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From the Marin Independent Journal
Gary Klien, 05/16/2007 1:118:43 PM PDT
T
The house at 1201 Highland Drive in Novato is for sale with an asking price of $1,125,000. The median price of a single-family home in Marin was $1,010,000 in April breaking the $1 million barrier for the first time .
Somewhere out there, there's a world where housing prices are flaccid, real estate is rotting on the market and homeowners are watching equity evaporate like the morning dew.
And then there is the alternate universe that is Marin County.
The median price of a single-family home in Marin was $1,010,000 in April - breaking the $1 million barrier for the first time and shattering the previous record of $973,000 in April 2006, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a La Jolla-based research firm.
Marin is the first county in California to pass the $1 million single-family home median - the point at which half the homes sold for more money and half for less.
In addition, Marin was the only county in the Bay Area where sales of detached homes increased from April 2006 to April 2007. Marin home-owners sold 254 detached houses last month, up from 250 the previous April - while the overall nine-county Bay Area posted a 20 percent decline.
"It's a world unto itself," said DataQuick analyst John Karevoll. "Marin dances to its own tune. It always has."
Meanwhile, condo prices in Marin showed double-digit growth while most counties saw prices decline or increase only modestly. The median condo price in Marin was $640,000
last month, up 19 percent from $537,000 in April 2006.
It cost more to buy a condo or townhome in Marin last month than a single-family home in Contra Costa, Napa, Solano or Sonoma counties, on a median basis.
"Marin continues to be a desirable place to live," said Valerie Castellana, a Greenbrae broker and president of the Marin Association of Realtors.
Castellana said the median has been pushed up by sales at the high end of the market.
Drawing upon Bay Area Real Estate Services, a regional database, Castellana said 59 homes above $1.5 million were sold in Marin last month, a 40 percent increase over the previous April.
Sixteen homes over $3 million were sold in Marin last month, up 77 percent from the nine sold in April 2006, she said.
Whether the $1 million threshold will hold is difficult to say, she said.
"It's very community-specific . . . the northern part of the county is not as robust as the central and southern part of the county, and sellers have to be very careful with their pricing."
The observation is borne out by the experience of Katherine Higgins, who bought a home in Novato last month for $1,005,000 - almost precisely the county median.
Higgins and her husband, Jim Gianola, who started house-shopping in January as they were selling their $1.8 million home in Mill Valley, planned to stay within the $1 million range on their next home. Their search pushed them farther north as they confronted multiple offers in
central and southern Marin, some from young couples trying to trade up from their first house, others from baby boomers.
"In this particular cycle we're in, I would never be in a multiple-offer situation," said Higgins, a Greenbrae real-estate broker specializing in commercial property. "I'm a Realtor and an investor. I would never do that."
Then, on St. Patrick's Day, the couple went to see a new four-bedroom home on a Novato hillside whose builder had just dropped the price by about
$100,000. They quickly made an offer and closed the sale late last month.
"We really wanted to have a better investment, we wanted to have more for our money," she said. "As soon as we got out of central San Rafael the prices started to get better."
Robert Rees, an agent with Frank Howard Allen in Novato, is representing a four-bedroom Novato home for sale at $1,009,999, down from the original price of $1.2 million. He said the house is at the higher end of the Novato market and the real "bread and butter" homes there are still in the mid-$600,000s to mid-$700,000s.
"It's like everything else - it's a matter of value," he said. "If people perceive the value, they're writing offers. But the frenzy that's fueled things in years past has subsided."
Karevoll, the DataQuick analyst, said the $1,000,000 benchmark is probably not a one-time anomaly because single-family home prices in Marin rose a solid 3.8 percent from April 2006 to April 2007.
"It could go down again, a month or two, but I think a year from now we'll see it's a milestone that's passed permanently," he said.
Other parts of the state continue to struggle. In Southern California, sales slid 29 percent from April 2006 to April 2007, hitting a 12-year low. Median prices rose 6.6 percent during the year, to $505,000.
"The drop-off in sales of more affordable homes was expected," Marshall Prentice, DataQuick's president, said of the six-county Southland region. "That was the part of the market that was last in line for price and sales increases during the upside of the cycle. What we're in for now is the somewhat painful endgame of that cycle."
Statewide, home sales were down nearly 29 percent from April 2006. The median home price last month was $484,000 statewide, up 3.4 percent from April 2006.
In the Bay Area, home sales fell 18.4 percent year-over-year while prices rose 3.8 percent. Solano County had the steepest drop in sales with a 37 percent decline, while Sonoma County had the sharpest drop in its median price: 8.5 percent, to $519,000.
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