San Francisco: The seven-figure city, where even a fixer-upper can run you a cool million in some neighborhoods (which you can then flip for $2 million). It wasn’t always this way; in fact, most of us should remember when it wasn’t, since it was only five years ago.
Paragon Real Estate crunched some numbers and concluded that the housing market has inverted itself in half a decade. In 2011, 75 percent of the city’s houses sold for under a million dollars. Today, only 26 percent do. Inflation gives us about $70,000 worth of wiggle room on those numbers, since is not nearly enough to wiggle us out of the tough conclusion.
Over on Realtor.com, the home listing site of the Association of Realtors, 168 of the 427 single family homes presently for sale in San Francisco are on offer for less than $1 million, a ratio of almost 40 percent.
But quite a few of those (46) are priced at least $899,000 and so in reasonable danger of leaping over $1 million over the course of bidding. Most recent surveys give a median home price of over $1.3 million in the city.
So where is the elusive 26 percent? You’ve probably already guessed that most cultivate on the southern side of the city, from Bayview on the east all the way to Ingleside and Oceanview on the west.
To date, there have been 51 under-$1 million sales in the Excelsior, 46 in the Ingleside/Oceanview area, 35 in Bayview (where it’s possibly a surprise that it doesn’t manage the number two spot), 34 in Crocker Amazon, and 29 in Visitacion Valley.
Comparably, there have been 35 in the Sunset and 13 in Bernal Heights. Of course, some parts of both of those neighborhoods dip pretty far south in their own right. Mission Terrace, site of eight sales, is about as far north as you’re going to get here.
Looking at the homes for sale right now, it doesn’t seem as if the last months of 2016 are going to see any sudden and inexplicable breakouts in savings in unexpected places. There are four active sub-million listings in the Richmond, plus a 35 day timeshare in Ghirardelli Square for $269,000, and not much else.
Searching a bit further north on Redfin, the cheapest house in the Mission is $795,000. In Bernal Heights, $799,00. In the Miraloma neighborhood, it’s $899,000.
- Where To Buy in SF [Paragon]
- California Housing Market Update [Association of Realtors]