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.
