Open Homes

in San Francisco

May 19-20, 2012

Click on the interactive map link on the left to narrow specific searches

or use the quick search buttons below for all open homes within the 10 major districts of San Francisco

NOTE: The buttons below are "real time" links.  Once the Sunday Open House times have passed, the links will revert to a "default" search. 

Open Homes

in San Francisco

April 14-15, 2012

Click on the interactive map link on the left to narrow specific searches

or use the quick search buttons below for all open homes within the 10 major districts of San Francisco

NOTE: The buttons below are "real time" links.  Once the Sunday Open House times have passed, the links will revert to a "default" search. 

Open Homes

in San Francisco

March 25th, 2012

Click on the interactive map link on the left to narrow specific searches

or use the quick search buttons below for all open homes within the 10 major districts of San Francisco

NOTE: The buttons below are "real time" links.  Once the Sunday Open House times have passed, the links will revert to a "default" search. 

Life can turn on a dime...and so can your market.  And when that "dime" is a complete shift from mediocre to excellent (or is it excellent to mediocre?), what do you do?  Well, if your a seller in San Francisco, Marin, San Mateo, or parts of Santa Clara County, your day has arrived.  Not only has it arrived...I believe it has caught you a little by surprise.  And that's OK.  You're still not quite ready to put your home up for sale.  If you were ready, chances are it would be sold in 10 minutes for a price you might not have expected just a few short months ago.  Yep.

If you're a buyer, chances are you might be wondering what happened the last time you blinked.  You've been ready for a while...perhaps even a little hesitant, and that's OK too!  You've been keeping an eye on the market, but nothing really terrific has caught your eye just yet.  You've been patient, but now there's even less inventory to shop!  And where did all those other buyers come from, for Pete's sake?!! 

Simply put: It is what it is.  It's also what you make it.  I don't know how long it will last.  Six months? Six years?  If I knew the precise answer to that mystery, I'd be a very rich man.  Real estate is cyclical...always has been, always will be.  The blog post below (via Randall Kostick...Zephyr's General Manager), is probably the best summary in regard to what is currently happening in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley market right now...read on.

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Posted On ZephyrSF.com: Monday, March 19, 2012 - 5:39pm | Posted By: Randall Kostick
Topics: Market Statistics | Tags: housing inventory, housing market

“You can’t time the market”- How many times have you heard that? The reason this adage is so enduring is because it is so true. Every time there is a change in the real estate market it seems to take buyers, sellers and even REALTORS® by surprise. It seems we all assume that the market will be the same tomorrow as it is today, yet we all know that’s just not how things work. There are few better examples of a cyclical market than real estate.

Every indicator that we’re seeing is telling us that the tides have already changed. For the first time since we entered the gloom of the downturn we are beginning to hear buyers say they think they may have “missed the bottom.” This is usually an utterance heard only after the bottom of a market has come and gone.

What is there to suggest that the market has already changed?

First, sales activity throughout the Bay Area is dramatically up. Although activity has been improving in San Francisco for some time now, the rest of our metropolitan area has not experienced the same comeback (until the last couple of months). Over the last thirty to sixty days, real estate offices are reporting multiple offers and over asking sales prices affecting all of our surrounding neighbors. In spite of the fact that many national and even state locations have yet to experience a rebound, the Bay Area is definitely coming alive!

Second, rising median sales prices. San Francisco prices have been flat to rising over the past two years (depending on the neighborhood). However, the uptick in prices for February alone was 6.5 percent citywide.

Third, if you haven’t heard already, we are experiencing a four-year low in “months supply of inventory,” which is a measure of how many months might be needed to sell out the current inventory at the current rate of sale. The supply side of this basic supply and demand statistic is illustrated in the graph (to the left). It tracks the steady, substantial decrease in inventory over the last 18 months.

What’s causing these changes in the Bay Area and particularly in San Francisco?

