Breaking: Houses Selling Above Asking

Remember that house at 111 Locust Street, Mill Valley (see here)? The asking price was $3.395 million. Our sources say it closed yesterday after getting three offers. Price: $3.75 million.

Meanwhile, 55 Buena Vista Avenue, a remolded three-BR stucco house in a flat, sunny walk-to-town location, got at least two offers in under a week. The house, which was listed for $1.749 million (1,800 square feet), is already in escrow. Let us know if it also sold above asking.

Mill Valley: Bizarro World.

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BREAKING: That house in Strawberry Point sold

We were in Produce this morning, considering the virtues of the local organic strawberries that the teachers at Park School told the fifth graders to tell their parents to buy. (Supposedly, they prevent global warming.) That's when we ran into one of the 4,000 real estate brokers who live in our little town of 13,000 people.

To divert her from the baby arugula, we said casually, "So, how are things?"

"Busy," she said. She looked more excited than you would expect of someone who was examining carrots, even if they were tiny purple-colored carrots that save polar ice caps.

"Really?" we asked skeptically, having read in the paper how there's this big real estate crisis that is going to plunge us into bankruptcy and out on the street, where we'll be living off the muddy stems of other people's arugula that we scrounged from the garbage.

She leaned closer. "Did you hear about the house out on Strawberry Point?" she asked. "The one that was listed for almost $4 million?"

"You mean the one that's been sitting there for a while now?" we asked.

"It's not sitting anymore," she said. "It sold!"

True story? Eager to confirm it as quickly as possible, we bypassed our favorite checker Barbara (she chats) for the fast bagger on Three.

It turned out that not only is the house—5 BR, 4581 square feet, with "take-your-breath-away views"—in contract, it also got multiple offers. At least two. We'll let you know the sale price when it posts.

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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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