Fitbit eyes Pebble purchase amid wearables consolidation
Fitbit is eyeing a purchase of smartwatch maker Pebble, but it’s not clear how far the deal will go to bolster Fitbit’s murky prospects. On Nov. 3, Fitbit warned analysts that revenue during the fourth...
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And the rich get richer: Silicon Valley towns benefit most from Prop. 13
When California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13 in 1978, the effect was to lock in low property taxes for average homeowners – to protect them from getting priced out of their houses by...
View ArticleCrazy time: Study says 18 billionaires could buy pretty much every house and...
What would Zuckerberg do? Like, if every single residential property in Palo Alto were suddenly on the block, would the Facebook chairman just buy it all up? Turns out, he could, at least according to...
View ArticleNew study: Bay Area renters are less cost-burdened than you think
We’re worn down from hearing about the costliness of Bay Area rents — the fact that finding an affordable apartment in Mountain View is a cruel joke and that San Francisco seems stripped of ordinary,...
View ArticleRedfin: Bay Area’s housing supply remains tight, as prices (mostly) rise yet...
The housing supply is low. But buyers — an insatiable lot — need houses, so competition keeps pushing prices up. That was the story nationally in November, according to today’s report from Redfin,...
View ArticleBay Area rents: the whopping cost of a single square foot of floor space
Oh, brother, the Apartment Guide website is boring straight down to the pain point. It’s showing just how much you — you poor, overextended Bay Area renter — pay for a single square foot of apartment...
View ArticleSo you thought Bay Area home prices were cooling? Well, kind of, maybe…
You may have heard that home prices have reached a plateau around the Bay Area, or at least that the rate of appreciation is slowing. The November report from the California Association of Realtors...
View ArticleAtherton, Palo Alto crack Top 10 priciest ZIP codes in nation
The 25 priciest ZIP codes in the country are top-heavy with Bay Area addresses: Nine of the glitziest concentrations of residential real estate are in Silicon Valley. Four of those — in Atherton, Palo...
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Hot markets: San Jose, San Francisco — and Yuba City?
Well, aren’t we becoming just one giant megalopolis? As Bay Area and Greater Sacramento buyers throw up their hands at the cost of housing, they are moving farther and farther afield. We’ve known this...
View ArticleUber’s autonomous car program drives out homeless camp
When Uber unveiled its self-driving cars in San Francisco earlier this month, apparently the last thing the company wanted was a homeless encampment blighting its testing facility. So, before Uber...
View ArticleIt’s a fact: Bay Area rental costs have hit a plateau
After years of painful increases, the cost of renting an apartment in most Bay Area cities has hit a plateau. In San Francisco, the median cost of a 2-bedroom apartment was $4,550 in mid-December —...
View ArticleOne more time: housing appreciates in Bay Area, but modestly
Confirmation. CoreLogic, the real estate information service, has issued its latest Home Price Index and it shows what we already know – that Bay Area housing prices continued to climb in the past...
View ArticleBay Area housing: You’re still better off renting than buying
In two-thirds of the nation’s busiest housing markets, it’s more affordable to buy a house than rent an apartment. But in the Bay Area that’s hardly the case. Given the outlandish appreciation of home...
View ArticleBad news for Bay Area mega-commuters: Sacramento now leads the nation in rent...
We’ve been hearing about Bay Area mega-commuters for some time now — those poor souls who spend hours on the road each day, commuting from far-away affordable homes or apartments to decent-paying jobs...
View ArticleIn San Jose, it takes 182 percent of annual income to cover a 20 percent down...
What does it take? If you’re talking about scraping together a 20 percent down payment on a house, and you live in the Bay Area, the answer is “a much larger percentage of your income than you can...
View ArticleRedfin: Hottest U.S. neighborhood is Oakland’s Bushrod, with Sunnyvale’s...
Sometimes it seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry is rating the hottest neighborhoods in the nation for real estate. Still, when Redfin does it, potential home buyers tend to pay attention. And...
View ArticleBay Area women’s marches go beyond Facebook activism
Nearly 80,000 people have RSVP’d on Facebook for post-inauguration women’s marches in the Bay Area’s biggest cities — San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose — on Saturday. On the Facebook page of the...
View ArticleBay Area rents down for the fourth straight month
For the fourth consecutive month, rents have fallen around the Bay Area. That’s according to a new analysis by the Axiometrics research firm, which shows rents sliding across the region, from San Jose...
View ArticleAs in Silicon Valley, U.S. luxury home prices are sluggish
Luxury home prices rose nominally across the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2016 — by only 0.7 percent, year-over-year, reaching an average of $1.6 million, according to Redfin, the real estate...
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Top 10 hottest real estate markets: San Francisco, San Jose… and Vallejo?
Realtor.com’s new national “Hotness Index” is once again top-heavy with Bay Area markets. No surprise there. Because of the region’s housing supply (ridiculously low) and demand from buyers (high, like...
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