Luxury Market stats in "D7" - north end of SF

Pacific Heights, Cow Hollow, the Marina, Presidio Heights $2M to $3M market.
A quick look at the past 6 months as compared to the same time period in each of the prior 6 years. This is the $2 million to $3 million Single Family home market in Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights, the Marina & Cow Hollow. With all sales btwn $2M and $3M most of the average and medians for these time periods were right around $2.5 million so I'll focus on price per SqFt, and the size of home you can get for that price, and number of sales:

'03-'04 - 25 sales, $713 per SqFt, 3,586 Avg SqFt
'04-'05 - 25 sales, $793 per SqFt, 3,140 Avg SqFt
'05-'06 - 14 sales, $1,026 per SqFt, 2,634 Avg SqFt
'06-'07 - 20 sales, $847 per SqFt, 2,937 Avg SqFt
'07-'08 - 9 sales, $918 per SqFt, 2,793 Avg SqFt
'08-'09 - 8 sales, $901 per SqFt, 2,806 Avg SqFt
'09-present - 14 sales, $802 SqFt, 3,290 Avg SqFt

Oh so many caveats here. For one I had to take out the Bourn Mansion sale - 2550 Webster was an extreme fixer that had 9762 SqFt for "only" $2.79M. Of course that buyer is going to put in MILLIONS of dollars to restore it and it seriously skewed the price per SqFt and the average SqFt.

Secondly, this price range and area is notorious for private non-MLS Sales (and this is all San Francisco MLS data) and for "undisclosed" prices.

Still, the above is general guidance. Prices are back to the late '04 early '05 levels with Sellers becoming more realistic and total sales improving over the past 2 years' results. But sales are up, and the anecdotal evidence from agents in my office is that there is a LOT of off-MLS sales happening right now. Sellers and Buyers are cutting deals. This is one of those times I think it's a good time to be a Buyer or a Seller. Well, Sellers might not think that because prices are way down from peak, but if you want to sell, there is definitely demand right now. And if you want to buy, you should find it easier to negotiate a deal rather than finding nothing but unrealistic and totally inflexible sellers.

Well, maybe they still aren't
<------ this flexible.

Market updates - the best local resource I've found

Case-Shiller... bah humbug. Dataquest... better than a sharp stick in the eye, but not by much. Talking heads on CNBC... please stop talking. So WHO can you listen to when trying to figure out what is going on in the LOCAL San Francisco real estate market? Well, the two best things to do are go to open houses and scrutinize the market for months, and you'll get to know it better than anyone. The 2nd is to turn to someone who does that for a living... a hard working Realtor. But if you just want data... a quick place to check in on the market once per month... Trulia's "heat map" with (and this is critically important) it's ZIP CODE box checked.



Zip codes aren't even as "local" as I'd prefer, but the map will show you the border outlines for each zip code, and then you can see the "year over year" or "y-o-y" difference in "Average Selling Price" and "Median Selling Price". Median is probably best - half sold for more, half sold for less, than the median. "Average" can be skewed by just one or two really high priced (or low) sales.



You can then sort by zip code, or by highest appreciation, or highest depreciation. A quick guide are the color codes - which change as you sort in different ways. And to see the what area is what zip code, just hover your mouse over the map.

The most unfortunate thing about Trulia's heat map is that I'm writing this at the end of December, and they only have July through September data. It shows zip codes 94118 (Laurel Village, Lake and Inner Richmond) as being up 9.9% year over year (surprised????) but as a San Francisco Realtor with "feet on the street" I know the market lost that entire 10% after the financial crisis became mainstream news.

But Case-SCHMiller is old data too and does not have San Francisco City only data... so I find it to be totally worthless, and Dataquest does do San Francisco only, but does not get any more local than that. And as the old adage says, real estate is local, especially San Francisco real estate.