May 20, 2008 5:51 pm US/Pacific
Bay Area Home Sales Jump 29 Percent In April
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ―
Home sales in the San Francisco Bay area jumped nearly 29 percent from March to April as bargain hunters found it easier to get loans and pick up property on the cheap.
But the slumping real estate market in one of the country's most expensive regions hasn't recovered from a wave of foreclosures and tightened lending requirements that are causing property values to plummet, according to a report Tuesday by DataQuick Information Systems.
Prices continued to drop in the nine-county region measured by the report, which includes San Francisco and its surrounding areas. That's a sign that home owners are still finding it hard to unload their properties without steep discounts.
A total of 6,310 homes were sold in April in the Bay Area, a jump of 28.8 percent over March, when 4,898 homes were sold. The increase is the largest for the March-to-April period since DataQuick began keeping statistics in 1988.
The firm attributed the increase to mortgage lenders loosening their grip on hard-to-come-by home loans.
"The big issue here is that mortgages are becoming obtainable, which will reduce the pile of stacked-up pending escrows," Marshall Prentice, DataQuick's president, said in a statement. "It's unclear if the financing is because of policy changes or because mortgage investors are getting more interested in securities. Probably both."
Yet the figures are gloomier when looking at year-over-year comparisons to gauge the long-term trends in the real estate market.
Home prices continued to plunge, creating opportunities for buyers looking for a deal but exacerbating the headaches of homeowners looking to move.
The median price for a home in the Bay Area was $518,000 in April, down 21.4 percent from $659,000 in the same period a year ago.
And it was nearly $150,000 less than the peak median price of $665,000 reached in June and July of 2007, according to the DataQuick information.
On the year-over-year basis, the number of homes sold in the region continues to decline as well.
The number of homes sold in April was 15.3 percent lower than the 7,447 units sold in April 2007.
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