According to the current headline report and most popular story on SFGate, a two-bedroom Nob Hill condo was purchased for $690,000 in June of 2014 and flipped for $1,740,000 this past May, earning the reporter’s “award for investment of the year.”
Unfortunately, the report isn’t fact but rather fiction. And the “[p]roperty records [which] show the unit…sold for $690K in June of 2014,” don’t actually exist.
1150 Sacramento Street #202 was purchased for $650,000 in 1994. In 1998, the condo was transferred between family members, likely from father to daughter.
And while the condo did sell for $1,740,000, or $972 per square foot, this past April, it’s not “appreciation of $1,050,000 in one year” as highlighted by SFGate, but rather total appreciation of $1,090,000 over the past twenty years, or an “insane” 4.97 percent per year for the Nob Hill condo.
In related news, while SFGate also reports that the median sale price for homes in San Francisco ticked up in June, it actually slipped.
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There you go again, expecting an SFGate ‘reporter’ to do actual research …
Hmm, which is more surprising – that SFGate got something wrong… or that they even tried in the first place to have their own local “news item” instead of their usual third-patry click-bait slideshows?
ugly building at any rate. Looks like it was planned as an office and was turned into housing as an afterthought
It would look so much better if they just swapped out the balustrades with something modern. It wouldn’t solve the office-look problem, of course.
$972/sqf for that property in that location actually seems a little under market.
This is why I love socketsite so much.
SFGate is where former SF Bay Guardian “reporters” go to do bong hits.
SfGate’s “On the block” is a link bait. They have a new author recently. But the style has not changed. Their talent is in writing a WOW title, thats it. The content is bland and uninformative to support the title. In this case, it is amateur misinformation.
SFGate is hewing closely to that famous Mark Twain quote: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
You are all way to harsh on SFGate, you need to come down from your high horses and chill. Their article about the Top 15 Kardashian photos (#5 will shock you) was really informative.
“You won’t believe what happened next!”
Thank you very much for writing about this. Saw the SFGate article yesterday and thought there is no way this could be accurate. Socketsite to the rescue.
Also, the house should sue SFGate for libel
While you’re on the mark in catching the error (or fabrication, or whatever you’d like to call it), don’t use this one example to argue that extreme flips don’t happen in San Francisco. A perusal of your own archive will prove some examples of property inflation far in excess of 4.97%/yr
Reading comprehension is your friend. The title of this post is specifically directed at the Chronicle’s article from yesterday. No one said that flips don’t happen in excess of 4.97% a year but the claimed 150%/year flip was the target of this article.
If you were here in the 1980’s you might remember the July 5 Chronicle front page where the top half of the page was a picture of July 4 fire works going off at Crissey Field the night before.
Even though they had been cancelled due to fog.
Did they misspell Crissy as Crissey too?
No, that was Crissy’s new preferred name after its sex-change operation.
Hardly a day goes by that there is not a breathless, hyperbolic story on the Gate by Anna Marie Erwert.
Do you know what happens to the real estate market about 6-12 months after the media climbs aboard the realtors clown car?
what?+ didn’t you say that two years ago?
No I said it in 2007/2008.
got it. you were wrong for about a 12-15 months before the market shifted here, fall 2008. what about now? “media climbs aboard realtors clown car” ? what does that mean? did they even have such click bait type of stuff in the sfgate back in 2007/2008 as Anna Marie Erwin’s lousy paragraph and a half nonsense?
That’s funny. Market here started to tank by mid-2007. Really undeniable in all sectors by mid-2008, yet many realtors continued to blindly, wishfully say “SF is different.”
On SS the delusional denial from bull posters lasted maybe 6 months. Then late 2008 happened and it was pretty clear SF wasn’t an island.
I won’t cast the first stone. This was the deepest recession in 70+ years. Everything was new to everyone and posters who say they saw it coming are usually the perma-bears that got their tush handed to them in 2012 when they denied the skyrocketing price recovery.
mid 2007, or spring summer 2007, SF was seeing all time price highs
As far as different this time as opposed to last time? Hasn’t SF’s wild ascent been a bit different this time? Last time easy credit had most of the country appreciating rapidly. This time SF was climbing when many other areas were not. Jobs haven’t been that great nationwide but they have been here for a few years now.
As a former bear the last run-up has been very humbling. Now I am back to being a bear (1 year now) but it’s more a “what-the-heck-they’re-all-crazy” kind of bear. I am still trying to figure where the bubble-poping-needle would come from. The fun thing is that it’s different every time and it’s always what we expected less.
SF Gate is useless. I gave up on that site years ago. They don’t have journalists, they have overly-opinionated bloggers who have no clue what actual journalism is.
Thanks for setting them straight.
UPDATE: From a Fabled Flip to Reality on Nob Hill