
After first decline in years, SF home prices hit all-time high in April 2016 - walterclifford
https://www.openlistings.com/blog/san-francisco-median-home-price-april-2016/
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radikalus
1\. I hate paying so much for a house, this is ridiculous, they need to build
more supply. 2\. I bought a house for some ridiculous price anyways. 3\. I'm
now fucked if more supply is added. Vote against any proposition that adds
more units to the city. 4\. Go to my job where I make the world a better
place.

~~~
tachyonbeam
I just moved to the bay area from a large urban center. I live in the far away
surburbs right now (Sunnyvale). It's kind of incredible to me how flat and
sprawled out everything is. There are almost no buildings taller than 2-3
floors.

The bay area has a housing crisis, and it needs to grow _vertically_. There
should be tall apartment buildings being built, especially in the suburbs,
there's plenty of space. It's pretty clear that the bay area refuses to grow,
because of political reasons, which are often selfish as you pointed out.

IMO, the inevitable outcome is that tech will slowly relocate to other areas
that are more willing to accomodate (and perhaps welcome) the growth. I think
it's already started.

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rgbrgb
Hey, thanks for posting this to HN. For those curious, our designer/CEO (DEO!)
Judd Schoenholtz made the graphs in Sketch (we're huge fans). A little trick
from him on making the bars to scale... use the actual values as the pixel
heights then scale group to your desired size. Seems obvious but I would have
done something dumber and more complicated.

As for the data, it's from the SFAR MLS (we're a participating broker member)
and was double-checked with data from Paragon RE. If you want it, email
datarequest@openlistings.com (I think we need to pull it into its own
spreadsheet but I'll post the link here when we do).

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okigan
Statistics are misleading, particularly median [1].

Post the same graph with volume of sales under it (like [2]) to actually make
it meaningful.

[1]
[https://www.openlistings.com/blog/content/images/2016/05/Art...](https://www.openlistings.com/blog/content/images/2016/05/Artboard-4-Copy-10-4.png)

[2] [http://www.gmatpill.com/images/apple-
stock.jpg](http://www.gmatpill.com/images/apple-stock.jpg)

~~~
w-ll
Box Charts would probably be the best way to look at it.

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coldcode
How does anyone afford the median 1.2M house price? The income multiplier I
always considered was 2X annual income which would require an income of $600K
per household. I don't know anyone who makes that much as a programmer, even a
dual $300K income seems unlikely. Are there really that many startup
millionaires in SF?

~~~
CptJamesCook
Wells Fargo list today's 30-Year Fixed-Rate Jumbo rate at 3.5%:
[https://www.wellsfargo.com/mortgage/rates/](https://www.wellsfargo.com/mortgage/rates/)

For simplicity, let's say you put 200k down on this 1.2 mil home. Your
mortgage payment on a $1 million loan would be a $4,490/month, or around
$50,000 per year. $30,000 of that is tax deductible.

A general rule of thumb is that you shouldn't spend more than roughly thirty
percent of your income on rent, so I think any person or family making over
150k/year could feasibly think about a purchase like this.

The major caveat is that $200k in savings is hard to come by.

~~~
nugget
You'd also have ~ $13,200/year in property taxes (also deductible) and should
budget another ~ $4,000/year for maintenance and upkeep. Not earth shattering
but it does add up. There's some political risk that the Feds will eliminate
or at least limit one or both of these deductions. Your basic premise is
accurate which is that low rates have enabled people to stretch their incomes
to meet high housing prices. Since rates have steadily fallen since the late
70s we've sort of seen this play out before, and we know how it ends: people
get into trouble when they lose their jobs and can't sell their house in a
down market. If you have 30 years of relatively steady employment, then you
are fine.

~~~
eru
I wonder if one could buy insurance against the deductibles vanishing?

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matt_wulfeck
Don't worry everyone this time it's different.

~~~
snarfy
It is different. In 2007 the bubble was everywhere. Today markets like Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver are at or above 2007 levels. Other
markets like Phoenix, Atlanta and most others have still not recovered.

It's lack of inventory causing the increase, not sub prime mortgages. I just
bought a house myself in a hot market. It had 35 offers on it. That week there
were about 3 houses available in the entire county of similar price. And every
week I've shopped, the outlook was just as grim. They will need to build a lot
more to meet the demand, but there isn't enough space.

~~~
ghaff
The bubble really wasn't everywhere. The areas with a lot of genuine demand
because of job growth and other factors (Bay area, prime areas of Northeast,
prime areas of NYC) didn't decline to nearly the same degree that locales like
Las Vegas did. Presumably, absent the sub-prime crunch, prices would have
started rising more and sooner in the popular areas.

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pcr0
While it's a useful statistic, I don't think home prices by themselves tell
the whole story.

Would be great to have a median multiple as well. (median home price / median
annual salary)

~~~
rgbrgb
Someone mentioned something like this in a reddit thread as well [0].

What conclusion would you be hoping to make from that? According to census.gov
median household income was $78,378 in 2014 if that's interesting [1].

[0]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4i7wmt/sf_hom...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4i7wmt/sf_home_prices_back_to_an_all_time_high/)
[1]:
[http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/0667000,00](http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/0667000,00)

~~~
pcr0
Cool, thanks.

It just gives an income-adjusted figure to be able to compare with other
cities in the US, and around the world [0]. It also gives a rough idea of how
long a typical household would have to save in order to buy a home (though
this depends on tax and other spending).

That represents a median multiple of ~16.4 (1.285m / 78378), second only to
Hong Kong (19.0)[0], which has topped the survey since its inclusion.

[0]: [http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf](http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf)

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jboydyhacker
Median is a tough number to use if a bunch of folks at the high end skew the
data during a month- especially if volumes are drying up.

To get at what is occurring you probably need to show it in price bands. say
top/bottom and middle third of real estate prices. How much volume at each and
trends in each.

~~~
nickm12
You have it reversed. The advantage of the median (50th percentile) is that a
few outliers at the high end won't skew the data. To move the median, you have
to move half of the distribution.

~~~
jboydyhacker
No read the second sentence.

What I'm saying is the real estate market has very different characteristics
in the low, medium, and high end. So the top third, middle thirds and bottom
thirds should be broken out and you can't use median for the market as one
sample set.

