San Jose Area Prices Recover at 5 Times the National Rate
You’ve read it here before and you’ll read it here again: There’s no such thing as a national housing market, any more than there is a national weather report.
This just in: When it comes to residential real estate, the Bay Area just ain’t normal.
Consider, for instance, April – a month that saw home values increase by 5.2 percent across the USA.
Buyers Paying Growing Premium in San Jose’s Blossom Valley
Buyers paid an average of 106.4 percent of list price for single-family homes that changed hands in San Jose’s Blossom Valley area in April, up from 105.2 percent in March and 102.6 percent in April 2012.
In short, the strong seller’s market continued, with low inventory helping induce buyers to pay ever larger premiums to beat out the competition in multiple-offer situations.
The average sale price of $593,427 did fall by 1.3 percent from March, but remained a hefty 21.7 percent above one year ago. READ MORE …
Santa Clara County Average Home Price Tops $1 Million
Click on graph for interactive version
The average price for a single-family home that changed hands in Santa Clara County in April topped $1 million for the first time since November 2007.
The average price of $1,032,630 was up 8.6 percent from March and 24.5 percent year-over-year.
In all, 989 homes closed escrow in April, up 23 percent from March but down 9.3 percent from April 2012.
Buyers paid 105.9% of list price in April – the highest the ratio has been since May 2000, when it was 107.7%.
Do Monsters Lurk Beyond Bay Area Price Recovery?
Regular readers of my blog won’t be surprised by this, but homes in about one in six Bay Area zip codes already have regained or surpassed their pre-crash highs.
To put a finer point on it, homes in 34 of 185 ZIP codes in five Bay Area counties have regained or surpassed their bubble-era peak home value or are less than 1 percent from it, according to a San Jose Mercury News analysis of February median values for all homes from online real estate site Zillow.
The best way for me to illustrate how shocking is this recovery – and how amazingly different is the San Jose/Bay Area from the rest of the country – is to recount a prediction READ MORE …
What Every Buyer Needs to Know and None Wants to Hear
Before I dispense some badly needed advice to San Jose area home buyers, a material disclosure is in order: I have little sympathy for those buyers who looked a gift horse in the mouth for three-and-a-half years, all because they expected an even better gift horse to come along in the form of even lower prices and/or interest rates. READ MORE …
New Listing in Blossom Valley:
