Housing Price Trends in the Bay Area, 2005 to 2009

Several years ago, I started looking at housing listings in the Bay Area to get an idea of whether I could afford to purchase a nice place to live.  Housing prices in the Bay Area are insanely high compared to most of the United States, and I figured I might have to watch prices for a while.  So I signed up for one of those online real estate search services where you input your search parameters (price, location, square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, etc.) and every once in a while I would get an email saying that I had listings that matched my search parameters.

Also, this service sent me an email message once a month with a report showing a housing inventory snapshot, with average and median list price, average days on the market, and interest rates for 30-year fixed, 15-year fixed, and 5/1 adjustable rate mortgages.  I have saved some from 2005 and 2006, and most of them since January 2007 and saved the data into this spreadsheet(StarOffice / OpenOffice format) (Excel format here ) so I could graph the changes over time.

Here are some of the trends.

First, the Average List Price for houses under $1,000,000 in San Mateo County (a fairly expensive county in the Bay Area):


Look how much housing prices fell from their peak in May 2006 ($788,274) to the low in January of this year ($609,290).  That's a drop of about 23 percent.  Ouch.  Even worse, look at the next graph that shows how long these houses stayed on the market:


By the May 2006 peak, houses were already taking longer to sell than the months before (38 days) but at the lowest average prices in January 2009, average time on the market was a painful 91 days.  Yes folks, 3 full months on the market to sell a house for 23% less than the peak.

When I would look at my graphs over the past three years, I started to have hope that we could find an affordable house in San Mateo County that we would enjoy.  But the prices were still a bit steep, so I started to look at Alameda County, where the news is worse for sellers, better for buyers.  Check this out:


From a high in May 2006 of $645,401, average housing prices dropped by 37% to $415,561.  That's a spanking, no matter how you look at it.  Let's see how long these houses stayed on the market, on average:



Yeah, not so good.  Same trend as with San Mateo county, and again in January 2009, houses stayed on the market an average of 91 days.

The graphs show some good news, though: in both San Mateo and Alameda counties, average housing prices have risen a fair bit.  In Alameda County, prices have recovered about 13% of their former value (average prices are now at 76% of the May 2006 high vs. 63% of the high); looking at it with a glass-half-full point of view, prices have risen in Alameda County about 21% since January.  San Mateo prices have recovered about 10% of their former high value, rising about 13% since January of this year.

We bought in September 20092008, a few months before the bottom and just before lending really tightened up.  Our timing was fortunate, and we've been delighted in our new house ever since.

One last graph: interest rates for 30-year fixed mortgages over the same time period:

I don't really know what to make of this chart except to say that if you can manage to borrow money right now, it seems like a really good time to do it.

What's going on with housing prices where you live? Have you been tracking prices, too? If so, drop me a line and let me know what you've been seeing. Or, download the spreadsheet and play with the data yourself, make some graphs of your own, and put the links in a comment here.

Powered by ScribeFire.