June 28, 2008

A Stroll, A Wander, A Saunter, A Hike, A Promenade

We all have our pet subjects. One of mine — you may have noticed — is “walkability”. So I was delighted to read that the wonderful Walk Score is soon to launch “America’s Most Walkable Neighborhoods”, a ranking of the 40 largest cities in the U.S. Can’t wait to see it.

In the meantime, it is revealing to see how Walk Score defines a “walkable neighborhood”. The parameters are much broader than I would have imagined and encompass demographics as well as proximity to useful resources.

A walkable neighborhood is, according to them, a community which has the following characteristics:

• A center: a discernible center, whether it’s a shopping district, a main street, or a public space.
• Density: The neighborhood is dense enough for local businesses to flourish and for public transportation to be cost effective.
• Mixed income, mixed use: Housing is provided for everyone who works in the neighborhood: young and old, singles and families, rich and poor. Businesses and residences are located near each other.
• Parks and public space: There are plenty of public places to gather and play.
• Accessibility: The neighborhood is accessible to everyone and has wheelchair access, plenty of benches with shade, sidewalks on all streets, etc.
• Well connected, speed controlled streets: Streets form a connected grid that improves traffic by providing many routes to any destination. Streets are narrow to control speed, and shaded by trees to protect pedestrians.
• Pedestrian-centric design: Buildings are placed close to the street to cater to foot traffic, with parking lots relegated to the back.
• Close schools and workplaces: Schools and workplaces are close enough that most residents can walk from their homes.

I would be interested to hear from readers which neighborhoods they think fit some or all of these descriptions. Central and South Berkeley? Rockridge? Montclair Village? El Cerrito?

Walk Score have also devised a couple of very cool maps which clearly demonstrate the difference between a walkable area and its opposite:

To me, these maps bring to mind the difference between taking a one-mile walk in Berkeley and in Piedmont.

Previous posts that have addressed walkability issues:

On San Leandro (or why it’s tiresome to buy underwear in Berkeley)
Montclair: is this the new hot spot for savvy Bay Area buyers?
Notes on a neighborhood: Chabot
Rockridge duplex offers price and fixing potential
Berkeley: can’t get enough of those views
Mapping the walkability factor

June 27, 2008

Bay Area: Do You Really Belong Here?

Forget your psychic friend and magic 8 ball. CurbedSF has it that today’s savvy home hunters leave it to programmers to come up with a way to tell them, via scientific survey, whether a neighborhood is a good fit or not. Indeed, Hoodeo is the “neighborhood match maker,” your online connector of human to ‘hood.

So I gave it a spin- God knows I am having a hard time finding a place I can afford in SF; maybe Hoodeo knows something I don’t.  Among its questions, the survey asks me if I wanted to stay in this city or if I would go anywhere. Since my job and friends and life are here, I actually do want to stay here, but just for fun, I chose “will go anywhere.” Hoodeo also smartly inquires how much I make and how much I “want to spend” on my next home, as well as how big I want it, cleverly reminding me that those square feet I desire will also have to be cleaned (I picked 1000 square feet, and since I had the option, 2 beds and at least 1.5 baths since I share with a man whom occasionally disgusts me). I decided the fair amount to pay, based on what we make, and that we would like to have money left over to travel and buy beer and such, would be 400 to 450K.

I should be, according to Hoodeo, living in Philidelphia. Wait, but you didn’t ask if I like sub-zero winters! I don’t!

Back to Hoodeo then, this time insisting on staying in the Bay Area. If I am to spend what I want to spend, I will need to think about Pacifica, San Bruno, South San Francisco, or– if I want the city proper– Bayview. Wait, you didn’t ask if I like gunfire in my front yard. I don’t!

Needless to say, Hoodeo has left some poignant questions off the list in determining if a ‘hood will fit you. For instance, nowhere am I asked what I think of On Deadline’s report that

Members of the Presidential Memorial Commission tell the San Francisco Chronicle that they’ve already collected 8,500 signatures on a petition to put the proposal before voters this November. If it passes, the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant would be renamed [the “George W. Bush Sewage Plant.]

