I am delighted to present a wonderful home not far from my house in North Berkeley. Right now there is a regatta in the San Francisco Bay, and you can watch that from the living room of this new listing at 923 Creston Road in Berkeley, CA.

 

You will find the utmost of charm, calm and quietude in this split-level North Berkeley hills home! Only a few minutes to Monterey Market or the Gourmet Ghetto, and yet you feel as if you're a million miles away from the cares of everyday life once you arrive on coveted Creston Road. San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge look beautiful from this retreat in the hills! Tilden Park and Lake Anza are close at hand, and the UC Berkeley campus is easily accessible.

 

This home provides delightful architectural details: beamed wood ceilings in living and dining rooms; arched openings, nooks and alcoves add to the appeal. Besides three bedrooms, a full bath with both tub and shower and a very convenient half bath in the master suite, you'll benefit from a stand-alone studio building in the garden. What an ideal office, writer's cottage or studio space!

I'll be there tomorrow and it should be super weather with great views!

Open Sundays January 29th: 1:30 - 4 pm and
February 5th: 12:30 - 3 pm (earlier because of Super Bowl!)

Listed for $685,000

For anyone looking for a view home with traditional charm, updated kitchen and bath, and a great location, I have a recommendation for you. Visit 2530 Edwards Avenue, in El Cerrito. A significant arched picture window frames beautiful views of Mt.Tamalpais and the Bay from the living room. The home has a stylish, urban chic aesthetic that should appeal to many buyers. Those who would love a view home in Berkeley will feel very much at home here—and will especially appreciate the value! One of my favorite pocket parks is right down the way; Poinsett Park is one of those great local secrets, a little unexpected treasure. And for more serious outdoor activities the Mira Vista Golf Course and Country Club is nearby, another under-appreciated gem of the region.

 This home has more thano offer than the usual starter property: it has a third much-desired bedroom in addition to an extra-spacious living room with fireplace. The eat-in kitchen has been updated in cheerful blue tiles, combining with white cabinetry to create a crisp, clean effect. The updated bathroom features tasteful stone tiles and custom finishes. It’s easy to imagine entertaining friends on the inviting stone patio.

 You can check out this home on Sunday, November 6, from 2-5 pm, or by appointment. It is listed by my colleague Parisa Samimi at McGuire Real Estate; offered at $435,000.

Sales prices of single family homes in one of our favorite neighborhoods--Rockridge in Oakland, CA--have seen a series of rises and falls over the past three years. From this time in 2008, median sold prices in this popular area saw a fairly percipitous fall from the mid-$900's to the mid-$700's, and back up to the mid-$900's nine months later. From a median of $780K at the beginning of 2010, they zoomed up by almost $200K  to $975K, dropped back to around $800K, soared again last quarter to the $900K range, only to drop back again this quarter to a median of $818K. What an exhausting ride! Over the course of three years median sold prices are now down 16%, but we won't be surprised to see them take another swing upwards! While median sold prices ended down 6% as compared to this time last year, over the past three months median prices have been on the rise. Inventory has been relatively high, with 81 properties for sale, of which 35 sold.

Part of the erratic price behavior is based on the disparate nature of the inventory: a combination of the vintage homes that are found on both sides of College Avenue, and the large, mostly new homes in the Rockridge hills. Both types of construction fall within the 94618 zip code, and there is a broad range of prices.

We've seen an additional swing in behavior in list price vs. sold price in the homes for sale in the  Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, CA. This past quarter sold prices(in green)  fell below median list price(in red) by $44K, whereas the previous quarter sold prices were in excess of list by $47K.

 

