Statistics -- they never seem to tell the whole story.

Trulia just put out a report picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle on their sfgate.com site that carried the headline "15 SF neighborhoods where median price is under $1M".

(Click to go directly to the Trulia report where the map is interactive and shows not just San Francisco neighborhoods but all across the country).

I get that the point of the story is to show how unaffordable housing has become in our city.  But they're not comparing apples to apples. 

For example, the median selling price in 2018 for a home in the Tenderloin and Civic Center neighborhoods is $852,000.  Those neighborhoods are two of the fifteen that are still under one million.  Compare that to the neighborhoods of Potrero Hill and Dogpatch where the median sales price this year has been $1,210,000 and has been over a million for at least two years.

However, the median size of the properties selling in the Tenderloin and Civic Center is a one bedroom, one bath home in 745sf.  Compare that to the median in Potrero Hill and Dogpatch which is a two bedroom, two bath home in 1,020sf.  The cost per square foot in both areas is virtually identical ($1,144/sf in the Tenderloin and Civic Center vs $1,142 in Potrero Hill and Dogpatch).

That exposes one of the problems of lumping all residential sales into one median or average number, especially when you're trying to compare relatively small geographic areas such as city neighborhoods.

If you want a true comparison using these neighborhoods as an example, take a look at the median cost of a one bedroom, one bath condo.  In the Tenderloin and Civic Center area the median sales price for this year so far is, as noted above, $852,000.  The median sales price in Potrero Hill and Dogpatch is actually lower -- $807,000.  (It's also smaller -- 695sf vs 745sf).

Averages/medians don't mean a lot to a prospective buyer or seller if they lump all homes (studios and mansions alike) together in one number.  That's why our sales reports look at specific configurations of single family homes and condos which gives a truer picture.

Volume of Residential Sales UP

For the first ten months of the year the total number of residential sales of single family homes and condos/TICs has reached a three-year high of 4,382 units:

We typically see an average of over 400 sales each month for November and December.  If that holds for this year we should have an annual total of approx. 5,200 sales.  That would be the highest in the last four year.

Monthly sales totals this year have been higher than last year in 6 of 10 months.  Four of those came in February through May.

Stay tuned.

New Listing Watch - back to normal?

The number of new listings during the past two weeks was virtually identical to the same period a year ago.  There were 124 new listings for single family homes vs 111 a year ago.  There were 165 new listings of condos compared to 171 a year ago.

Compared to the prior two week period there was a significant drop which is typical for this time of year:  124 vs 164 for single family homes and 165 vs 209 for condos.

The percentage of new listings that went into contract in the same two week period is up compared to the prior period (slightly for single family homes, 10.5% vs 9.8%; and more substantially for condos: 10.9% vs 6.2%).

However, the number of price reductions in the last two weeks maintains the trend over the past two months -- much higher numbers than a year ago.  There were 33 price reductions of single family homes compared to 18 a year ago.  There were 58 reductions on condos compared to 35 a year ago.

The full report can be found at our web site:  www.boldsf.com