Getting Granular in Hayes Valley
October 26, 2008Hayes Valley is an interesting neighborhood. Ironically, the destruction caused by the Loma Prieta earthquake in ’89 actually helped this gem spring to life. The earthquake led to the demolition of a freeway on-ramp, which let the light finally shine in and Hayes Valley officially took off. Nineteen years later, the streets teem with pedestrians, funky shops, restaurants, bars, cafes and coffee houses.
So what’s happened to median sales prices of real estate in HV? I mean, surely it has gone up since the quake, but what about the dot com bust, and the current down market? What’s going on now? Here’s a look at the chart and here’s what we did:
- Click to Zoom In
First we capped each year at October 25th, so we could include 2008 and get an even comparison to years past. We started with condos, which is the navy blue line. Because the average number of condo sales up to this point in the year is just 28, we wanted to run another query with more median sales price data points to ensure that the trend was reliable. So we ran numbers for condos/tics/lofts/coops, which is indicated by the pink line. Sure enough, it is virtually the same shape as the navy line, but consistently rides below it. This is expected since it includes less expensive TICs. When we included the other property types, we had an average of 45 data points per year, which we believe is a fairly reliable data string.
Are there any caveats? Actually yes, there are. A new development, The Hayes, opened up recently adding 128 condominium units to the neighborhood. Many of their sales are not listed in MLS, so the data in our chart represents the resale market rather than sales of brand new units straight from developers.
What does this information tell us about Hayes Valley? We’d say that it verifies all the press we read about its increasing popularity and growth. Naturally we see a couple of peaks and valleys (we call them Hayes Valleys), but overall the trend is positive. Kinda makes us wish we had bought a place in 1995, but then again, all of these charts do.
For more “Getting Granular” articles, click HERE.
- Ughhh… I should’ve bought something in 1995
