07.23.08
27% plunge in Bay Area real estate prices
I must admit I’ve been far too busy to keep up with the media. But when I walked into a convenience store last Friday and saw this headline screaming up at me from a stack of San Francisco Chronicles I took note.
Up to this point, the inner San Francisco Bay Area seems to had a teflon coating against the declining RE market. Yes the outer Bay Area is bad for a while, lots of foreclosures and huge price drops. My personal opinion is that the severe downturn in the outer bay has been hastened by the high cost of energy. Many in the outer Bay Area commute many more miles to get to places like San Francisco and Silicon Valley where the housing prices have always been higher. At some point the commute stops making sense. And let’s not even talk about further out into the central valley, where Stockton is ground zero for foreclosures, driven by speculation gone bust and really not much in the way of jobs.
But the inner bay has been immune, or so I thought, severe building restrictions, an awesome climate, great culture and high paying jobs has always kept prices high and competition for houses intense. When I bought in 2000, I was incredibly lucky to be the one picked out of 14 offers. But the cancer of the housing market has spread inward and yes even San Francisco has suffered a double digit decline (11%).
What’s dragging down prices? The large inventory of bargain priced bank owned properties. The individual owners don’t really have much of a chance unless they have something really special that the right person will want.
07.05.08
Real estate swap sites, alternative to selling?
One year. That’s how long I have been trying to sell some land. I’m not alone, I heard just the other day that a family was contemplating moving back into their house that they had been trying to sell for six months.
Recently I put my land on domuswap, a real estate swap site. Here is how it works. You list your property and set up some criteria on what you will consider in trade. The site attempts to match your property with possible trade candidates. You can search for properties and inquire about possible matches. In the few weeks I have had the land listed I have gotten several inquiries, one interesting and a real candidate.
The one challenging thing is if the properties are financed. The lender won’t let you just move a loan over to a new property, you have to get a new one. All the rules apply as if it was a regular transaction, even if you decide to trade into a property that is worth less than your current property, the bank will want an appraisal and lend based on that, not based on what you are trading out of.
Other swap sites are goswap and onlinehousetrading. I haven’t checked these sites out yet.
