San Francisco Bay Area Home Sales

Source: DataQuick

Overall, homes in the Bay Area sold at the slowest pace seen in 1995. In some areas, like Solano County, homes haven't sold this slowly since 1989.

Most counties within the Bay Area experienced year-over-year declines. The worst decline could be seen in Solano County, where sales fell 36.7 percent and in Napa County, were sales fell 38.4 percent.

Marshall Prentice, DataQuick president, took an optimistic stance once again, noting in the latest DataQuick press release that the market isn't nearly as bad in the San Francisco Bay Area as it is throughout much of the rest of California.

'The trend we're seeing statewide is that more expensive neighborhoods do better than less expensive neighborhoods. The Bay Area's always been a high cost market, and we're not seeing the declines in prices or sales volume that we're seeing elsewhere in California. There is certainly a lull in sales, but it appears that buyers and sellers are both taking a wait-and-see stance,' said Prentice.

The 'this can't happen here' philosophy will probably only hold up for so long. Home sales in California have slipped an average of 20 percent in a year's time. Contra Costa, Napa, and Solano Counties all had home sale declines well above this average, and many of the other counties weren't that far behind.

San Francisco Bay Area Home Prices

Source: DataQuick

According to DataQuick, median prices held fairly steady during the month of July. Declines were seen in Solano County (-9.8 percent) and Sonoma County (-4.1 percent).

Marin County once again had an increase in the median, as did some of the other counties within the Bay Area. Some of these numbers, however, should be taken with a grain of salt according to Bryce Ellsworth, a broker with Brentwood firm Windermere Ellsworth and Associates. Ellsworth explained in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News that the Contra Costa numbers aren't exactly area specific.

'They are very skewed in different areas,' Ellsworth said. 'In East County we didn't have an increase in prices.'

He added that inventory is now at about ten times the amount that it was during the housing boom's peak, and that more inventory will be added very quickly as the foreclosure crisis deepens.

If this is true, it is likely that the prices will come down in the flooded market.

San Francisco Bay Area Foreclosures

Although foreclosure activity is rising in the Bay Area, only 4.5 percent of the sales activity seen in July involved foreclosure properties. This number is up from 1.5 percent in July of 2006 and up from 4.1 percent in June of his year.

These numbers are projected to change in future months as more foreclosure properties come onto the market. According to the 2007 Midyear Metropolitan Foreclosure Market Report released yesterday by RealtyTrac, the Bay Area has several metropolitan areas with high foreclosure rates.

Oakland had the 19th highest foreclosure rates among the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara ranked at 56 and San Francisco at 78. Nearby Stockton and Sacramento also ranked high on the list.