Unfortunately, I did not act fast enough to send New York Post real estate writer Mary Jacob some smelling salts. But back in April, she hyperventilated about San Francisco housing, saying that it is “now teetering on the brink of collapse — and it seems like nobody is sounding the alarm.” Well, she did.
The reason for her worry — and it’s always touching when a New Yorker expresses concern for the villagers in little San Francisco — was an April 10, 2024 Redfin analysis that said 17.8 percent of homes sold in San Francisco in the three months ending Feb. 29 had sold at a loss (compared to the purchase price). I’m not sure that would be scarier to me than meeting election conspiracy promoter Maria Bartiromo, who glowers at readers from a video embed at the top of Jacob’s article. The Redfin analysis was less apocalyptic and much more nuanced than the Post‘s take, but it still wouldn’t make locals happy. Unless they were buying one of those undervalued homes.
Briefly, Redfin’s Dana Anderson and Elijah de la Campa wrote that San Francisco’s 17.8 percent is the worst performance of the cities it tracks in the report, where the average nationally is found to be 4 percent. (They also write that the dollar amount of the loss taken by San Francisco sellers is larger than elsewhere, but that would stand to reason, considering San Francisco prices are higher than most places, and “prices have come back down to earth after skyrocketing during the pandemic.”)
It can be unsettling to watch boom-and-bust real estate markets, but it’s a fact of life that can produce some unsettling statistics at times.
Further down in the report, perhaps too far for Jacobs or her interns to have read, is this paragraph: “Even in San Francisco, where roughly 18% of sellers who part ways with their home are losing money, more than four in five (82%) sellers are selling for more than they bought for. The typical San Francisco seller sold for $482,000 more than their purchase price during the three months ending February 29.” Sounds a lot less crash-and-burn when talking about the vast majority of the sellers rather than the unlucky few. Oh, and that $482,000 is more than double the median gain nationwide of $196,016, say Anderson and de la Campa.
Other analyses
In June, real estate firm Compass released its latest San Francisco market report, which notes “The 3-month rolling median house sales price in May, at $1,735,000, hit its highest value since mid-2022. The median condo sales price, $1,135,500, declined about 1% year over year.”
In addition, Compass noted that 82 percent of house sales and 44 percent of condos went for over their asking prices in May, and that house sales “averaged a sales price almost 13% over asking price, while condos averaged a sale price about a half percent higher than asking price. Both were the highest percentages since mid-2022.”
Also in April, Housingwire’s Brooklee Han wrote that the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont region (a common statistical agglomeration) was the “fourth-hottest housing market in the country.”
On Redfin’s stats page for the San Francisco housing market, it notes “The San Francisco housing market is very competitive. Homes in San Francisco receive 4 offers on average and sell in around 22 days. The median sale price of a home in San Francisco was $1.4 [million] last month, up 3.7% since last year. The median sale price per square foot in San Francisco is $998, up 4.2% since last year.”
That … doesn’t quite sound like a collapse, does it? And maybe that’s why nobody except the New York Post, bless its heart, is sounding the alarm.
Something I learned near the beginning of my real estate journalism career 30 years ago is that the coasts tend to be much more boom-and-bust than the country in between. That hasn’t changed since then. The up and down swing of prices is much larger on these volatile coasts, and San Francisco as one of the highest-flying of the high flyers during the boom had a nasty return to Earth in the bust. It can be unsettling to watch (or experience, if you’re trying to buy or sell in those markets during a swing), but it’s a fact of life that can produce some unsettling statistics at times.
The real target
The Post article online, at least as of this writing, is accompanied by numerous photos of homeless tent encampments and quotes from Jamie Dimon (to Bartiromo, no less) about the city’s failures in housing and crime. Those are certainly concerns that a lot of people in San Francisco justifiably have these days, and certainly are shared by the Voice. But Jacobs intones, “San Francisco is failing on all fronts and in turn, its housing market is quietly crashing.”
Except it’s not.