Despite national and state-wide news to the contrary, our extended Berkeley area market feels quite active, with lots of new buyers hoping to take advantage of record low mortgage rates. We continue to suffer primarily from a dearth of desirable inventory. The most attractively presented, well-located homes continue to attract multiple offers. All-cash offers seem to have tapered off as one would expect with the low rates, but we still hear of one or two each week, usually in one of the multiple-offer scenarios. An all-cash offer still is tremendously attractive to a seller! This was the second week of the new fall season, with a reasonable number of properties to see. Of the 88 properties on tour, most were new, with only four coming back with price reductions. Tour covers Albany (7 properties this week), Berkeley (36), El Cerrito (8), Emeryville (3), Kensington (3), and Oakland (31, from Montclair, Rockridge and other North Oakland locations). That's a fairly typical Thursday tour. A few properties appeared "new" in our multiple listing system, but were in fact properties that had not sold during the summer, and are now back on the market at a reduced price, after a hiatus. The chart below shows overall activity for Berkeley. Looking at this a buyer would understandably assume that there was no rush to make an offer, as on average, homes are sitting on the market for more than three months. But here is where buyers need counseling. There is an enormous disparity between the well-presented homes (like my listings and those of my active colleagues) vs. homes that appear on the market over-priced and under-represented! It is still the case that the most desirable properties come on the market, have a brokers' tour and two open houses, and then hear offers on a scheduled day. Their elapsed days on the market is in the range of 14-18. Of the current pending sales (61 in Berkeley) two-thirds of those are properties that had been on the market a month or less. Buyers must be ready to take action, with a loan pre-approval, as well as the psychological readiness to take action quickly, rather than waiting for a price reduction. This material is prepared by a commercial firm, and includes some properties not in our Multiple Listing Service. If I compare that data about days on market to what we agents see within our MLS, there are some considerable differences: within the MLS, the average DOM is 60, but the median of 38 is more reflective of what most buyers will experience. Advice from a good local agent is imperative to know which properties will go into contract quickly, and which ones will be sitting for months to come!

 

On this of all days, we celebrate the simple joys of life: heirloom tomatoes, cling peaches, blackberries, sweet corn. . . . and community. Visiting a farmers’ market provides the pleasures of top-quality products with the added satisfaction of talking with the vendors, hearing their stories and details about their products. The aromas and the sounds are vibrant. You feel part of a community, rather than just being an isolated shopper.

One of my favorite ways to spend time on a Sunday morning, before heading off for an open house, is to visit the Kensington Farmers Market. It’s small but has everything I usually want: great coffee from Catahoulie (I use their Butkus or Lola for espresso). There are always several great fruit and veggie options. And this past week I enjoyed speaking with two vendors in particular:

For the carnivores among us, Fifth Quarter was selling some intriguing pate, confit and other specialty charcuterie items. I took home some ground duck crepinettes, patties of duck and pork, seasoned with mustard seeds and dried figs. We grilled them and they made lovely, rich burgers.

There will be live music from Suska Varda, and as a special treat you’ll be able to get wood-fired pizza from Fist of Flour. What a gentle and yummy way to spend some time on this on Sept. 11^th.

 

Heading to an Association breakfast meeting, I turned on the car radio to hear a national real estate market update. The reporter was commenting on the fact that the housing market recovery was going to be much slower than originally anticipated, lasting at least through next year, if not longer. The number of foreclosures nationwide is being talked about in the range of 5-6 million still on the books in the "shadow inventory" we all hear about. Foreclosures are being absorbed at a rate of about 1M per year. Could it really take five or more years for us to see a recovery? Speculation is that recovery will come sooner, as a result of foreign investment increasing, and a natural increase in the number of households requiring housing.

An interesting point was made about the fact that fewer new households are being formed now than a year ago. Speculation is that with such financial pressures, and especially with the fear that they could not sell a home if they own one, couples are less likely to split up and form new households. Adult children are less likely to leave home and start their own households under current economic restrictions. Imigration rates have also slowed.

Jobs are being created at a slower rate than expected, and unlike in previous recessions, many employers are willing to eliminate jobs even at the risk of not being able to replace them when the economy begins to recover. Unlike in previous downturns, now a very large number of positions are occupied by contract workers, without benefits.

That's the fairly grim macro picture. As I listened, I considered that some of my clients or future clients could be listening to this same story. And how do I reconcile this nation-wide picture with my current local experience? This week I spent five hours at a pre-offer inspection with a buyer, inspecting a $1 million home, so that my buyer could make the strongest possible offer in a multiple offer situation. He was already planning to write an all-cash offer, but having no inspection contingency would make the offer significantly more compelling. We were competing against three other offers. (He didn't get the house). That is the kind of pressure that buyers face here in the hot parts of the Berkeley, Rockridge and Piedmont markets right now, where multiple offers and quick sales are again the norm. It's both odd and difficult to counsel clients when our market appears to have hit bottom, picked up, and gone back to the kind of activity level that we experienced at the top of the market. Now prices are 10-20% lower than the peak, but the competition is stiff. Right here. In my neighborhoods. It's all about micro-markets! 

