All about Life & Real Estate in Silicon Valley – Broker Michael Koo's Blog.

In the bucolic enclave of North Berkeley sits a 1922 humble abode the recently benefited from a gentle yet modern makeover.

Coming in at two beds and one bath, 1534 Edith features period window casings, fireplace, and hardwood floors repainted in designer neutral tones with white trim. The arched windows are especially delightful.

By Brock Keeling @ SF.Curb

Richard Rogers looks at the kitchen at an open house at 5893 Taormino Avenue in San Jose, Calif. on Sunday, Feb. 25, 2018. (Randy Vazquez/ Bay Area News Group)

Bay Area housing demand and prices continued a record-setting streak in January, as aggressive buyers pushed up year-over-year median sale prices for the 70th straight month.

A deepening shortage of homes for sale in the region drove up bidding for scarce supply. The median home price in the region rose to $710,000 in January, up from the median price of $628,000 a year ago, according to a report released Wednesday by real estate data firm CoreLogic.

Over the last six months, median home prices in the nine-county region have gained an average of 12.6 percent from the previous year.

But rising prices also meant a drop in home sales, particularly in entry-level units. The 4,884 home purchases last month represented a dip of nearly 8 percent from last year and the lowest January sales mark since 2008, according to CoreLogic.

CoreLogic research analyst Andrew LePage said the drop “has a lot to do with the continuing mismatch between housing supply and demand, especially in the lower price ranges.”

By Louis Hanse, Bay Area News Group

Millennials, take note: If you’re looking to build up your nest egg, home ownership isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, a new study published on Thursday shows that renting may very well be the best way to go about it.

The numbers, crunched by Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University and the University of Wyoming, determined that the property appreciation most homeowners expect doesn’t necessarily stack up in terms of wealth building.

Hence, FAU economist and co-author of the study Ken Johnson says that while the American Dream is alive and well, it needs a revision.

“When considering buying and building wealth through equity appreciation versus renting and reinvesting in a portfolio of stocks and bonds, property appreciation does not change the results,” he said. “On average, renting and reinvesting wins in terms of wealth creation regardless of property appreciation, because property appreciation is highly correlated with gains in the traditional financial asset classes of stocks and bonds.”

Shawn Langlois at Marketwatch

In the midst of the mad selling and explaining and quantifying and qualifying of potentially the biggest U.S. tax overhaul in decades, President Donald Trump’s chief economic advisor stood at a White House podium and made a bold declaration: “People don’t buy homes because of the mortgage deduction.”

He said that, even though members of the Trump administration have repeatedly said they will “protect” the popular tax break.

There are a lot of reasons people buy homes—financial, practical and emotional. For the vast majority of those who make that choice, it is by far their single largest investment. Until the financial crisis, the common belief was the home prices always rise, and a home was therefore a proven way to build wealth, but that was proven wrong.

More than 6.5 million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure in the past 10 years, according to Attom Data Solutions, and 2.8 million current homeowners still owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth. This after home prices plummeted nationally for the first time since the Great Depression.

Most consumers, at least according to several recent surveys, still believe that a home is a good investment. The majority of renters still aspire to home ownership, despite the fact that millennials have been deemed the “renter generation.” That designation is likely more due to high student loan debt and lower initial employment for this generation than anything else. Millennials have also been slower to marry and have children, which are the primary drivers of homeownership.

“I think people buy homes because it represents security and a way to build wealth and a sense of stability,” said Laurie Goodman, co-director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. “I don’t think the mortgage interest deduction plays a large role in that decision.”

For a great many homeowners, the deduction isn’t even a financial factor. A taxpayer can only take the deduction if he or she itemizes, and just one third of taxpayers itemize, but about 64 percent of Americans own a home (and just over one third of homeowners have no mortgage). Three quarters of those who do itemize take the deduction, but if the standard deduction were raised, fewer taxpayers would itemize, and therefore the mortgage deduction would be used even less.

“Gary Cohn is probably right about that,” said Richard Green, director and chair of University of Southern California’s Lusk Center for Real Estate. “It does absolutely encourage people to buy bigger houses than they would, but does it flip the switch between buying and renting?— maybe half a percent in home ownership, very little.”

Green notes that the deduction is most important to those living in states like California, which has both high tax rates and high home prices. Home prices there, he said, could drop without the deduction. As for overall homeownership, he points to other nation’s like Canada and Australia, which have no mortgage deduction but have very high homeownership rates.

The National Association of Realtors, one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington, vehemently opposes any change to the deduction. Even though there has been no change so far, they came out against the current plan, claiming that because it would result in fewer taxpayers itemizing, it would weaken the power of the deduction.

“This proposal recommends a backdoor elimination of the mortgage interest deduction for all but the top 5 percent who would still itemize their deductions,” wrote NAR president William Brown in a release. “When combined with the elimination of the state and local tax deduction, these efforts represent a tax increase on millions of middle-class homeowners.”

By CNBC Diana Olick

The multi-year stretch of robust job gains along with improving household confidence are expected to guide existing-home sales to a decade high in 2017, but supply and affordability headwinds and modest economic growth are holding back sales and threatening to keep the nation’s low homeownership rate subdued. That’s according to speakers at a residential real estate forum here at the 2017 REALTORS® Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors®, presented his 2017 midyear forecast and was joined onstage by Jonathan Spader, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, and Mark Calabria, chief economist and assistant to Vice President Mike Pence. Spader’s presentation addressed past and projected movements in the homeownership rate, and Calabria dove into why reversing weak productivity and the low labor force participation rate are necessary to boost the economy.

By the National Association of Realtors

Last Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the median monthly rent in Manhattan stalled out, falling 1.2 percent in September to hit $3,396. “It was only the second year-over-year decline since February 2014,” the outlet continued, citing a new study from appraisal firm Miller Samuel, and the brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

That second decline happened in March of this year. It was followed by a peak of 2 percent growth in June, and then rents in the Big Apple slowed again before falling last month. Further signs that the housing market has shifted include the fact that landlords are offering renters more sweeteners, like a month or two free; meanwhile, only 17 percent of all housing sales in Manhattan involved a bidding war this year, down from 31 percent last year.

“The market does not appear to be resuming an upward pattern anytime soon,” Miller Samuel’s president told Bloomberg.

And it’s not just Manhattan or New York. Over the last year, the rate of rent growth has dropped precipitously in Portland, San Francisco, Denver, and Houston as well.

Jeff Spross at the Week.

There’s a paradox in Monday’s existing-home-sales data.

Sales slid 7.1% to the lowest pace since November, the National Association of Realtors said. NAR has warned for many months that low levels of supply, which are pushing prices ever higher, will eventually cripple the market.

February’s decline may be a sign that the Realtors’ fears are coming true, although it may still turn out to be a temporary blip caused by weather, new closing regulations, and the difficulties of adjusting data to account for all those anomalies.

Still, as NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a statement, “the main issue continues to be a supply and affordability problem. Finding the right property at an affordable price is burdening many potential buyers.”

That may sound obvious: if you can’t afford the few limited options available on the market, you’d probably give up too. It also tracks with a survey NAR published last week, which found that the share of current renters who say now is a good time to buy fell in the most recent quarter.

But it’s worth remembering, as Yun pointed out in a press conference Monday morning, that it wasn’t too long ago that higher prices drew more buyers in, rather than shutting them out.

By Andrea Riquier at Marketwatch.com