To which I say: I am home.

June 27, 2008

Festival Fridays: Oakland’s Montclair Village Fine Arts Festival

The 33rd Annual Montclair Village Fine Arts Festival is being held this weekend, Friday through Sunday, in the Montclair district of Oakland. Montclair Village is nestled in the upper Oakland hills and definitely lives up to its moniker of “village”, not feeling at all like part of a big urban city. The downtown, along Mountain Blvd and adjacent streets, is primarily comprised of boutiques and small businesses, gourmet as well as standard food fare, and a large recreation center. The weather should be nice, so plan on heading over this way, checking out the booths, the Farmer’s Market on Sunday, and then seeing some of the wonderful homes available for sale in the neighborhood.

Location: Montclair Village is located just off of the Warren Freeway (Hwy 13) between Park Blvd. and Moraga Ave.
Date: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday
Time: Fri 10-6; Sat 10-5; Sun 10-5

Montclair is noted for its low crime rate and good schools, and you can get more bang for your buck than in the Crocker Highlands neighborhood or over in Berkeley. There are approximately 21 homes available for sale in this area, ranging in price from $445,000 to $3,500,000. Five on the west side of Highway 13, 9 on the east side, and 6 that cannot be mapped. There are none known to have an open house this weekend, but that shouldn’t prevent you from driving by and checking them out. Here are the 6 homes closest to downtown on the east side of Highway 13:

Closest to downtown is 1901 Magellan Drive, a 5/2 listed for $905,000 ($437/sf). On the market 19 days, a contemporary home with great views. Close to BART and the freeway.

Nearby is 5905 Zinn, a good example of mid-mod architecture with lots of windows and resulting light. Being offered by the original owner for $777,000 ($568/sf), you get over a quarter of an acre with this home.

There are 3 homes along Colton Blvd, a traditional 3/2 fixer at 6030 listed for $750,000 ($436/sf), an 4/3 updated rancher at 6097, offering great views and a price tag of $899,000 ($339/sf), and a 2/2 contemporary on a substandard lot at 6670, listed for $600,000 ($369/sf).

There is also 3/2.5 of 2,065 sf updated modern home with large airy rooms at 5931 Mazuela Drive listed for $899,000 ($435/sf), which could quite possibly be my favorite of the bunch.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the biggest festival happening this weekend. The 2008 San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration and Parade will be taking place Saturday and Sunday. The theme “United by Pride, Bound for Equality” comes on the heels of the historic decision to allow all people to marry, regardless of gender. On Saturday, the celebration will take place in the Civic Center from noon to 6pm, and on Sunday there is the annual parade, with Cyndi Lauper and Charo the celebrity grand marshals, beginning on Market Street at 10:30. The parade is followed by events in Civic Center Plaza from noon to 7 pm. This will be a particularly well-attended event, so plan on using public transit, as parking will be difficult.

June 25, 2008

Oakland: Let’s Compare in the Laurel

It’s now officially summer, traditionally the time for homes to get spruced up and go on the market in droves. It’s also the first summer in a buyer’s market for many years and buyers are bargain hunting. One of the Oakland neighborhoods that saw its value shoot up during the housing bubble is the Laurel. With wonderful bungalows at the foot of the Oakland Hills, the Laurel offers not only great homes but convenience to shopping on MacArthur Ave. and proximity to the 580 freeway to the south and further up, the Warren freeway to the north.

Perusing throught the listings I was pleased to see that many homes in the “lower” Laurel seem to be pricing “right”. The homes I’ve highlighted below range from $277,500 to $474,000 and all are 2/1’s except for 4010 Brown Ave., which is a 3/2. Compare this to sales in the fall of 2007 contained in my post What Does Fair Mean? A Closer Look at the Laurel.

