WHAT’S NEW AND NEWS WITH US

Recent Sales Activity Highlights Fragmented Nature of San Francisco Real Estate — which is normal for this time of year  

Happy Sunday! First things first: Be sure to come and our listings at 520 Natoma (which can now be used as a residential rental property) and 101 Lundys this weekend.

Now, making sense of what’s what and why things sell at X price and others for Y price requires continued education and awareness that we’re delighted to give you all as often as we can. This week is no different as you’ll see our latest ranking of the top 10 most over-list price houses that sold in the first part of 2017 (with our YouTube walkthroughs of a couple of those properties) below along with this week’s and last week’s Tall Tales of Sales (i.e., Stories of the Week). 

• Apart from that we’ve seen some interesting properties hit San Francisco’s real estate market over the past couple of weeks that are appealing and intriguing. And a lot more listings are coming up as you’ll see in our Coming Soon and Off-Market section, which returns this week. With all of that, we’ve seen the following:  
• For those special properties we’re seeing what you’d expect: multiple offers after a very tight and short marketing periods with final sale prices way, way over list price. This is especially true for the $899,000–$2M price range for condos and houses in the City.
• But for other properties outside of that price range, we’re seeing sales take a (relatively) longer period to sell with final sale prices being closer to original list prices While we’re still seeing price reductions we’re not seeing as many as we saw at the end of June and in early July. 
• As we ease into August, we will be begin to see more properties being withdrawn but still available off-market as we anticipate the market’s reawakening after Burning Man/Labor Day, which is the traditional start to the fall selling season.  Last, we’re also seeing strength in the rental market pickup again. There’s been some ballyhoo about the ‘declining’ rental market. In context you may see rents off by 4-5 percent (what is that, a hundred or two hundred dollars a month?!) but anecdotal evidence from new buildings going up like 600 South Van Ness — a 20-unit building with luxury finishes that Pacific Heights high-end flipper/developers built instead of doing another mansion flip — is almost rented out 100 percent without the building being completed.

Many San Francisco agents will under price their listings to see them sell for X% over list price. In fact, about 75-80% of San Francisco listings sell for over list price on average. We don’t know why this habit is the convention but that’s just how it goes.

Usually you can expect a property to sell at 110-120% of its list price. But there are the cases where agents really underprice their listings — much to everyone’s annoyance. Pricing like this creates mind games and has the risk pushing away better buyers and creating false hopes for many, many other buyers. Right or wrong, the market will find a property’s value regardless of a given list price. And despite what news headlines may scream there usually is some logic at play — at least we hope there is — that would substantiate a high sale price. Take a look at the properties that sold for way, way over their respective list prices.

We’re happy to announce that we are having our best year ever in real estate to date — thank you to all of you and yours. Please keep the referrals and confidence in our services coming!

And the adage that success begets success is one that applies with our brokerage too. MLS data for the first part of 2017 is in and Vanguard Properties now ranks as the top brokerage for all of San Francisco in terms of market share and sales volume. Leaving large, in-house brokers for new-construction buildings aside, Vanguard Properties was also top of the rankings for the number of residential listings in San Francisco according to MLS data. Vanguard Properties’ top-dog status in the sunnier neighborhoods Alamo Square to Bernal Heights, SOMA, Eureka Valley, this Mission to Mission Bay (Districts 5, 6 and 9) also continues to hold strong too. So know that you’re really working with the best in the City and for wine country too as Vanguard Properties also dominates residential real estate in Sonoma and Napa counties too.