The Stock Market Did What?

The real estate market here on the San Francisco Peninsula has been really good the past month or so. We're starting to get some good inventory and homes are moving at a brisk pace. Realtors are out and about again after the Holiday slow down doing Broker Tours and holding Open Houses. There was a time there when there were very few signs out on Tuesdays and Sundays. Though a few more good homes on the market wouldn't hurt.

Then out of no where, okay so some equity analysts called it, the Dow fell over 400 pts for a 3%+ drop yesterday caused by the Shenzen and Shanghai markets in China falling 10% overnight. Did you all hit as big a bump as I did? (Normally, I'm a big believer in the International Markets, but that just made me look kind of silly yesterday)

The question for us is does that have any impact on real estate? Well, let's just say my mortgage broker was happy yesterday because the bond yields immediately fell thus pushing mortgage rates lower. It may be short lived, but if you can take advantage of it, right now seems like a great time to buy. Home prices have stabilized and rates just dropped? This seems to benefit both buyers and sellers. We've reached a kind of short term equilibrium in the real estate market on the Peninsula. It's a welcome change and, with Economists still projecting a healthy economy and the FED on the sideline with this recent stock market correction, is one that looks to be sustainable for the foreseeable future.

Happy Buying. . .and Selling!!

What's going on in 2007?

So it's been over two months, my bad!! Actually over the holidays and new year I'm sure the last thing you wanted to hear about was how dismal the real estate market was. But truth be told, it wasn't bad, it was just kind of sort of non-existent. Like bears that hibernate during the winter, so does the real estate market over the holiday season.

Locally here in the Bay Area, it has picked back up with the nice weather we've been seeing early in the year and the number of listings increasing. Yes, that's what I said, the number of listings are slowly increasing and that's a good thing. Believe it or not, there are still a lot of buyers out there and they want more choices on what to buy. For example, on the Mid-Peninsula in Foster City, just last week there were only about 7 single family homes active on the market with about 8 or 9 in some form of pending status or another. That's right, buyers that didn't want to wait any longer just started taking what was there. And the choices aren't much better elsewhere.

I just read an article on cnn.com yesterday about exurbs, or basically more recently built suburbs of major metropolitan areas maybe an extra half hour to an hour further. Those are the areas that have hurt the most in the recent and perhaps still current downturn, however, the traditional centers like the Peninsula are holding up tremendously well. This observation though is not entirely surprising; the price real estate here on the Peninsula and other areas like it historically have been high relative to other areas. During this most recent five year real estate bull market, while the absolute gain has been astronomical, the percentage or relative appreciation has been much lower than these outlying areas. So while stories of 50% a year gains were being seen elsewhere, we were generally at a much lower double digit growth, while substantial, still more responsible. Yes, yes, arguments can be made every which way, though I still believe that if you're not speculating and are buying to live, we are still in a reasonably strong market for both sides and that there are some win-win deals to be made out there.