FRIDAY - wondering what my dog named me
- Shopping for a home? It will take a lot longer than you think
- Small Percentage of Buyers Would Cancel Plans to Buy if Mortgage Rates Surpassed 5%
- California Housing Affordability Edges Up in Q4
- Buying a Bay Area home now a struggle even for Apple, Google engineers
- 10 Times When Wallpapering a Ceiling Is a Good Move
- A Guide to Self-Storage: Packing Tips
Enjoy!
$303K is the annual income now needed to buy a median priced home in San Francisco - The household income needed to buy a median-priced home in the city reached a new high and is now $303,000. That's according to the California Association of Realtors affordability index, which is based on sales in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Shopping for a home? It will take a lot longer than you think - Homes today are selling in about 40 days on average, almost two weeks faster than a year ago. But it is taking a lot longer for shoppers to find a home to buy. Two-thirds of buyers are shopping for more than three months before signing a deal, according to a new survey from the National Association of Home Builders. Why so long? They can't find a home they can afford. Forty-two percent of buyers surveyed said prices were out of reach for the homes they wanted. Home prices have been rising at a fast clip in the past year – faster than income growth and inflation. The primary reason is a lack of homes for sale, especially lower-priced homes.
Small Percentage of Buyers Would Cancel Plans to Buy if Mortgage Rates Surpassed 5% - Just 6 percent of prospective homebuyers would halt their home search if mortgage rates rose above 5 percent, according to a late-2017 survey commissioned by Redfin.This represents a modest one-point increase in the portion of buyers who responded this way to a similar survey question in May, revealing that buyers remain unfazed by the prospect of rising mortgage rates.
California Housing Affordability Edges Up in Q4 - The percentage of home buyers who could afford to purchase a median-priced, existing single-family home in California in fourth-quarter 2017 edged up to 29 percent from 28 percent in the third quarter of 2017 but was down from 31 percent in the fourth quarter a year ago, according to C.A.R.’s Traditional Housing Affordability Index (HAI). This is the 19th consecutive quarter that the index has been below 40 percent. California’s housing affordability index hit a peak of 56 percent in the first quarter of 2012.
Buying a Bay Area home now a struggle even for Apple, Google engineers - These days even high-paid tech workers — the very people often blamed for driving up home prices — have to stretch to buy a house, according to a new study by Los Angeles-based real estate startup Open Listings. Techies do come closer to affording a pricey Silicon Valley home than teachers, service industry workers and scores of other workers. But home ownership may not be a given for them anymore, a shift that signals how the region’s explosive housing costs are shutting out even the prosperous.
10 Times When Wallpapering a Ceiling Is a Good Move - Don’t ignore the blank canvas above your head. Wallpaper can transform it into a fabulous feature
A Guide to Self-Storage: Packing Tips - Find out how to load your mini storage unit safely and efficiently, and remember to document the contents