As you drive north into the ”upper” Laurel and towards the Oakland Hills, prices jump up to the 500k range, and once into Laurel Heights, there is at least one listing in the 600k range. Closer to the hills=higher prices; well, no surprise there. However, I wonder if these prices will hold since several of the listings I highlight in the upper district already have price reductions and all below have been on the market more than 40 days.  Plus, while the homes are lovely from the photos, they are relatively small (all around 1000 SF). What do you think: are these homes priced “right”?

“Lower” Laurel District

 3046 Georgia St. 2bd/1ba listed for  $277,500. Description emphatically states “NOT A SHORT SALE” and status is “back on the market”. No square footage listed. Previous sale was in Feb 2007 for $470,000.

3531 Laurel Ave. 2bd/1ba 975 SF  Listed for $289,900. 1920’s stucco bungalow. Last sale March 2008 for $303, 571.

3425 Suter St. 2bd/1ba 1024 SF. Listed for $349,000. Reduced from $399,000. Last sale was in May 2005 for $525,000. 1920’s craftsman.

3801 Brown Ave. 2bd/1ba 1138 SF. Listed for $399,900. Last sale was in Dec 1999 for $286,000. Victorian with white picket fence.

4010 Brown Ave. 3bd/2ba 1100 SF Listed for $465,000. Reduced from $497,000. Last sale was in Dec 2006 $474,000.

“Upper” Laurel District

Pictured Above: 3287 Arizona St. 2bd/1ba List price $548,000. Reduced from $598,000. 1920’s bungalow, crisp, clean, white, airy-looking interiors.

3251 Wisconsin St. 2bd/1ba 1110 SF List price $569,000. 1930’s Mediterranean. Reduced from $595,000.

3812 Harbor View Ave. 2bd/1ba 1057 SF List price $590,000. Last sale was in July 2004 for $550,000.

June 25, 2008

Home Prices In Berkeley (Or Should That Be Manhattan?) V. Oakland

It’s always good to find fellow real-estate groupies out there in the blogosphere.

Recently I made the virtual acquaintance of My East Bay Agent, a site run by Andy Kaufman, Glen Bell and Norman Gee, three real-estate agents in the East Bay (well, there’s a surprise).

I was led to the site via Felix Salmon’s Portfolio blog, via Mike Simonsen’s Altos blog, both of whom paused to consider a fascinating Altos graph which shows what’s been happening over the past year to house prices in Berkeley and Oakland (below).

Simonsen believes the chart is indicative of the real-estate pricing phenomenon being experienced across the nation, namely:

• Demand is off everywhere and everyone knows it.
• So if you’re a home buyer in the East Bay with good cash and good credit, you get your pick. In this case, Berkeley has generally better schools, more cachet, etc., so the buyers go there first.
• There’s enough demand to keep the market afloat.
• If you don’t have good cash and good credit, you get nothing. There is literally no spillover demand for Oakland.
• A few years ago, a home buyer might look to the nicer neighborhoods in Oakland for additional inventory or a lesser school-premium price. Not the case any more.

Salmon, interestingly, sees one overarching reason for the disparity on display: “Berkeley is like Manhattan,” he writes. “It is one of the very few areas of the country where marginal house prices are set by what people are willing to pay, rather than what they are able to pay.” Read his argument here.

Commentators on the sites raise pertinent issues such as the difference in inventory, crime stats and the always significant existence of micro-neighborhoods. Sometimes it seems making any generalization about real estate — or life for that matter — is fraught with problems.

June 22, 2008

The Day I Made The Acquaintance Of A New Berkeley Neighborhood

A listing caught my eye a couple of weeks ago because it mentioned that the Berkeley home was located in the “Bateman neighborhood”. This was news to me — I had never heard of this area, so I decided to investigate.

Turns out Bateman Street (zip 94705) is one I know fairly well having driven down it a couple of times under the (false) impression I would be able to make a nifty short cut through this maze of leafy residential streets west of College Avenue near to The Elmwood district.

For the fact is this is more what I would call “Lower Elmwood“. Bateman Street itself (mapped above) is quite special. It is narrow and pretty and slightly disheveled in a chic-shabby way, and very much reminds me of an English country lane — and I know agents use this description with some abandon, but I really mean it here — or perhaps even more so of a quiet street tucked away in one of London’s former “garden suburbs” such as Hampstead.