At least part of the answer has to do with the incredible boom in technology development and the resulting strong employment environment that we enjoy. Have you experienced the lines outside of the restaurants serving lunch South of Market or the wait behind a Genentech bus as it picks up or drops off employees? Our housing market is host to a wave of new employees that are working for everybody from Facebook to Zynga to YouTube.

What’s it all mean?

With national economic indicators showing some very healthy signs and local economic factors creating a long-term foundation for a strong housing market, anyone who is “waiting for the market to improve” before they sell may be missing one of the most exciting seller’s markets in years. We currently have buyers who are wishing they had purchased a year ago. Will sellers be looking back at today’s sales environment a year from now and asking why they sat on the sidelines and watched a fabulous seller’s market pass them by? Good question!

    Shuttle Stops:

View Google Shuttle Stops in a larger map

"The Hot Spot for the Rising Tech Generation"

I found this article in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal which pretty much sums up the current market here in San Francisco... 

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By NANCY KEATES and GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

San Francisco

A bidding war broke out in November when a small house in San Francisco's tightly packed Noe Valley came on the market.

Twenty-two people, including employees of Facebook, Zynga, Google and Pixar, battled for the home. The winning offer was $1.5 million—40% higher than the asking price. The house had a great view, but it was only 1,800 square feet and came with an old kitchen which, like most of the interior, was covered in 1970s plywood paneling. Seen from the curb, there's hardly any house at all—just a one-car garage and gate leading to small front courtyard.

The inconspicuousness was part of the attraction, said Jasmin Arneja, 42, who bought the two-bedroom house with her husband Gagan, 40, a software engineer at a networking start-up. "It's the antithesis to these outrageous bizarre Gordon Gekko-esque houses. It just incorporates so much of our values," said Ms. Arneja, who runs a philanthropic advisory firm.

Housing prices in the San Francisco Bay area are once again soaring, thanks to an infusion of cash from the rising shares of Apple and Google and the initial public offerings by Zynga, LinkedIn, Yelp and soon Facebook, expected to be the largest in Internet history. But while a previous generation of dot-com executives opted for mansions in wealthy San Francisco neighborhoods like Pacific Heights and tony Silicon Valley suburbs like Atherton, this generation is gravitating to modest homes and condos in grittier parts of the city.

Ground zero of the current tech-fueled real-estate boom is the Mission, formerly a majority Hispanic neighborhood on the southern edge of San Francisco that's close to the main arteries that link San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Median home prices in the Mission grew 44% in December compared with a year earlier. Adjacent Noe Valley had a rise of 31% over that same period, according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors. The average number of days homes sat on the market in both neighborhoods has almost halved over the past year.

That's in sharp contrast to what's happening nationally, where the housing market continues to flounder, with the Case-Shiller 20-City index down for the fourth straight month in a row. It's even an aberration from the San Francisco area (including Oakland), which saw a 5.4% drop in home prices in December from a year earlier

Real-estate agents say it's a cultural shift. The new generation of Internet executives—younger than the last generation of dot-commers—eschews the trappings and responsibilities of expensive properties. They want to bicycle, walk or take public transportation. They like living near food trucks and dive bars.

"You can spend a lot of money on a great restaurant here or just $5 on a burrito," said Christian Niles, 31, who bought a two-bedroom apartment for $585,000 in the Mission with his wife in August because he saw real estate as a good place to store the cash he'd made from selling his app called TrackerBot to Pivotal Labs last summer. He plans to never own a car.

StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp bought a 2,900-square-foot loft penthouse with four bathrooms and a patio for $3 million this past summer in the South of Market area. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams bought a $2.4 million house in Noe Valley in 2009.

The hottest properties are near corporate shuttle bus stops—where employees for companies like Google, Facebook, Genentech, LinkedIn and Apple line up daily for the ride to Silicon Valley. Real-estate agent Amanda Jones calls it the "Shuttle Effect" and said proximity can command as much as a 20% premium. Some real-estate agents said they're dying for a map of where the buses pick up. "When a listing gets deluged with people—that tells me it's close to a stop," said Ms. Jones.

