Bay Area Housing Market Looks Great as Job Market Thrives
Oakland, CA (PRWEB) August 08, 2014 -- Throughout the Bay Area home values have reached or surpassed pre-recession levels, but luckily for home buyers in the region the growth has slowed. Brian Cheek REALTOR® for Alain Pinel Realtors reports the median single-family home value of the nine-county to be only 8.6 percent lower than the 2007 peak of $675,000 in June, according to a report released by DataQuick.
One of the major influencers of the thriving real estate market in the Bay Area is the similarly prosperous job market. Particularly in the East Bay, the unemployment rate is less than 6 percent for the first time in five years and more people are employed than before the recession. To put it into perspective, 25,000 more Californians were employed this June than they were during the same month seven years ago.
One region of the East Bay that is particularly booming is Piedmont. According to Altos Research, a California-based real estate analytics company, the median single-family home value in Piedmont was at $1,833,654, a slight uptick from the previous week.
Altos reported there were only 20 available properties on the market as of July 18, and this shortage of inventory has played a major role in the strong seller-favored conditions here. Using a unique figure called the Market Action Index, Altos ranked Piedmont as having incredibly seller-biased conditions that have intensified since April.
“Piedmont, Oakland and Berkeley are all strong real estate markets where home buyers are the majority and the amount of available homes for sale is so low. People are so attracted to this housing market and it’s easy to see why,” Cheek says. “Home builder confidence has increased in the past month and home value increases have slowed, which is going to be great news for home buyers in the coming months.”
In Alameda County, the median sales price was up 10.2 percent compared with June 2013 although home sales were down 7 percent. As more and more people are being priced out of San Francisco and the Peninsula, East Bay as a whole is becoming a much more lively housing market.
Kim Manning, TRIBUS, +1 (877)894-2824 Ext: 3001, [email protected]
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