Comments on: Case-Shiller: San Francisco Home Prices Getting Hammered

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:01:45 +0000

I live in San Jose and work as a software engineer, and my salary has not gone up in 8 years (HP). Meanwhile, housing prices have doubled. Hello! The housing prices were propped up by easy mortgage money and stock market-fueled down payments. Both of those factors are gone. Add to that layoffs and you have a recipe for year-2000 level home prices. Do not buy yet! Use redfin to see what properties were selling for in 2000, add 10% to avoid missing the bottom and buy at that level. I think it will take at least a year to hit bottom. We haven’t seen the effect of the impending automaker bankruptcies yet.

By: Missy

Missy — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 18:33:02 +0000

I would wait to buy in the Bay Area. These prices are going to continue downward after the first of the year when even more homes are coming back on the market. Right now a lot of people are waiting till after the holidays to place their home back on the market. It’s going to be flooded even MORE with homes. Plus the amount of foreclosures. Check the local papers for the notices of foreclosures – tons are coming up.

SF proper is still WAY overpriced and expensive. It loves to tell itself how “important” it is, but the truth is, they have just as many if not MORE foreclosures than everyone else.

If you’re interested in moving to SF, luxury condo place One Rincon Hill is now in the 500’s, down from 700’s.

http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2008/12/one_rincon_hill_from_the_500s_700s_500s.html#comments

By: tim

tim — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:55:56 +0000

do you have submarket data? i’m considering a move to the SF area, and know that the city, the Valley, the East Bay and the central valley each has its own story. I need to be able to at least guess at a bottom, probably somewhere in the East Bay. A lor of homes in the Valley are still ludicrously close to $1,000 a foot: The top listing in Mountain View is 1.1 million and change for 1,240 square feet. I think that’s nuts and I’m from New York!

all in, including low property taxes, the East Bay and the nicer parts of Oakland can be done reasonably. But how much farther down before one can play the bottom? And if one pursues a foreclosure now, can they be had cheaply enough to insulate you against at least most of the deflation still in the pipeline?

By: John

John — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:30:05 +0000

Case-Shiller has “tiered” indices for low, medium, and high priced homes. (I recall reading somewhere that “high priced” meant $770K and up.) The high priced tier peaked in Aug 07 and has fallen about 14 percent since then. The low priced tier (which I presume is homes in outlying Contra Costa and the like) has fallen almost exactly 50 percent from its 2006 peak.

By: David

David — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:50:57 +0000

well, it’s true that SF proper hasn’t declined much, but it will.

It’s still a very useful index, as prices in, say, Chicago, are similar–bigger declines in the outer ‘burbs, smaller declines in desirable closer-in ‘hoods.

So, say what you will about CoCo, it’s still true I think that overall SF area has become *relatively* cheap. I know my mortgage payments & taxes are lower than they were in Chicago, but I’m not living in SF either.

By: smurfett

smurfett — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 04:54:01 +0000

if it includes some of the outlaying counties, like CoCo county, I’m not surprised it’s such a huge drop. The price drops over there is astounding. But inner Bay isn’t as much it looks like. I wish they’d break up these metro areas more.