Northern California Real Estate Sales Increase 29% March 2009
DataQuick just released the sales data for March 2009 for Northern California. The sales continue to improve significantly over last year but not quite at the pace seen in the Southland. Sales are up about 29% compared to one year ago. Having lived in Northern California for 9 years (San Francisco, Walnut Creek, Pleasanton and Dublin) this is close to my heart. It’s a beautiful part of the country.  Northern California doesn’t have as vast an area as Southern California, but there were certainly areas where builders went crazy and so they are seeing huge numbers of foreclosures there as well.
Here’s a statistics that ought to cause a little concern:
“The use of government-insured FHA loans – a common choice among first-time buyers – represented a record 25.4 percent of all Bay Area purchase loans in March, up from 1.5 percent a year ago” (DataQuick).
The Federal Government, and thus the U.S. taxpayer, is going to end up with a lot of these houses.