All residents of the Berkeley, CA area are invited to bring their lifeless laptops, sick cellphones, tired TVs and moribund monitors to the Berkeley Association of REALTORS® this Thursday from 1 - 4 pm or Friday from 10 -noon and their electronics will be recycled for FREE. This is the annual Earth Day tribute I organize on behalf of the GREEN Council of the Berkeley Association of REALTORS®.  Last year we filled the conference room -- help us do that again this year!

The office is conveniently located at the corner of MLK and Cedar Streets in Berkeley (1553 MLK Jr. Way for those with GPS!). Please, no major appliances. As an added bonus, all donors will receive a reusable lunch bag filled with Green Goodies and tips on saving energy. It includes a CFL, bio bag, outlet gaskets, as well as information about how to recycle CFLs. It's our way of saying Thank You for e-cycling with us on Earth Day!

We've all heard about the "shadow inventory" of distressed homes, that large number of properties that may dump into our market at any minute from the banks' stash of foreclosed properties, commonly called REOs. It's impossible to know how much of an issue that will be in this area. Below I show the distressed property activity in the areas I cover since the beginning of the year. The Berkeley numbers remind us that we are not unscathed. Seven of the 21 foreclosures were in North Berkeley and the hills.  

Distressed Property Activity: January 1 - April 15 2011

	Short Sales	Foreclosures	Total Distessed	Total Sales	% Distressed
Berkeley	16	21	37	130	28.5%
Oakland	129	326	455	804	56.6%
Albany	1	3	4	27	14.8%
Kensington	0	2	2	14	14.3%
El Cerrito	1	7	8	45	17.8%
Piedmont	1	2	3	26	11.5%

Nationwide, Fannie Mae, in its most recent annual report to investors, said it acquired 262,078 homes in 2010, up 80 percent from 2009. REO sales picked up 51 percent, to 185,744, leaving Fannie Mae with REO inventory of 162,489 homes valued at $14.9 billion at the end of the year. The company also said $212.8 billion in mortgages guaranteed by the company were delinquent by 60 days or more.

 "Given the large number of seriously delinquent loans in our single-family guaranty book of business and the large current and anticipated supply of single-family homes in the market, we expect it will take years before our REO inventory approaches pre-2008 levels," Fannie Mae warned.

In order to help sell off some of that inventory, Fannie Mae has recently re-instated a bonus program to buyers within California. Buyers who enter into contract on a Fannie Mae owned property from now through May 15^th, and close by June 30th, will be eligible for $1000 in credits towards closing costs. The program is called HomePath, and closely resembles a program available last year, but this year's program is less generous. The deal only applies to buyers who will owner-occupy their purchase.

We know we need rain, at least in some global sense of “need.” But today, right now, I do not NEED it to be raining. My seller most certainly does not WANT it to be raining in El Cerrito on the first day that his house is on the market. Especially not after weeks, really months of preparation, which is what is required of conscientious sellers to prepare a home for sale, especially in a rocky market. This seller has done a great deal, not just in the time immediately before the sale, but over the entire five years that he and his family have lived there. We’re talking about all new windows, a new electrical system, a very tastefully remodeled bathroom, refinished floors and mostly new paint. The front porch and exterior paint is so new that the front of the home will look different to those who attend my open house than it looks on the website and flyers—all the exterior photos will change the next time the sun shines! So after weeks, months, truly years of work to get to the point of being ready for the debut of a this property, it hardly seems fair for a crucial event in the sale of a property to be so impacted by the weather gods and godesses!

So let’s hope there will be those hail and hearty souls looking for three bedroom homes in El Cerrito who will still come visit. They’ll find this thoroughly updated home in a very commute-friendly location at 808 Richmond Street, not far from El Cerrito Plaza. And it’s priced at quite a friendly price as well: $498,000, hoping to attract lots of interest. I’d be delighted to show you this handsome home, as well as the garage/storage building. What tremendous potential for conversion to an artist studio, home office or the like! Much too nice to put a car in! And you’ve got oodles of space in the driveway to park several cars anyway.

Dellums the cat and I would love to show you around starting at 2 pm!