I just got an email from my title company rep and wanted to share some of my ponderings on this with you.

 First of all, San Francisco is a very diverse market and very much a neighborhood-by-neighborhood market. The info I have is by districts which is still very general. We only have 10 MLS districts in The City so this info is not as neighborhood-specific as it could be. (These numbers are single-family residences only.)

The first item that I found interesting was the days on market. In half the districts, this number was up and in half, the number was down. District 10 (Outer Mission, Crocker Amazon, Vis Valley, Bayview, Hunter's Point, Excelsior, etc.) had the highest DOM (days on market) at 67. District 3 (SW Area) was not too far behind with 61 DOM and District 7 (Pac Hts, Presidio etc.) only had one nearly $5 million sale that took 54 days.

The rest of the districts had average market times ranging from 4-6 weeks. Compared to most of the country and other parts of California and the Bay Area, this is a short amount of time.

Conclusion, properties priced correctly sell quickly as these are averages. Case in point, I showed some clients a vintage Inner Richmond house that was supposed to be on tour Tuesday and open again this weekend. When I checked on disclosures Tuesday--two days after we saw it--the property had already received SEVEN pre-emptive offers and presumably went 20% over asking (which was $950,000 for a fixer!)!

As far as number of sales, in every district the number of sales was nearly the same as a year ago or down; some by a lot such as District 10 which was down 40% (45 sales in March 2007 and 27 sales March 2008) and District 7 which was down 90% (10 sales lat year vs. one this March). A few districts were off by 25-33% and some by only 1 or 2 sales.

I think that the lower number of sales in most districts (northern SF) has to do with a lack of inventory. In some areas--where first-time buyers might be able to afford something--it's probably due to a lack of qualified buyers. Not that people don't want to buy, just the FICO requirements are more stringent (I have ranted on this in the past).

The last item that Nachelle had tracked (and SFAR tracks this as well) was the median selling price. Again, this was split 50/50 among the 10 districts. Districts 1 (Richmond, etc.) and 5 (Noe, Glen Park, Haight Ashbury, etc.) had--for the number of sales (14 and 29 respectively)--the highest median increases of close to half a million each! Many of the districts that went down in median price only did so slightly, 1-2%; and only Districts 3 and 10 (the far southern edges) had dramatic decreases IMHO. The median price in District 3 dropped 23% to $566,000 and 20% in District 10 to $550,000.

This means that some of our neighborhoods have median prices below $600,000 and a single-family home can be had for the same price as a one-bedroom condo or TIC in South Beach or the North End.

May I reiterate, with interest rates low, it is an excellent time to buy and San Francisco is a perennially strong market.