Even as speculation bubbles and ferments about when or if present pricing peaks will begin to take a dive, word has just come down from the statistics aggregating site Statista and Business Insider that median home prices across the Bay Area have broken the records set by previous all-time highs in 2007.
We know what you’re thinking—we've peaked just now? Not last year? Or the year before? In San Francisco and other molten hot markets like San Mateo County, we left old all-time high records behind years ago as prices exited the stratosphere.
But as the real estate company Paragon reminded us this week, some parts of the Bay Area never fully recovered from the 2008 bust.
Napa County, Sonoma County, and Contra Costa County in particular have received only a middling boost from the feeding frenzy of demand the past five years, partly because the juiced up reputation of South Bay counties has robbed them of some of their past prestige.
(The 2014 Napa earthquake probably accounts for a good portion of that region’s lingering malaise as well.)
And of course, those counties have a lot of real estate, particularly Contra Costa, home to well over a million people. So while the rest of us have been charting like mad, the overall average of the nine counties together has behaved a bit more conservatively.
As you can see from the Statista chart, we’ve flirted with the previous high regional median of $665,000 since late 2014, maintaining a daredevil-like degree of tension for months. Statista pulled the data compiled here from reports by analytics agency CoreLogic.
The fact that only now are we in uncharted territory is perhaps startling. Against all intuition and evident definitions of reason, everything that’s happened in the last five years has technically been within established parameters.
(For the Bay Area overall, at least. The significance of more tightly defined craziness in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Palo Alto etc, still stands.)
So that’s how it is. $665,001 is the new normal. For now, at least.
- SF Prices Above Previous Bubble [Business Insider]
- Report Insists Rosy Future For Condos [Curbed SF]
- Bay Area Prices Surpass Bubble [Business Journals]