Tag: San Francisco

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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.

district-5-omnimap

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.)

cole-valley-monthly-sales-chart

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.

cole-valley-annual-sales-chart1

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.

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Just How Bad Is It? (Answer: depends)

I’ve been digging a bit deeper into the raw data that’s used to generate the beautiful graphs you can find here and which I used to generate the MLS District graphs in my blog of a few days ago.

So I thought I’d check how September 08’s median home prices (condos will come later) compared to their all-time highs and to the median prices of a year ago, both by MLS District and for all of San Francisco.  I didn’t include District 8 (North-east) because it doesn’t have enough data to be useful, and I also didn’t include the southern-most districts of SF (3 and 10) because to be honest I don’t follow them closely. Here’s the result:

So clearly prices are down from their all-time highs across the board.  (Most districts were still hitting highs or near-highs well into 2007, by the way, and District 5, which includes Noe Valley had its top 3 highs in 2008!) )  But where the drops are really big (Districts 6 and 7 for example), that could simply be due to the fact that the all-time high was aberrational.

The percentage change from a year ago are interesting because you can see how some districts seem to be doing quite well.  Half up, half down.  Once again, though, with sales volumes down across the board, there are less data points and that can skew the numbers.  But it certainly seems like the tonier districts (1, 5 and 7) are holding up better than the others.  (Take a look at my graph from a coupla days ago to see how the districts compare over time.)

Bottom line(s)?

San Francisco single family homes are down over 11% from a year ago.

The more expensive neighborhoods seem to be doing ok.

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San Francisco Condos doing just fine, thank you.

Condos often get hit hard in times of real estate turmoil, but that doesn’t seem to be happening in San Francisco — at least for now. This graph shows a 12 month moving average of actual condo sales through March.

The moving average “flattens” fluctuations, but the raw numbers show the March median and average condo prices at all time highs of $765,575 and $914,187, respectively. And this is while volume in terms of units sold is down. Why?

My theory, which is mine and belongs to me — Monty Python fans, you need to go back a long way to pick up that reference — is that it’s precisely because single family home prices have remained high AND buyers are finding it harder to get loans that condos are looking particularly attractive as a relatively –ahem — affordable option. Kind of counter-intuitive, but I think it makes a crazy kind of sense. Let me know what you think!