Here they come down the final stretch, folks! It's San Francisco in first, followed by Manhattan -- yes, Donald Trump's Manhattan -- close behind in the second spot! And -- look out -- that's San Jose in third place!Real estate rankings are like overlapping horse races, with one finish line replacing the next as data crunchers continually spew out their latest findings.
This week's new joint analysis by the Point2homes.com and PropertyShark websites points to San Francisco as the costliest housing market in the U.S. and Canada, with a median home price of $1,085,000. Manhattan captured the No. 2 position ($1,059,000), while San Jose ($700,000) took the third spot, followed by Brooklyn in fourth place, Los Angeles in fifth and Vancouver in sixth.
Those are the top finishers in what's billed as North America's Superstar Housing Markets.
"These kinds of headlines aren't good for our workforce," said Jacky Morales-Ferrand, San Jose's housing director. "When you get housing prices that are so expensive, it makes it very challenging for people's kids, for grandparents and for companies to recruit here," she said.
She called the obsession with rankings "a sign of this recovery." "Because the latest recession was all about housing and its prices, and we now have this recovering market. But how high can it go again? When it reaches its cap, it's going to deflate. It's going to have to go down," she added.
Sometimes it's hard to make sense of all the number crunching from competing sources. Just as an example, the Demographia housing affordability index recently named Vancouver as the third most expensive city in the world, after Hong Kong and Sydney, while Point2homes.com ranks it as the sixth most expensive market in North America.
At times contradictory, the rankings are a confusing aspect of contemporary culture, celebrating the fact that entire markets are now out of reach of ordinary pocketbooks. But people are fascinated, anyway. It's something like a new turn on the old joke by Groucho Marx, who said, "I don't want to belong to any club that will have me as a member" -- the inference being that he envied the razzle-dazzle lifestyles that seemed beyond his own comfort zone and reach.
Oakland didn't make the Top 15 of the Point2homes.com ranking. But fear not, it appears on another new list: The Top 30 Hipster Zips for Home Flips, compiled by RealtyTrac. It ranks Oakland's 94606 ZIP code -- where 28.1 percent of the population is aged 20-34 -- in the 17th position nationally, with a $185,000 average gross profit per home flip. (A flip is defined as the purchase and re-sale of a house within a 12-month period.) That represents a 74 percent return on investment.
San Francisco and San Jose didn't even make that list, probably because most millennials can't afford to buy a dirt lot in those cities.
Housing officials, affordability proponents and real estate agents cull from a gazillion sources across academia and the nonprofit and commercial worlds. Some of the big brokerages and real estate franchises crunch their own numbers.
This newspaper often relies on CoreLogic, the real estate information service whose February data analysis showed the median price for a single-family home in the nine-county Bay Area to be $635,000 -- though that wouldn't mean much if you live in San Mateo County (where the median was $1,001,000) or Santa Clara County ($830,000).
Boring down by ZIP code, there is even more variability: like the Bay Area weather, real estate is about microclimates.
In January, RealFacts reported that Bay Area landlords pushed rents up by nearly 10 percent across the region in 2015. In San Jose, the average monthly price for an apartment rose to $2,436 -- a 9.4 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2014. In Oakland, the rise was even steeper: up 13.7 percent to $2,806, RealFacts said.
More recently, the Abodo apartment search website reported that rental costs for one-bedroom units in San Jose fell 11 percent from January to February this year, said to be the biggest decline in the nation. But when Abodo tabulated the 10 largest declines from February to March, San Jose wasn't on the list, though Sacramento ranked second (down 16 percent) and San Francisco ranked ninth (down 6 percent).
Is your head spinning yet?
Just wondering.
Because Zumper, the apartment rental website, has just reported that the median rent for a one-bedroom house in San Francisco last month was $3,590, making it (yet again) the costliest rental market in the United States. Commenting on San Francisco's continued reign, the Curbed SF real estate blog noted that for $3,950, "you could rent a house in Zumper's cheapest city (Wichita, Kansas, $450 a month) and have enough left over to buy a monthly bottle of Napa's Screaming Eagle cabernet sauvignon, the ninth most expensive wine on the market today."
Meanwhile, the blog continued, Oakland "climbed to the survey's number four spot in February," with a median rent of $2,250. That just barely dislodges San Jose from number four; a one-bedroom there is also $2,250, but for Oakland that number is a record, rising 2.3 percent and breaking the previous Oakland Zumper high of $2,210 back in December."
But that soon will be old news. Who's in first place right now?
Stay tuned.
Source: San Jose Mercury News, Richard Scheinin
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_29628585/san-jose-third-costliest-north-american-housing-market
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