I would question how a street, particularly one this short, could constitute a neighborhood — unless one embraces surrounding streets such as Regent Street and Hillegass Avenue. But something tells me the residents of these streets would not consider themselves residents of the Bateman area.

Bateman is what in England we refer to as a “dead-end”. This doesn’t reflect how we feel about the place — just that it’s a no-through street, although I’m pretty sure this fact isn’t advertised (hence my mistake of opting to drive down the street only to have to ignominiously turn around and come back).

3020 Bateman Street, the 3/2 “story book English country style” home (right) went on the market for $799,000 in early June and was pending very quickly — which suggests this is a popular neighborhood.

The house scores a whopping 97/100 on Walk Score and its crime rate looks reasonable if not wildly encouraging (but do they ever?). It’s also very close to Alta Bates Hospital, which could come in handy.

There are no other homes on the market in the “Bateman neighborhood” right now. But I’ll be keeping my eye out from now on. After all, it’s not every day you discover a whole new neighborhood in your own backyard.

June 19, 2008

Buyers Have the Upper Hand with Home Sales in Berkeley

This week’s crop of homes recorded as having sold to June 15 (sourced here) is a story of success for buyers—in contrast to my last post on sales data when sellers seemed to in the winning court with closing prices of between 9-18% over asking.

1314 Dwight Way, a 3/2 “Eichler-style oasis” with entertainment spaces and large yard went on the market for $675,000, but sold for 6% less at $636,000.

1620 Josephine Street, a 4/2.5 house in north Berkeley with “tons of space” that needed to be “decluttered and repainted” sold for $785,000, 13% less than its $900,000 asking price. Maybe the owners wish they had done some of that decluttering themselves now.

2208A Derby Street, a 3/1 Craftsman condo with original details, was priced at $630,000, but sold for 5% less at $598,000.

Last but not least, our very own reader, Kim, whose Berkeley Housing Crash blog is always worth a detour, is the proud new owner of 1745 Allston Way, a 3/1.5 brown shingle within walking distance of downtown with lots of original features. He paid just $1,000 over the $799,000 asking price (a competitive $318/sq ft).

Kim wrote to us after closing: “We are very happy. Back to walking and bicycling like the old days when we lived in Copenhagen.”

Congratulations Kim. These are the stories we like to hear.

June 18, 2008

Oakland: Would You Believe, Condo-esque Apartments? Plus Ashland Auction

Jerry Brown, Oakland’s last mayor and California’s current Attorney General, had a vision. That vision was condos. Lots of ‘em. All around Oakland. Especially downtown. Why? I think it was a build-condos-and-they-will-come-type-of-thing. Take shiny new condos, add lots of people and presto: get the critical mass needed to “jumpstart” this great diamond-in-the-rough of a city.

So Oakland built condos. Oakland even allowed apartment buildings to be converted into condos. And now we are flooded with them. It seems as though Jerry’s vision and the housing boom that brought us apartments-cum-condos has trainwrecked (is that a word?) into the housing downturn.

Which brings us to: The Uptown. The Uptown (pictured above) is a development on Telegraph between 17th and 21st streets in downtown Oakland. Floating in a sea of brand new condos, V Smoothe (a very savvy local Oakland blogger) has pointed out that the Uptown is special since the development was planned from the start to be apartments. Ok. Fine. Rentals for folks who can’t buy. But these aren’t just any old rentals. They are brand-spanking-new, luxurious even, apartments. Take a look at their current website: for $1580 you can have a studio. Junior-one bedrooms start at $1745; “regular” one bedrooms start at $1895; two bedrooms can be had for $2420. What? Pricey, you say? Perhaps. But you’ll be getting brand new:

Whirlpool sleek white-on-white appliances, custom white finish cabinetry with stainless steel accents, Moon Dust granite counter tops in kitchen and bath, custom top-mounted double stainless steel sinks in kitchens, upgraded fixtures and faucets. Natural maple finish wood laminate flooring in living room and kitchen, updated woven Berber-style carpeting in bedrooms, ceramic tile in baths. Designer pendant and track lighting. In-suite washer and dryer.

