New end-of-year data compiled by Paragon Real Estate Group confirms that San Francisco’s residential real estate market remains rather bonkers, with median home prices up by 11% citywide during 2015:
Despite anxiety about interest rates, financial markets, housing affordability, unending international crises, and possibly over-valued, high-tech unicorns, the Q4 2015 San Francisco median house sales price, at $1,250,000, is up about 11% from Q4 2014. That dovetails nicely with the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index for the Bay Area, which measures appreciation in a different way, but also calculated 11% annual appreciation (through October, its last report). The Q4 condo median sales price, at $1,125,000, is up 13% year over year, but that is influenced by the greater percentage of more recently built, and more expensive units in the sales mix.
One chart was particularly telling; it places today’s vertiginous home-price appreciation within the context of 30 years of vertiginous home-price appreciation. As it happens, 1984 is right around the time when San Francisco implemented new land-use controls, just as the City’s population began to rebound after three decades of postwar slump:
Anyway, closer to home, Paragon also provides detail about the Bernal Heights market, revealing that Bernal homes generally hover around the same level as the citywide median. Here in Bernal, the median price for a single-family home stands at around $1.3 million, with condos selling for about $1.1 million.
Paragon doesn’t provide specific data on the price of fixer-upper homes for Bernal Heights, but since Bernal’s prices now mirror citywide medians, this is also a depressing interesting datapoint: The median sale price for fixer-upper homes in San Francisco is now $950,000. (FWIW, this fixer in South Bernal sold in December for a bit less.)
It should come as no surprise to anyone who lives here, but Paragon reveals that homes in Bernal tend to be more compact than those in other parts of the city:
But what’s surprising is that on a cost-per-square-foot basis, houses in Bernal go for prices that nestle somewhere between St. Francis Wood and Sea Cliff. Oh my:
CHARTS: via Paragon Real Estate
Bernalwood 
“Houses in Bernal go for prices that nestle somewhere between St. Francis Wood and Sea Cliff”
Oh hell YES.
Price per square foot is an incomplete metric. It does not properly account for the somewhat significant difference in the size of homes between, say Bernal, and Sea Cliff or St Francis Wood. There is a base entry cost for an empty lot, so would you say there the price per square foot is infinite? No, you wouldn’t. Basically, the model for square footage and pricing is more likely first-order approximated by our old high-school (grade school?) friend, y=mx+b. Where x is the square footage, m is the “price per square foot” and b is the cost of an empty lot, permitting, and architecture costs for a green-field build. So, just giving us “m” and comparing it between neighborhoods does not help much.
Significantly smaller houses would have a higher price per square foot. For example, our 750 ft^2 2bd/1ba at $939/ft^2 would be $704k. I’d have a line down the block for an open house if I listed anything more than a scraper for $700k. Zilllow guesses our place is worth $920k. That puts it at $1230/ft^2.
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