San Francisco Real Estate Market Update for the week of February 10, 2008
Read what Rick Turley, President of Coldwell Banker, San Francisco/Peninsula says in his latest weekly report:It has been a big week for real estate news. The National Association of Realtors, DataQuick Information Services, Standard & Poor Case/Schiller, the Mortgage Bankers Association, and even Zillow.com, among several others, bombarded us with indexes, surveys, lists and reports. Filtered through the media, the headlines were, of course, mostly negative – but there were nuggets of positivism in many of the articles. You just had to mine deep within the articles to find them. Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist for the N.A.R. expressed it best by saying, “Those pessimistic thoughts are being driven by media outlets that tend to cherry pick data and experts to perpetuate the story that the economy is heading into recession.” He also stressed that, despite the value of national housing data, all real estate is local and consumers should base their decisions on local trends.
The biggest positive news nugget was that President Bush signed the economic stimulus package into law. One component of the package includes a temporary (through December of this year) increase in the conforming loan limit set by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA. The change increases the limit from $417,000 up to as much as $729,950 based on the median price of a given metropolitan area and local market. This is a great bonus to buyers in the greater Bay Area where our median price maxes out the new limit easily in many areas.
The anticipation of this truly necessary change in the conforming loan limits is, I believe, what has spurred so many buyers to be out looking at our more than 460 open houses with such gusto. Every single office reported successful opens this week. People were “out in droves” in Castro Valley. 85 groups visited a new Berkeley Hills listing. . .
Read the entire report here.
- Rick Turley
* For an e-mail alert when this report is updated, send an e-mail to info@SFResidence.com with "weekly market report" in the subject line.
posted by SFResidence.com @ 9:52 AM
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