East Bay real estate

AltosCharts map mashup by Kevin Boer at 3OceansRealEstate.com

Our AltosCharts service is up for the Most Innovative Technology award at the Inman Connect conference this week. It's partners like Kevin that really illustrate the power of using market analytics to inform. We're proud to count him as a client. I'm not sure how the winners are selected for these awards, but maybe fans of Kevin's work will stuff the ballot box for us.

And while I'm patting myself on the back, here are a couple of other Altos clients that use AltosCharts really well to bring value to their readers, and boost their own marketing return:

The Harper Team in the East Bay

Pat Kapowich in Sunnyvale

SeattleHome.com

(BTW - I don't mean to exclude any other clients and your sites. There are too many to mention. Feel free to add your site to the comments of this blog if you want to show off your AltosCharts work. I'll work up a post highlighting other sites soon.)

Thanks to the folks at FortiusOne, who launched GeoCommons at O'Reilly's Where2.0 conference last week, we finally got around to illustrating the heat map of this phenomenon.

In the following snapshot we've created a heatmap of price reductions. Specifically this is our percent-price-reduction stat--for a given zip code, the percent of properties that have had their asking prices reduced. We have some color tweaking to do still, but you can see the picture pretty clearly. The brighter red, the higher the percentage (and the weaker the market).

San Francisco Bay Area Real Estate Market. Percent Price Reductions. Single Family Homes. June 1 2007. Brightest red is over 50% reductions, darkest red around 10%, which indicates strong demand and healthy turnover rates.

If we zoom into the San Francisco, San Mateo County Peninsula and the north end of Santa Clara County, you can see the strength in Mountain View, up through Palo Alto, and in the San Mateo/Burlingame areas. Also, demand levels in the City have stayed strong.

San Francisco and San Mateo Counties, with parts of Alameda, Contra Costa, and Santa Clara Counties. Affluent neighborhoods are seeing robust demand this spring.

You can get details of the markets in Burlingame, San Mateo, Palo Alto, Mountain View etc. on our free research page. From that page, you can go to our map view and look at price trends for each zip code. (Heatmap not yet included.)

Some readers have asked lately about a recent jump in our Days on Market statistic. I thought it makes sense to explain it here. We recently did a methodology change where we increased the look-back window for watching properties.

By making this change, we more accurately reflect the actual total time on market, even for properties that have come on and off the market, especially including those that have been off the market for 30 days before being relisted.

In January 2007 we increased our look-back window. We'll now identify more properties as they've come on and off the market. Thus the big jump in our Days on Market statistic.

What we found was that in some markets, we can find a significant chunk of properties that have really been on the market for long periods and these properties were previously under-reported in our stats. We've seen a notable decline in the number of properties relisted (with the sole intention of "refreshing" a listing) in Silicon Valley since last fall when the local MLS changed its rules. In San Jose California we've observed a drop from nearly 25% of homes on the market having been relisted down to 9%. That's real progress.

Those rules however do not impact a property that for example was on the market all last summer, was pulled off over the holidays and put back on the market in January. A soon-to-be-announced Altos partner calls these properties "stale fish." We've adjusted our nets to catch more stale fish. We're still dolphin-safe though.

This change effected our the trend charts in most communities a little bit. In some areas, though, you might notice a big jump in the DoM stat that week in January 2007. This change is the reason for the jump. Inset is a snapshot of the current Days on Market trend for San Jose Homes.

Here's a look at 16 zip-codes showing mounting pressure from the slowing housing market. We looked at Northern California and Seattle area zip codes with greater than 40% of the properties with price reductions. We also filtered for decreasing demand trends (measured by our Market Action Index), sufficient inventory, and median days on market (at least 7 weeks).

The result is one way to identify some at-risk bubble markets:

Some patterns emerge. High-end markets, even those close in, like Los Altos, Saratoga, and Redmond are showing their weakness. Outlier communities like Bodega Bay start to filter in. Worst, of course, is the combination of high-end communities far from the economic center - Pebble Beach and Carmel.

Note 1: We filtered pretty aggressively, exclusion from this list does not mean everything is rosy in homeville. You can draw parallels with similar communities that aren't on this list for one reason or another.

Note 2: Inclusion on this list does not imply market rout. In fact prices for these markets are UP an average of 2% year-to-date.

Just some important warning signs for our housing bubble vigilance.

Here's a snapshot from our latest report on Walnut Creek real estate conditions:

Median single family home price as of August 15 is $899,000, that's up a little over 3% from the beginning of the year. Current available inventory of homes is 134, which is up consistently through the year. Demand has kept pace enough to keep us in a seller's market. The market cooling is measurable in a declining Market Action Index, and increasing Days on Market (though at around 40 days, the average time it takes to sell a home is not worrisome.)

Here's an interesting tidbit from our research. Changes in Walnut Creek home prices this year are being driven by a shift in the properties available. In this chart, we look at the four price quartiles for Walnut Creek 94597 (which includes neighborhoods Larkey Park and Beacon Ridge.) Notice that we have a convergence in the properties available. Fewer properties being sold at very high-end of the market keeps a lid on the median price. But the low end of the market (around $700,000) has had relative price stability.

Walnut Creek single family home prices by quartile

If you want to keep track of Walnut Creek in real time, you can bookmark our free Executive Summary page for Walnut Creek real estate market.