How to Buy Smart in a Housing Downturn

Story Updates

5/21/09

• Data on Bay Area Home's

  An update from Alice Chen for our pitch on how to buy smart in a housing downturn.

  I just checked in with staff at the real estate website Zillow.com, recommended to me by Thomas Davidoff, an assistant professor at U.C. Berkeley's business school. Zillow staff gave me data which ranked the Bay Area housing markets from strongest to the weakest in the past year.

  Atherton tops the list with an unbelievable 46% growth in the Zillow Home Value Index (read more about the index at http://www.zillow.com/howto/WhatsaZindex.htm) from the first quarter of 2008. The staff at Zillow tell me this is because Atherton is a small, extraordinarily affluent town with very few home sales, which can skew the stats. Even so, 29 of the 130 towns included in Zillow's Bay Area city-by-city data have seen their Zillow Home Value Index drop by less than 10%. That's not much considering how high home prices rose in those areas in recent years.

  And now for the data!!!! (You have been warned… it is a lot). We will take a closer look at this data hosted by DocStoc. In the future and how it relates to the larger pitch.

  Posted by Spot. Us on 05/21/09
5/12/09

• SF Expensive - but not THAT expensive

  From SF Gate we got a quick blog post letting us know that SF is on the list of most expensive cities in America - but near the bottom (18 out of 20).

  Read more here.

  Forbes also recently came out with a list of America's Top 25 Towns to Live Well. San Francisco is too big to qualify, but we've gotta give props to our neighbors to the south who took plenty of spots. So congrats to Mountain View (No. 4), Cupertino (No. 5), Foster City (No. 10), Belmont (No. 11) and Hillsborough (No. 12). That last one, by the way, sports a jaw-dropping median income of $320,715, according to Forbes.

  Posted by Spot. Us on 05/12/09
4/19/09

• SF Home Prices Fall 20%; Overall Bay Area Prices Fall 46%

  Via SFist

  The number of home sales in San Francisco County has actually been on the rise, in large part due to falling prices and the never-ending demand of people who want to own property here.

  Reporting continues and Alice Chen and Jen Reeves are researching and interviewing to find out what this means - and give this new data context.

  Posted by Spot. Us on 04/19/09