SF: State of the Market; 9/1/07 to 9/7/07
Whether it’s talk of the rising sea of foreclosures, the unexpectedly weak jobs report, the continued trouble in the mortgage markets or the cratering of home prices in some regions, bad news about the real estate market and the economy in general seems to be coming from every direction. Yet, as someone who is currently looking to buy a home in SF, I can say with certainty that I have seen almost no impact to date on the houses I am interested in. Desirable properties in nice neighborhoods seem to get snatched up almost immediately for prices that continue to amaze me.
In order to get a better handle on what’s going on in the SF market, I thought it might be useful to slice and dice the data from the previous week’s home sales. My hope is that a few trends might start to emerge that will give us some perspective on what all this bad news is (or isn’t) doing to our market.
Week ending September 7th: 55 houses and condominiums closed escrow in the city of San Francisco. The average property sold just over 64 days after it was listed and the average sale price was about 2.1% over asking. 13 properties sold for less than their asking price and 42 sold for at or over asking. The average property selling for less than asking was listed 77.8 days before it was sold while those selling for at or over asking spent an average of 59.9 days on the market.
In subsequent weeks, I’ll include some tables showing how the data has moved over time.
One final note: this is a work in progress. If you have any suggestions about how to make this data more useful or some other metrics that might be worth tracking, please let me know.
gfw said:
If you are interested in how the market is doing overall, you should also include in your analysis statistics regarding homes that have NOT sold. If you only look at “sold homes” you are going to have a biased sample. Additionally, if you can find statistics about homes not on the market, that would be even better.
September 10, 2007 3:34 PM
dwg said:
Do you think there may be a lag effect with respect to the recent credit issues, especially in the jumbo segment (which represents pretty much every property in SF) ?? Homes that closed this past week might have already had their loans approved and lenders weren’t pulling the rug out from underneath them yet, as numerous other reports recently have suggested.
September 11, 2007 10:03 AM
scott.h said:
There absolutely is a lag effect. The terms of most of the sales we saw last week were set 15-30+ days ago when the properties went pending. So, there should be a lag period of at least that long before we start seeing the effects (or lack thereof) from any stimulus. For something like changes in the loan market, I think it may take even longer for the full effects to be seen since some buyers may be taking advantage of locked rates and solid loan commitments that predate the trouble in the debt markets.
It might be interesting to track how many properties end up back on the market in any given week. Though a property could fall out of escrow for a number of reasons, it might give a feel for just how much rug pulling is going on. I will add that to the mix next week.
September 11, 2007 11:30 AM