Year Over Year Medians By District
June 25, 2009As most of you know, the San Francisco Association of Realtors has divided the city up into 10 market areas. Curious to find out what’s been transpiring on a district by district basis here in ’09, we decided to run a little analysis. Our goal? To take a look at the year over year performance of each district, using median sales price as our yardstick. Here’s what we did:
- Find the median sales price in each district from January 1, 2008 through June 1, 2008. Record it.
- Find the median sales price in each district from January 1, 2009 through June 1, 2009. Record it.
- Calculate the year over year change for each district.
- Rank the 10 districts based on performance over this period.
- How are the 10 districts faring from last year? Photo courtesy of tenyearsofmylife.com
*Please note: You’ll need to familiarize yourself with THIS map in order to understand the MLS districts. All sales come from the MLS. These do not include private transactions or sales taking place at new developments. Property types included in the analysis include single family homes, condos, TIC’s, lofts, and stock cooperatives.
What did we find? Continue reading for the chart –>
- Year Over Year Performance of SF’s 10 MLS Districts (click to enlarge)
- The chart shows that 7 of the 10 districts have lower medians in 2009 than they did in 2008. Three districts have higher medians.
- Districts 6, 7, and 8 have shown strong performance year over year relative to the other districts.
Final Thoughts
Median sales price changes can be indicative of a couple of different things (and thus slightly misleading). First, of course, are changing prices. Second, is the batch of homes that are selling at any given time. For example, District 1 shows a -22.93% decline year over year. Part of this is likely attributed to falling sales prices and the other part attributed to a lack of high end property sales, which help carry the median higher. Averages (as opposed to medians) are more drastically affected by this statistical tendency, which is why we focus on medians.
Despite the shortcomings associated with looking at medians, the data is still rather telling. We learned which districts have shown relative strength to the others, and which ones are showing weakness. District 6 surprised us with the best performance, and District 5 surprised us with one of the worst. Thoughts from any of you readers?
For more articles looking at the SF market as a whole, click HERE.
