Let’s continue looking at some homes untouched by Bay Area Bubble 4.0 fever!  Thanks very much to Burbed reader dollarbin for this fantastic find: over 200 days on the market and wait until you see the price history! Amazing!

1915 83RD Ave
Oakland, CA 94621
$189,000

3 Beds
2 Baths
1,526 Sq. Ft.
$124 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1963
Lot Size: 5,400 Sq. Ft.
On Redfin: 210 days
Type: Detached
Stories: 1
County: Alameda
Style: Custom
Community: East Oakland
MLS#: 40592548

Come and see this custom built Eichler in Oakland. You will own the house that everyone talks about. This house is an architectural masterpiece and the additional master bed and bath make it incredible. This is the only Eichler in this part of Oakland. Open House April 6th, 10 AM- 12PM.

Here’s what dollarbin thought of the place:

I’ve been sitting on this one for quite some time and it’s finally pending but as a short sale, I bet it will have a long luxurious escrow.  Check out the listing price history, more ups and downs than a whack-a-mole game. Bring on the Eichler lovers!

There’s so much to salute about this property, it’s hard to figure out where to start the rollout.  How about we take a look at all the attractive price points it has offered in search of the One True Buyer.

No wonder it’s selling shortly!  Don’t miss the Open House, either! Um, whoops.  Hey, this is the only Eichler in this part of Oakland!

Today is Sunday! That means better hurry up and make the most of Spring Bounce by visiting as many Open Houses as you can today.  It also means we put the alphabet away until Monday.

This particular house on the left isn’t listed as Open and probably won’t be, because it’s selling shortly.  The bank knows a lot more about it than the FB who wasn’t getting the monthly nut met.

And you don’t have to be a psychic to get that banks expect mortgages to be paid back.  Too bad this resident didn’t sense that sudden change in their domestic affairs. 

Here’s the most real estate-related card in the Tarot.  The Tower represents sudden change, release, downfall or revelation. Yes, that definitely sounds like a ride on a Bay Area Real Estate Bubble.

Thanks very much to Burbed reader Petsmart Groomer for observing the inherent contradiction in that listing photo.

This is an Open Thread. Share your predictions of where home prices are headed.  Or we’ll just post them for you as we shuffle the cards.

We’ll keep today’s Opening On the Outside, Only the Opposite.  Yes, it’s O day in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, which means we Only do the letters in the Official Order.  On this day we Open Our ears, eyes and Other Orifices in the direction of Oakland. And we’ll keep this One sweet, as it’s selling shortly.

Or rather, it’s Opening On an Oversized Optimization for the Ordained Owner.

9437 PEACH St
Oakland, CA 94603
$69,500

3 Beds
1 Baths
1,080 Sq. Ft.
$64 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1985
Lot Size: —
On Redfin: 198 days
Type: Condominium
Stories: 1
Community: Oakland
MLS#": 40591208
Style: Ranch
View: Other
County: Alameda

Nice Three bedroom condo with a 1 car garage.

Didn’t they mean this One the Other way ‘round?  Looks like a nice One bedroom condo with a 3 car garage.  Only somebody Omitted the condo part.

If you Object that there’s no pictures of the condo at all (not even the Outside), we Offer the streetview and Orbital scape.  (As always, you have the Option click to Open a bigger One.)

Want to look at Open Houses but inventory is too low? Here’s yet another reason why Bay Area Bubble 4.0 is in full swing for Spring: Flash sales. Redfin coined this term for a house that’s in contract within 24 hours of being listed.

They also made a list of how many flash sales there have been in the last five months in each of the markets they cover, and San Jose came in 15th out of 15 with 74 quickies. San Francisco didn’t even make the cut at all!  All-time flash sales champion? Phoenix, with 540.

8271 SKYLINE Cir
Oakland, CA 94605
Sold for $650,000

3 Beds
2.5 Baths
2,090 Sq. Ft.
$311 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1998
Lot Size: 10,119 Sq. Ft.
Sold On: Dec 26, 2012
HOA Dues: $140/month
Style: Traditional
View: Bay, Greenbelt, Water
County: Alameda
Type: Detached
Stories: Split Level
Community: Skyline/Oakknoll
MLS#: 40598366

Amazing Oakland hills. 3/2.5 w/ extra office space. Incredible living space with 10ft ceilings, beautifully appointed thru/out. Chef’s kitchen with custom island, grnite, countertops, s. s. appliances. Electronic window coverings, deck with bridge views, gorgeous pergola/ backs to open space. Perfect!