So what do you think? Worth it to rent?

And if you still want to buy condos on the cheap, the unincorporated yet “census-designated-place” (never knew there was such a term) of Ashland has a condo development called City Walk up for auction at the end of this month. On Sunday evening, June 29th, 32 units will be presented for sale by auction at the San Mateo Marriott. One-bedrooms start at $145,000. See the Accelerated Marketing Partners website for more information. And if you’re wondering (like I was) where Ashland is, it’s in Alameda County, between San Leandro and Hayward, east of San Lorenzo.

June 16, 2008

Berkeley Homes Get Price Cuts As City Discovers Its Inner Paris

Today: price reductions — including the return of a house that is patently finding it very difficult to find a buyer — and a couple of “new” neighborhoods.

Prices are coming down on two 2/2 “green” condos and a cottage at 1532 Martin Luther King Jr Way in North Berkeley (pictured below left) . The cottage is down from $535,000 to $455,000, the garden flat is $669,000 and the upper flat $729,000. Visit the website here.

2354 Hilgard Avenue, a “sophisticated” 2/2 townhouse near UC, has been reduced from $550,000 to $530,000 after more than 70 days on Redfin.

The owner of 1535 Grand View Drive in the Oakland hills, a new custom-designed 5/4.5 Mediterranean style home, “needs a sale now!” The price has dropped from $2,698,000 to $2,295,000 after more than 400 days on Redfin.

Then there is the reappearance of 49 Evergreen Lane (pictured above right), a spacious 4/2.5 contemporary home which went on the market at the beginning of this year with a $2,275,000 sticker price; it went off the MLS at $1,695,000, and is back today for $1,545,000. That’s an impressive $730,000 — or 32% — drop.

Finally, I am always amused when I discover a “new” neighborhood — as in agents’ speak for a particular area of town. This weekend’s listings included mention of the “Left Bank” for a home on Matthews Street (not quite the Rive Gauche I fear); and “Gourmet Ghetto West” for a duplex on 7th Street. Brownie points for trying folks.

June 14, 2008

Oakland: Analyze This

The latest edition of SFGate.com shows 70 sales recorded in Oakland from April 30 to May 7th 2008. That’s more than double the number recorded during a period I looked at in the winter (see my post on February 2008 sales in Oakland here). Given that Oakland seems to have the largest volume of sales in Alameda County, I thought it might be interesting to see the breakdown in price for these homes. Thanks to PowerPoint, I was able to whip up the above graph for your analyzing pleasure. Of the 70 sales, the vast majority (60%) are under $499k; approximately 12% are in the $500-599k range and 4% are in each range of $600, $700 and $800k respectively. The stats dip to less than 3% of homes selling in the $900-999k range then shoot back up to 11% of homes selling for over $1 million.

So what do you make of this? As is well-known (and widely discussed on the Sweet Digs blog) the housing implosion has caused home prices to radically drop. Although homes at all prices are experiencing foreclosures, the majority of these are on the lower-end of the price range. In this dataset, the majority of homes sold are under $499k, and the largest subset of these are in the under $399k range. My guess is that the large volume of these sales are due to the bank buying them back. The other phenomenon that may be happening is investment. At the very peak of the bubble, home prices were so high that few homes could be bought to either flip or rent out (as occurred in droves during the climb to the peak). Now I’m wondering if the surge in sales under $399k can be attributed to not only bank buy-backs but to investors hoping to flip and/or rent out.

The smaller number of homes sold in the $600-999k ranges says to me that folks in this price range are better able to weather the economic downturn. In general, they are foreclosing less but mainly deciding to stay put and waiting to sell until the market begins to climb again.

Homes in the $1 million and above range continue to sell; a “protected class”? To what degree?

What are your thoughts?

List of Sales (click on “More” to see full list)

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