Some companies share a few of the same stops, occasionally leading to employees getting on the wrong bus. Discussions can get animated about adding or moving a stop, said Jessica Herrera, Facebook's transportation coordinator who controls the stop locations for Facebook's eight shuttle busses, including a new glass-topped double-decker the company rented to make space for the growing crowds. "Everybody wants a stop that's next to their house that comes every five minutes," she said, adding that discussions have remained civil.

Stephanie Pocino, 28, makes the 45-minute trip to Facebook every day from her rented apartment building in the Mission. She has no garbage disposal and no dishwasher, but the Victorian building has lots of charm and bay windows. She carries a wireless Internet card, which she uses to answer emails and work on presentations while on the commute, and her laundry, which she gets done free at the company's headquarters.

Soaring rental prices—up more than 10% in the Mission and Noe Valley in the past six months alone—are also making buying more competitive, said Vanguard Properties broker Craig Waddle. He's seen bidding competitions for rentals and rental offers coming in higher than the asking prices. At an open house for a one-bedroom offered for $1,400 a month, 40 people were filling out applications on the spot. One person walked up to the owner, offered $1,700 and got the place.  (no small wonder considering most 1 bedroom rentals range between $2,400 and $4,000/mo)!

"It's been kind of shocking," said Raj Gajwani, 36, who has been looking for a house in Noe Valley for around $1.5 million for the past few months. A founder of two online companies, he and his wife are expecting twins and want a house close to a shuttle-bus stop for his wife's commute but with "culture, interesting people and activities." They also want something they will be able to sell for more money in five years, when they might have to move to the suburbs for better schools.

Mike Shaw, a real-estate agent who has worked for 15 years in the San Francisco market, said buyers often want something already renovated or vintage because they don't have the time or the interest to hire designers and architects. "That person in jeans and a sweatshirt could be low on the totem pole or a multibillionaire. They haven't realized the value of good design either in architecture or fashion," said Suzanne Tucker, a San Francisco designer who has remodeled many of the most lavish homes in the Bay Area.

My new favorite App...Viber.  All I can say is, "Bye, bye, Skype" (at least for my mobile phone, that is). 

I was talking with a friend of mine in Ireland this morning , and toward the end of our conversation, she mentioned this "new" app she recently installed and said I had to get it.  Well...it's actually not that new.  Turns out it came on board sometime in 2010, but it's taken a little while to spread and doesn't have that "household" name status just yet. 

Anyway, I downloaded it today, and within a couple minutes I was set up.  AWESOME.  And, much simpler than Skype (for mobile phones).  One of their tag-lines..."Get it.  You'll like it."   Well, I did, and I do.  You WILL like it.  You might even love it.

 for Android....            AND iPhone

New Listing:  1720 Clay Street, #10

$549,000   ~   1 Bedroom / 1 Bath / 1 Car Deeded Parking

Located along the trendy Polk Street corridor at the western base of Nob Hill.  Low HOA dues: $335/month, and just steps to some of the most popular neighborhood hangouts in San Francisco.  Visit: www.1720ClayStreet.com for more information.

San Francisco has a plethora of street fairs and festivals throughout the year.  So, to make it simple, here's a quick quide to this year's most popular Fair and Festival dates throughout the City. 

   Mark your calendars.

   NOTE: This year marks the 75th Anniversary of the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge!...celebrations in May.

 Coming soon (mid March):  Trust Sale / SFR

   List Price: $649,000

   New Listing at 2431 37th Avenue, San Francisco, CA.

Classic tunnel-entrance single family home in the Outer Parkside neighborhood parallel to the Sunset Blvd corridor.

   Highlights:

   - 2 bedrooms

   - 2 bathrooms

   - Hardwood floors

   - Wood burning fireplace

   - 3 skylights

   - 1 car garage

   - Additional (unwarranted) bonus room and bath down

   - 1/2 block to L-Taraval Muni line

   - 11 blocks to the beach

Parkside Neighborhood website