This Skyline Circle home in Oakland was a Flash Sale and is featured on the Redfin Blog. It sold quick, and for list price. This is how we know Oakland, even in the hills, is not the Real Bay Area. Everyone knows Real Bay Area homes sell way over asking.  Also RBA homes don’t fester on the market for a year and a half until the Bubble finally blows up again.  The HOA dues are just the sickly sweet icing on the Not RBA cake.

Location: Oakland, CA
Listed By: Lynda Divito, Redfin
Listed: December 14, 2012
Pending: December 14, 2012
Closed: December 24, 2012
List Price: $650,000
Final Sale Price: $650,000

“This house never even hit the market! We had a brokers’ tour in the afternoon on the very same day the house was to hit the market. A broker came in with his buyers who offered all-cash at full list price and with the quick closing we had requested, making it an easy choice for my clients to accept their offer that same day.” - Lynda DiVito, San Francisco Bay Area Redfin Agent

Planning on visiting any Open Houses today? Let us know of any suitcases full of cash changing hands you see. This is also your Weekend Open Thread, so sky’s the limit!

Who’s priced out forever, and getting more priced out by the minute in Bay Area Bubble 4.0?  Not you! Not when you check out this completely affordable home in Oakmmphf CLOSE TO SAN FRANCISCO. Heck, you could pick up this sweet little lodging on your way home from the grocery store.  Well, you could if there were a grocery store anywhere near it.

Undisclosed Address
Oakland, CA 94621
$133,000

2 Beds
1 Baths
997 Sq. Ft.
$133 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1905
Lot Size: 3,200 Sq. Ft.
On Redfin: 4 days
Type: Detached
Stories: 1
County: Alameda
Style: Victorian
Community: E Oakland
MLS#: 40607349

Great 3 bedroom / 1 bath home with Tall ceilings! (Public records 2bd/1ba buyer to verify all property information) Spacious family room. Large eat-in kitchen w/ tile flooring. Spacious bath with tiled flooring. Homepath and Homeapth Renovation Approved!

Again with the undisclosed addresses?  Burbed laughs at the idea and discloses them.  We know how to use… teh Google!

2070 85TH AVE
OAKLAND, CA 94621
$133,000

Single Res | 2 beds | 1 baths | 997 sq. ft. | 3200 acres | 17 days on market | MLS# 40607349
Active
Price : $133,000
Bathrooms : 1
List Date : 03/04/2013
Approx Square Feet : 997
Listed Days Back : 17
Price per sq. ft : $133
County : Alameda
Approx Lot Feet : 3200
Location : 2070 85TH AVE, OAKLAND, CA 94621
Approx Lot Acres : 0.073
MLS# : 40607349
Approx age : 108
Status : New-REO
Homeowner`s Association Fee : -1 / n/a

Anyone know the difference between Homepath and Homeapth Renovation? Don’t ask Redfin. This is below their minimum commission.

Answer: The RBA is being bought up by foreigners with suitcases full of cash going to individual sellers.  Not the Real Bay Area is being bought up by investors with envelopes full of cashiers checks going to banks.

Report: Investors buy nearly half of Oakland’s foreclosed homes

Real estate firms turning properties into rentals, becoming "massive landlords" in some neighborhoods, critics say

by Aaron Glantz, Bay Citizen — June 28, 2012, 11:01 a.m.

The rental listing advertises a “gorgeous remodeled craftsman-style house” with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a converted basement, a large deck and a backyard for $2,595 a month.

Eight months ago, this West Oakland home was owned and occupied by Theodros Shawl, a local chiropractor. Shawl bought the house in 2004, his first since emigrating from Ethiopia in 1990. Over the years, Shawl said, he rebuilt the home’s foundation and replaced its aging plumbing and electrical systems.

“I liked the fact that it was an older home, that I could repair and paint and fix there on the weekends. I was always at Home Depot,” said Shawl, 40. “I was living the American Dream.”

