Coastal Real Estate and Lifestyles

Altos Research provides various kinds of trends data, updated weekly, about cities that is based on public LISTING data, not sold data.  It can be viewed from 7 days to 360 days.  This is a good compliment to the MLS sold data because it shows leading indicators about a local market.  Altos’ site explains it this way:

A city’s data can be viewed as one market, or broken down by quartile - in essence 4 micro-markets within a city, as shown in the Half Moon Bay reports below.  Quartile 1: Most expensive 25% of properties; Quartile 2: Next 25%; Quartile 3: Next 25%; Quartile 4: Least expensive 25% of properties.

This post will show, graphically, why some market activity appears different from others and can sometimes be confusing.  As we see below for Half Moon Bay, currently, the entry level markets continue their correction.  The higher end of the market is holding its own.  Half Moon Bay does have some distressed properties, but - to date - the number remains small compared to other counties.  They do, however, affect local values.  Value = that’s a topic for another post!…discussed following the first half of 2008 in this post.

A very clear listing price trend viewed by quartile over the past 12 months…

If you thought you were confused by Days-on-Market before…  It looks like we’re trending back to where we were about a year ago, but the last year has seen DOM all over the place - a transitional market?

To see median prices for the cities of Half Moon Bay, El Granada, Moss Beach, Montara, Pacifica, Pescadero, South San Francisco, San Bruno, San Mateo and Burlingame, check the Local Stats widget on my home page.  It is updated automatically by Altos every Monday.

To see more reports like this -  for condos, inventory tracking, price per square foot, median and average prices, as a whole or by quartile, subscribe to this blog or contact me.