Sunnyvale in Top Ten Cities Where Prices are Rising

Yahoo Real Estate featured an article from Forbes Magazine that had some positive things to say about the housing market.
Asking prices on single-family homes have increased as much as 36% from the previous year in some cities, an indicator that Michael Simonsen, CEO of Altos Research, a Mountain View, Calif. market research firm, says reflects "a bounce off the bottom of the bubble bursting."
To find out where prices are increasing the most, Altos Research pulled data for every U.S. city with at least 100 homes on the market (roughly 8,000 cities), and found those with the biggest price jumps from the previous year. Altos tracks asking prices for single-family homes but not condominiums.
Asking price, or list price, can be revealing because it records the price of a home at the earliest point in a sale. If sellers are asking for more money, it means they sense demand.
Lexington, Mass., has seen prices increase more than anywhere else. List prices rose 36% since last year, to a median $1,197,923. But this more likely reflects a change in the type of house for sale than an increase in the price of a typical house.
Three of the top 10 markets for rising prices are here in California, a state at the heart of the real estate boom and bust. But because markets in here were inflated earlier, many were well positioned to make a comeback even before the larger economy recovered.
That's true in the cities of Sunnyvale (here in Silicon Valley), Poway and affluent Arcadia, outside of Los Angeles, where prices increased an average of 28%. Inventory has dropped in these markets, suggesting demand is up, and prices in California rose overall from January 2009 to August 2009. That’s a natural seasonal trend for healthy markets, but it hadn't been reflected in California since the bust.
However, it's futile to draw conclusions about the national market from a few cities, and it's just as difficult to predict what turns a local market will take based on national trends. But data that bores down into local trends and uncovers positive signals, alongside indicators of a broad national recovery, together tell a story that the country's beleaguered housing market may be finding solid footing.