Noe Valley's housing market is a rarity - prices are up, and Adam Woollerson is happy to have paid 5% over the asking
Adam Woollerson and Lindsay Clark went house-hunting in Noe Valley four years ago and then again this summer. It was a whole different ballgame this time around.
"Back then, on one property we bid 40 percent over asking; we were one of 28 bids, and we were ninth on the list," said Woollerson, a project manager at Levi Strauss.
Now there are fewer rivals who are ready, willing and able to bid on homes that go for a median price of $954 a square foot, up 6.8 percent from last year. (The sales median was $1.32 million.)
This time, Woollerson and Clark, a value recovery manager for Goodwill, found a two-story Edwardian with parking and knew right away it was the house for them. As one of three offers, they ended up buying the house for $1,525,000, 5 percent over the asking price.
Their experience shows that Noe Valley, one of only a handful of ZIPs where prices on a per-square-foot basis rose year over year, still has sufficient cachet to bring in multiple offers. But it's still nothing like the go-go days.
"Any property that has any abnormalities or anything unusual is just a really hard sell, whereas before people would have said, 'That's all right, we can fix it,' " said Duncan Wheeler at Zephyr Real Estate, who was the couple's Realtor. "If there is one thing wrong with these houses, they sit for a really long time."
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