The Bay Area is known for its micro climates. That's as true for the real estate market as for weather patterns. Remember...I call our section of the Bay Area "The Oasis."
While home values have tumbled across the country, the San Francisco region has pockets of strength where prices continue to rise, albeit modestly compared with the double-digit appreciation of recent years. Not surprisingly, those strongholds are in affluent areas.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/02/12/MN19V0GLO.DTL&o=2
An analysis of home-price changes in Bay Area ZIP codes released by www.zillow.com shows a map of the region as a virtual checkerboard of good news and bad news.
Homes in many parts of Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Marin County appreciated in value as of the fourth quarter, compared with a year ago, Zillow said. But foreclosure-heavy, low-income areas such as east Contra Costa and southern Alameda counties had more dismal changes - many ZIPs there show home values down 5 to 10 percent, even more than 20 percent, in the space of a year.
The price volatility "is a sobering reminder of what's going on," said Stan Humphries, vice president of data and analytics for Seattle's Zillow. "It's pretty dramatic." However, he said, the Bay Area map actually is a pretty picture compared with many other places.
A 2-year-old Web site that provides an automated home-valuation service offering "Zestimates" - estimated market values - for 67 million homes nationwide. Zillow has data on 80 million homes in 48 states, or 88 percent of all homes in the country. Zillow collects data from a wide variety of sources, such as county recorder and assessor offices and real estate listings, then uses proprietary algorithms to arrive at automated models for estimating home values. Users can tweak property information to fine-tune the valuations, which are often "off" by 5 or 10%.
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