April showers bring— a 22.1% decrease in home sale prices for the Bay Area. Where are your May flowers? Don't panic (too much) yet; those numbers might be a bit misleading for two reasons. 1) San Francisco has actually seen a slight appreciation in home value. 2) Some experts think the surge in sales of foreclosed homes could be skewing the numbers — a lot. Outside of those areas hit particularly hard by foreclosures, typical Bay Area home value has actually declined by only about 7%. Feel better now? Should homeowners even worry about real estate statistics anymore? Sure they paint a bigger picture when looked at altogether, but lately they seem to be more newspaper fodder than anything else (and they're reliably inconsistent between different research and data services, for that matter).
· Bay Area home prices continue steep fall [SF Gate]
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