As seen on Thursday's front page of the San Jose Mercury News (and also in the SF Chronicle of today Friday), property values in the Bay Area as a whole are definitely picking up. Typically when it gets in the paper, it is already a few months old, but the information is organized in a way that shows updates in some communities that are not obviously visible to us here in the Silicon Valley.Some of the East Bay Cities are doing fantastic, showing some real improvement in 1st quarter 2013 over the first quarter of last year. For instance:
Oakley is 16% higher in median values than in the first quarter of 2012,
Antioch is 28% higher,
Union City is 34 % higher,
Pittsburg is 9 % higher.
The article is also interesting because it touches on a subject I touched on earlier in this blog: why are there so few homes on the market? They are showing that there are still a lot of houses either underwater, or with not enough equity for people to move:
according to Zillow there are still about 25% of homeowners who are in that situation in the Counties of Santa Clara and San Mateo, and a whopping 46% in the Contra Costa County.
That would include:
- people who bought when prices were higher,
- people who borrowed too much on their home equity over the years,
- prices that are slightly higher than when property was purchased, but would not break even with the costs of the sale.
Francis Rolland
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