The Merc did a better job of writing up the recent PropertyShark national rankings of median home prices than the Comicle did, so I will link to it here. It notes
The Bay Area maintains its status as the most expensive metropolitan area in the U.S. Bay Area ZIP codes made up 37 of the top 100 most expensive ZIP codes in the country, according to a new 2023 ranking by real estate data firm PropertyShark that looked at median sales prices.
In a quantification of the Doom Loop in EssEff, it notes
San Francisco only had three ZIP codes in the top 100 in 2023, a drop from the 13 it recorded in 2019.
Overall the realtor data shows
Across the nine-county Bay Area, median home prices are up 6.6% from last year, reaching $1.3 million in September, according to data from the California Association of Realtors.
Using median sales prices can be deceiving especially when there is the wider spread of prices from our combined zip code with H'borough than some others like Atherton. And rising interest rates have locked some people into homes that they would otherwise have sold to move. Nonetheless, numbers are numbers and ours are:
22 94010 Hillsborough/Burlingame San Mateo County CA $3,200,000
Our neighbor to the south was down the list aways:
62 94402 San Mateo San Mateo County CA $2,203,000
The most interesting real estate development in years happened in court a couple of weeks ago when:
A federal jury ruled on Tuesday that the powerful National Association of Realtors and several large brokerages had conspired to artificially inflate the commissions paid to real estate agents, a decision that could radically alter the home-buying process in the United States.
The realtors’ group and brokerages were ordered to pay damages of nearly $1.8 billion. The verdict allows the court to issue treble damages, which means they could swell to more than $5 billion.
It’s a decision that has the potential to rewrite the entire structure of the real estate industry in the United States, lowering the cost of moving homes by reducing commissions. Under a N.A.R. rule, a home seller is required to pay commissions to the agent representing the buyer, which sellers claimed forced them to pay excessive fees to the agents. The home sellers said the brokerages collaborated with N.A.R. to enforce what is called the “cooperative compensation rule.”
But under the verdict, the sellers would no longer be required to pay their buyers’ agents, and agents would be free to set their own commission rates, which could be slashed in half or less.
For the record, 6% of our median $3.2M sales price is a cool $192,000. Now that is likely to change over the next few years and after the heavy realtor support for Proposition 19 (the "Death Tax") a lot of people will not be the least upset when it does.
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