California Scene: Inventory Up, Asking Prices Not

HousingTracker looks at asking prices and inventory in more than 50 metro areas around the country. So, how are things in San Francisco? Um, bad:


Last week, the supply of listings increased in San Francisco, Santa Cruz and San Jose but down (bright spot!) in Riverside and Sacramento. Inventory stayed the same in L.A. As for asking prices, they dropped or stayed the same in all those markets.

In San Francisco, the market closest to Marin, the 12-month trend looks like this:

Trend	04/21/2008	1 month	3 month	6 month	12 month
Median Price	$521,000	+0.2%	-0.8%	-10.9%	-13.5%
Inventory	18,072	+5.5%	+19.5%	-3.9%	+28.1%

The takeaway message remains the same: It's not a good time to sell, so don't put your house on the market if you don't have to.

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The Mystery At The Top Of Telegraph Hill

The weather was so nice yesterday that we took the ferry to San Francisco so we could hike to the top of Telegraph Hill like tourists. We wheezed up the last steps, past the Open House at 333 Greenwich (amazing views, but no parking for $1.65 million, so tell us again how we get the groceries home). We caught our breath while clutching the chain link at 115 Telegraph Hill Blvd.—that weedy, overgrown $4 million parcel that's been for sale for years—and thought once again that there must be an amazing story behind the vacant property with panoramic views of everything between here and Asia. There is:

A little wooden shack once sat on the hill, home to a labor activist named Bill Bailey. Mr. Bailey, eulogized for being a "celebrated San Francisco longshoreman" when he died at age 84, had in his youth organized a legendary local waterfront strike to unionize dock workers. He was the fiery sort of idealist who tore Nazi flags off German ships and who fought fascists in Spain. Then, in the last decades of his life, he lived in a 300-square-foot box that had the best view in the world.

After his death in 1995, the lot's owners got city approval to demolish the house and build four condos on Mr. Bailey's hill. Neighborhood residents decided to save the house and in 1999 got it towed to a Muni lot near Islais Creek.

In the years since, the lot's owners let the permits lapse and the weeds take over. If any view is worth $4 million, it's this one. But the problem is taking advantage of it. As neighborhood resident Peter Dwares said in an interview, "There are a lot of people here on the hill who haven't made it very easy."

[Photo credit: The Volunteer]

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Parallel Universe: Noe Valley Apparently Didn't Get The Memo

Today, as we continued to obsess over this week's news that the real estate market tanked badly in January, we heard a story that sounded so bizarre we thought at first it came from the Twilight Zone.

"We keep trying to buy something, but then we get outbid," said a friend of ours who lives in San Francisco and who drove north over the Golden Gate Bridge to have lunch with us today. "Each weekend we keep running into the same people at open houses. I feel like I'm starting to get to know them."

Apparently, all those people are looking for the same thing as our friend and his wife: a condo in the $1.1-$1.3 million price range in San Francisco's Noe Valley, the hip-to-be-a-family-with-one-or-possibly-two-kids neighborhood where, if this wild tale is to be believed, multiple offers and bidding wars are still common.

Freshly bruised from a failed attempt to buy a 4BR condo on Church (a 2,283-square-foot Zephyr listing, with an asking price of $1.199 million), our friend had a haunted look in his eyes. "We were one of six who bid," he said. "And we came in No. 2."

"Who got the condo in the end?" we asked gently.

"Somebody who bid $1.31," he said. "We thought we had it, but they came in with a no-contingency offer and agreed to close in fourteen days. The owners had already moved out, and they just wanted the cash fast."

"Weird," we said, although frankly we would have taken the cash fast, too.

"You'll get the next one," we said (as if we knew the first thing about what's going on in the San Francisco real estate market). "It must have been a fluke."

Or was it? Is there some secret, robust real-estate market hiding out in plain sight in San Francisco?

[Photo credit: Historic Noe Valley street scene by way of Noevalues.com]

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