San Francisco Bay Area Homes Inch Up In Value

For the first time in two years, average home prices inched up in October.

I remember I was dating a girl in 2000. We met on a Jewish federation trip to Israel. She was working for Disney but quitting to take a job with Walker Digital in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She paid about $2500 a month for her big Beverly Hills apartment.

After much hunting, she got an apartment on the waterfront in San Francisco for about $4,000 a month. She signed a one year lease.

A month later, she lost her job as the dot com boom crashed.

She was stuck with her lease. She could not find a job for over two years, and she was hyper-educated with a Harvard MBA and PhD work at Stanford.

I had no idea in 2000 that real estate was more expensive in San Francisco than in Manhattan.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Sales of homes that cost more than $500,000 constituted 36% of sales in October, up from 34.9% in October 2008 and well up from a low of 22.7% in January.

Last month’s increase in the median sales price also came as foreclosure properties made up a smaller portion of the resale market. Sales of homes that had been foreclosed upon in the prior 12 months made up 31.9% of all previously owned homes sold in October, DataQuick said.

That was down from 32.3% in September and 44% in October 2008. Foreclosure sales peaked at 52% of the resale market in February.

The drop in foreclosure sales came as banks and loan servicers increasingly pursued alternatives to the foreclosure process such as loan modifications and short sales — where a lender agrees to sell a home for less than the value of a mortgage, DataQuick said.