Testimonials for Blog

  California’s housing market is expected to improve in 2016, but a shortage of available inventory and continuing high costs are expected to limit the improvement, according to a report released Thursday by the California Association of Realtors. According to CAR’s 2016 California Housing Market Forecast, existing home sales are expected to rise in 2016 by 6.3% over 2015’s expected total. Additionally, existing home sales are expected to hit 407,500 in 2015, which would also represent a 6.3% increase over 2014, when there were 383,300 existing home sales. CAR’s forecast calls for existing home sales to rise to 433,000 in 2016.

San Francisco metro area residents paid record median rent in August, but there was a glimmer of good news: the pace of year-over year rent increases rose at the slowest pace since June 2014, Zillow said Tuesday. The Zillow Rent Index for the San Francisco metro area stood at $3,313 in August, up 13.3 percent from August 2014. That put San Francisco in second place nationally for highest median rent — surpassed only by the San Jose metro area, which had a Zillow Rent Index of $3,401 in August, up 9.5 percent from August 2014. The San Jose area’s 9.5

Zillow’s latest figures show that the nation’s housing market is cooling off, even the white-hot Bay Area. The national housing market is slowing down, with home values showing the first monthly drop since the market began recovering four years ago, according to the real estate data company’s report for July. San Francisco, San Jose, Denver and Dallas are still tallying double-digit year-over-year home value increases, but even those hot markets are seeing a pullback in their pace of appreciation from June, Zillow said. In San Francisco, July’s Zillow Home Value Index stood at $756,100, up 0.6 percent from June and

Pending home sales in California soared in July compared to the previous year, posting the strongest year-over-year increase in more than six years, an industry trade group reported Monday. But there are signs of a possible forthcoming decline in real estate activity after California Realtors, responding to CA’s July Market Pulse Survey, saw a reduction in floor calls, listing appointments, and open house traffic, compared with June. The Market Pulse Survey is a monthly online survey of more than 300 California Realtors, which measures data about their last closed transaction and sentiment about business activity in their market area for

Like many people in the Bay Area, Ken Ball and his wife would like to sell their home in Oakland and use the profit to buy a house without a mortgage somewhere cheaper. The problem is, they can’t do it for nine to 12 months, and Ball wonders where the market will be then. “I think we are at some kind of peak” in the market, but “we are probably not ready” to sell, he said. “Is there a resource that offers Bay Area housing price forecasts out a year? Many people forecast home prices for the state or U.S.,

The median home value in San Jose is $783,100. San Jose home values have gone up 10.7% over the past year and Zillow predicts they will rise 4.5% within the next year. The median rent price in San Jose is $2,830, which is lower than the San Jose Metro median of $2,980. Foreclosures will be a factor impacting home values in the next several years. In San Jose 0.8 homes are foreclosed (per 10,000). This is greater than the San Jose Metro value of 0.7 and also lower than the national value of 3.8 Mortgage delinquency is the first step

The latest illustration of just how out of whack the Bay Area housing market is shows local counties overwhelming the United States map, when counties are drawn proportionate in size to their property values. Real estate tracker and data enthusiast Max Galka created the cartogram map and other intriguing visualizations for his website Metrocosm. “To create the map (above), I took the total residential property value for every county in the U.S. (the contiguous 48 states), and substituted those values for each county’s land area,” said Galka. “Notice what a small portion of the U.S. land area is actually covered by the red

A lack of houses for sale has had two main effects: it has reduced the selection of homes that consumers can choose from while making those that are available more expensive than they might otherwise be. Higher prices have had some positive effect, helping homeowners regain some lost equity, but the lack of inventory has mostly been a negative, keeping down the number of home sales. That now appears to be shifting as Realtor.com’s Advance Read on June Trends finds inventories are rising. It says that could lead 2015 to be the best year for housing since the bubble-peak year of 2006. Rising

The housing market is chugging ahead, with even higher home prices and more buyer activity—and in May, we’re seeing more than the ordinary seasonal uptick. “On the demand side, we are seeing traffic and searches on realtor.com® continue to set new highs,” said our chief economist, Jonathan Smoke, who did a preliminary analysis of our site’s data in May. Visits and searches are expected to be up more than 50% and 35%, respectively, year over year. Helping create more opportunities for buyers, the listings inventory is now growing faster, at 4% over April—but it’s still down compared with last year,

Buying a home is already far more affordable than renting one, and that imbalance could worsen as rents outpace home values for the first time in years. In April, rents nationally rose an average of 4 percent compared to home values increasing by just 3 percent year-over-year, according to new data from Zillow. One result: Renters who were considering buying are now taking that first step. “We finally have more buyers who are serious now,” said Cyndi Mino, an agent with First Team Real Estate Agents in Huntington Beach, CA. “Landlords are raising rents ridiculously high, and people are saying, ‘That’s