Last October, after being sidelined with a wrist injury, Shawl lost his home to foreclosure; in May, Bank of America sold it to a real estate investment firm, REO Homes 2 LLC, a company founded in 2010 by Bay Area businessman Neill Sullivan.

Lest you think this is a trend only in the depressed parts of the Bay Area, we assure you that it isn’t.  Real Estate Investment Trusts are back, mostly because there doesn’t seem to be a lot of places to get reasonable returns these days.  A recent article in The New Republic covers the growing national trend of paying cash for foreclosures and turning them into rentals.  Needless to say, actual would-be buyers are finding themselves aced out of the bottom-feeding.

Your New Landlord Works on Wall Street

Hedge funds are snatching up rental homes at an alarming rate

BY DAVID DAYEN, The New Republic, February 16, 2013

Housing analysts have been giddy for the past year about the comeback of their industry, whose collapse led to the Great Recession. Sure, 2012 was actually the third-worst year for housing ever—but it still beat 2010 and 2011. New and existing home sales, housing starts, and prices jumped in 2012, and experts expect an even stronger recovery for 2013.

It’s clear why people are so excited: Housing typically leads economic recoveries. As more people build equity in their homes, they feel more free to spend disposable income and increase economic activity, a phenomenon known as the “wealth effect.”  So a bullish outlook for housing would seemingly augur a long-awaited recovery to Main Street. But the more you look into it, the clearer it becomes that it’s not being driven by the typical American families who lost their homes in the economic crash. In fact, it’s being fueled by the banks and hedge funds whose speculation caused that crash in the first place.

If you’ve signed a lease in the past year, there’s a good chance your landlord wears a tailored suit and works on Wall Street. One of the hottest trends in the financial sector is known as “REO-to-rental.” Over the past couple years, hedge funds, private equity firms and the biggest banks have raised massive amounts of capital to buy distressed or foreclosed single-family homes, often in bulk, at bargain prices. Their strategy is to convert them to rental units for a while before reselling them when prices appreciate. The Wall Street firms are scooping up properties in the hardest-hit areas, promising high returns for the rental revenue streams—up to 10 percent annually —and starting bidding wars that have driven up some prices well above national averages. It’s the next Wall Street gold rush, with all the warning signs of a renewed speculative bubble.

Enjoy the Open Houses you’ll be making offers on but not buying because some sovereign wealth fund is outbidding you.

We sure hope so.  You survived the end of the world yesterday, didn’t you? (Those not surviving the end of the world, please stop interrupting.)  Now we’ve found a piece on Trulia on the numerology of home sales. 

This means you can continue your lucky lifestyle, thanks to Trulia’s research.  It turns out that a lot of home sellers put their favorite “lucky numbers” in their asking prices.

So what’s wrong with this pie chart at right?  Too many nines and fives, yet not enough eights, that’s what.  Everyone knows that eights are lucky.  Well, everyone in the Real Bay Area knows that.  The lucky numbers in the rest of the country say otherwise.

This consolidated map suggests that there aren’t any particular lucky numbers in the Midwest, the Plains, the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Northwest, just a countrywide avoidance of the number 13 in prices.  And here’s some more on 8 as a lucky number.

We took a spot-check of the asking prices in Cupertino, right now, over a million dollars (which is pretty much all of them).

We came up with one 1, one 2, one 6, three 9s, seven 5s, and a whopping ten 8s.    We just had to make a pie chart out of that.  Until today, we had no idea that donuts were a subset of pie.

If we then take the sub-million houses, we get an additional one 1, four 5s and two 8s.

We then compare with similarly sized cities (at least as to number of sales over a million) with rather different demographics.  San Rafael is majority white, and Oakland, while one of the most racially diverse cities, has a higher percentage of blacks than many other areas.

Whoa. There’s 4s in Oakland, which is a very unlucky number in Cupertino.  All three cities have a strongly marked preference for 5 over 9, while nationally it’s the other way by almost 2 to 1.

We welcome your reasoning on why this would be, or anything else you wish to bring up in this Weekend-after-the-end-of-the-world Open Thread.

We’re not just having Black Friday deals, we’ve got the cheapest housing all throughout the Bay!  Today we’re looking for the cheapest house in Alameda County.

Think you can’t afford a house? Boom. You could buy this one and still have enough left over for… oh… ANOTHER HOUSE.  The argument e-store is now offline.

