Berkeley single family home prices appear to have stabilized … and seem to be rising!

Every year  research Berkeley California single family home prices using data from the Berkeley East Bay Regional Data Multiple Listing Service – MLS.  The MLS doesn’t include every home sale in Berkeley, but it’s a large enough data set that I feel it gives a very good feeling for market trends.

Executive Summary: I feel that Berkeley single family home sales have stabilized and may be on the way back up.

This graph shows how the median sales price (half the homes sold for less, half sold for more) has changed between 2007 and 2010.  I organized the data by bedrooms, and  the median prices have stabilized or increased from 2009 to 2010.

I feel the median price gives a more accurate representation than the average price, which can be skewed by higher priced homes.  The two graphs below show that the most expensive homes in each bedroom range sell for significantly more than the rest of the homes.

 

The above graph shows how the home prices are distributed for homes with 2, 3, 4 & 5 bedrooms.  For each bedroom I sorted the sales price in increasing order.   The data should actually show as discrete points, lines look better.

Here’s how to read it.

There were 103 4 bedroom homes sold last year.. the median price (the 52nd home in increasing price) sold for $975,000.

There were 165 2 bedroom homes sold, the 75th highest sales price was about $500,000, the median price (the 83rd highest price) was $550,000

Though 2010 seemed like a slow year, there were actually more sales than in 2009; and the median price was the same, or higher than the previous year.

And here’s how the data for 2009.

In early April 2010, I created a youtube video about the market changes.  At that time, it looked like home prices were significantly rising.  Mid year, things seemed to slow down.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that by the end of 2010, the number of sales were up … as were the prices.

Here’s the link to the video.  Just click on the image to view it.

I’ll probably be tweaking the graphs and charts to make them look nicer … but thought it was more important to get them out than to make them perfect.  And thanks to S.I. Cheng, my Cooper Union Chemical Engineering Professor, whose mantra was “Collect Data … Publish”