“The deeply depressed housing sector finally seems to have found its bottom — and may even be starting to bounce back. A wide range of housing indicators — construction, home sales, prices — have stabilized in the past few months, although they remain at historically very low levels. And it looks as if construction activity [...]

“SAN FRANCISCO — Walk through San Francisco’s bustling SoMa neighborhood and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the economic roller coaster of the last 12 years was nothing more than a bad dream. Both the dot com boom’s epic implosion and the misery of the Great Recession vanish behind a chattering group of enthusiastic engineers [...]

“After half a decade of withering sales and slumping prices, there are strong and diverse signs that the single-family housing market is poised for a rebound. In some metropolitan areas, the market has bottomed, with both sales and prices on the rise and foreclosures on the decline. This contrarian — and largely overlooked — thesis [...]

An article in today’s Chronicle, in conjunction with Bloomberg, while not particularly positive about near-future trends in US real estate, is much more positive regarding San Francisco. “Your best bets: a small handful of “property-wealth islands,” including San Francisco and San Jose/Silicon Valley, both seen as “primary 24-hour gateways located along global pathways,” according to [...]

click to enlarge In San Francisco, 3 big factors are impacting the Rent vs. Buy equation: the 15-25% decline in prices since 2008, fast rising rents, and incredibly low mortgage rates. This chart compares the median SF asking rent for a 1-BR apartment ($2650) to buying a median-priced, 2-BR condo in SoMa ($650,000). With 20% [...]

“According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the preliminary unemployment rate in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont areas for September 2011 declined to 9.2 percent. And, based on the State’s Employment Development Department, the unemployment rate in San Francisco’s metropolitan area is currently at 8.7 percent, the lowest in California.” “The same panel of UCLA economists who [...]