explained by a few massively (in excess of $8 million) expensive TIC sales in those years.  This is a great example of how using medians or averages can really affect the results.)

So, can we drill down further and come up with a condo premium per square foot? Stay tuned….

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Noe Valley By the Foot

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

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve had several questions about per square foot prices recently.  There’s no doubt that it’s a very useful metric, for the obvious reason that it allows you to get closer to an “apples to apples” comparison of the value of two different properties that are different in size.  Of course, that leaves all sorts of other variables — location, amenities, etc.  But if, say, you’re looking to make an offer on a property, certainly you’d want to start by looking at what other properties in the same area have been selling for on a per square foot basis, and then use that to see if the property you’re interested in is in the ballpark.

Since I live in Noe Valley, I’ll readily admit that I tend to follow my neighborhood more closely than other areas.   No great surprise there.  So here, without further ado, is a chart showing the price per square foot for single family homes in “core” Noe Valley (click to enlarge).

Noe Valley Price Per SF

Rather than run the chart as Percentage Change From All-Time High, as I usually do, this simply shows price per square foot as a 3 month moving average.  I’ve added the  “number of sales” per month, plotted on the right-hand axis as well.   Note that low monthly sales volumes ( no surprise, given the small geographic area) will make the data less statistically reliable.  In most months, there are less than 15 sales.

While we’re on the subject of sales volume, I recently read an advertisement in the local rag, The Noe Valley Voice, from a local real estate company touting how sales volume in Noe Valley is up, compared to San Francisco as a whole.  So what?  As I’ve stated before in the context of the luxury home market, I really haven’t found any correlation between volume and price.  Though it may be a little difficult to tell from this chart, I don’t see it here either.  For example, sales volumes were down and falling during the autumn months of 2007, but that’s when prices started climbing towards their all-time high in early 2008.  Likewise, sales volumes were increasing through the first 6 months of 2008, even as prices were sliding.

The bottom line is that Noe Valley homes are still fetching north of $700 a square foot, and that’s after a protracted slide.  Sure, the price per square foot is  down substantially from the near- $900 a foot that they hit back in January 2008, but it’s a pretty well-heeled foot nonetheless.