Houses in Bayview and the Excelsior now average $1 million

The bad news is that even in Bayview and the Excelsior—the southern-lying neighborhoods that long spelled some relief from San Francisco’s out-of-control home prices—an average single-family house is now a seven-figure investment in 2019.

The good news? There’s not much of it, really. But nevertheless, even while netting seven-figures on average, these homes are still some half a million dollars cheaper than the rest of the city.

Last week, Compass Real Estate released its latest summary of home-buying business in the Bay Area, including a breakdown of the median price of a house in San Francisco neighborhoods through the first nine and a half months of 2019.

At the top of that list, the Pacific Heights/Marina real estate zone averaged more than $4.9 million for a single-family home so far this year.

At the bottom, the combined Bayview/Excelsior zone took its customary place at the end of the list. The median price for those neighborhoods: an estimated $1.08 million.

Per square foot, Bayview and Excelsior averaged about $792 so far this year, just a bit over half of the $1,447 per foot seen in Pac Heights.

This isn’t be the first time that these neighborhoods have broken the seven-figure mark; earlier this year, a different report by Compass economist Patrick Carlisle marked the median in these neighborhoods as just under $1.1 million in September of 2018.

However, that was a slightly different grouping of homes that also included parts of Crocker-Amazon.

Compiling MLS sales averages every six months starting in January of 2005, Carlisle noted that these neighborhoods—consistently the cheapest in the city—never averaged higher than $700K until May of 2015, and have been steadily rising alongside homes in the rest of the city ever since.

Even now, Bayview and Excelsior houses remain a discount compared to the rest of the city, which thus far this year averages $1.6 million for a house, per Carlisle’s calculations.

According to the California Association of Realtors, the citywide San Francisco median for September of 2019 was roughly $1.54 million, up from just over $1.5 million the same time last year.

Across all nine Bay Area counties, the median price was $880,000 in September, down more than five percent from last year’s $900,000.

Almost all of that year-over-year decline was on account of San Mateo County, where the median price fell 8.1 percent from last year; every other county saw prices either increase or decline 2.5 percent or less.

Note that these figures represent only single-family homes; almost all of the new housing built in these neighborhoods doesn’t factor into the numbers.

The Compass report does warn readers that the median price is but a single metric and that it can be affected by variables other than fair market price. It usually doesn’t pay to make too big of a deal about one figure or one report.

However, the trend toward seven-figure homes as the norm even in the most affordable SF neighborhoods has continued apace for years on end now.