1351 91ST Ave
Oakland, CA 94603
$39,888

1 Beds 
1 Baths 
634 Sq. Ft.
$63 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1927 
Lot Size: 2,725 Sq. Ft. 
On Redfin: 5 days
Status: New
Type: Detached
Stories: 1
County: Alameda
Style: Traditional
Community: Oakland
MLS#: 40596586

Nice started home, good for investor. Bring your offers

That’s right! Bring it!  When you do, maybe you can figure out what’s in the structure in the back and why the roof looks, um, distressed.

They did say it was a nice started home. You just have to figure out what they started.  But look on the bright side.  It’s a gated community!

Yesterday, we had a guest post from Greg Fielding on Bay Area Case-Shiller tiered data.  In case you haven’t been reading any real estate sites ever, a Case-Shiller index tracks home values by comparing sales of the same homes over time.  The index is arbitrarily set at 100 at the first quarter of the year 2000, so watch out if you ever see a two-digit C-S index for this or any region.  There is also a national C-S index.  Monthly updates represent sales from two months previous.

The counties included in the “San Francisco” regional index are the aforementioned City and County of San Francisco, as well as Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Mateo.  That’s right, it’s not a full Bay Area index and note the absence of Santa Clara County, that engine of high-paying job creation.

Today, we take a look at the magical cut-off point to qualify for the top tier.  According to Fielding, any house selling for more than $579,803 is in the top tier (there are three of them).  Let’s see what kind of palatial abodes you could have for this kind of money.  All homes shown today are at selling prices rather than the wishing ones.

2916 SOMBRERO Cir
San Ramon, CA 94583
$585,000, sold on 12/8/2011

If you’re looking in San Ramon, here’s a 3 bedroom, two and a half place for you. It’s not a new house, though, this was built in 1980.

The development it’s in sits hard against the freeway (and there’s only one in San Ramon, I-680), but the property itself does not. Instead it backs onto what is now open space.  Given how many new homes went up in San Ramon, the new owner will have some quiet over the back fence until the next bubble starts boiling up.

5205 MANILA Ave
Oakland, CA 94618
$580,000, sold on 12/24/2011

This cute little bungalow is in the Rockridge district, desired by hipsters and yuppies alike.  It’s a 2/1, but at over 1200 square feet it doesn’t qualify for the Burbed “cozy” tag.

There’s absolutely no information about previous sales on Redfin, but with a $43,000 assessment, this obviously wasn’t a flip.  The sellers went all-out with the staging and photography, so enjoy.

122 Crescent Rd
Corte Madera, CA 94925
$594,000, sold on 12/22/2011

Wow, what a home, complete with extra rooms the county obviously didn’t know about.  Listed as a 3/2.5, but recorded as a 2/1.  This place hiding in the woods of Marin County against a hill is going to be a contractor’s retirement fund.

Be sure to check out the sales history on this former REO puppy, it’s crap-tastic.

2051 SULLIVAN St
San Mateo, CA 94403
$585,000, sold on 11/30/2011

Everything in this price range in San Mateo is on the east side.  “Bunus:” This 3/2’s near the 101/92 cloverleaf, which is why it needs the doublepane windows.

This house sold for $795K in 2006, but at least it went for above asking this time around.

328 Monticello St
San Francisco, CA 94132
$583,000, sold on 10/19/2011

Amazingly, this Merced Heights house doesn’t directly touch walls with its neighbors.  And if you decide it isn’t for you, there are plenty of SF State students to rent it to.  Anyway, you or your tenants are going to have loads of fun with the tandem parking garage.

The house last changed hands in 1989, for $271K.  Quite the investment that doubles its value in 22 years.

We won’t bother with Santa Clara County, as it’s not in the Case-Shiller SF Index anyway.  If it were, that top tier would be a bit higher and way more Special.

BLACK FRIDAY DEALS continue all this week!  This is the time to find the lowest-prices throughout the Bay Area!  Plus we’ll continue to bring you all the regular Burbed features you expect.

Today, the cheapest house in all of Alameda County!  Woot!  And when we run out of Bay Area Counties, don’t worry, there are plenty of Special Cities to find more DEALS for you.  Feel free to place your requests!

So, Alameda County, where would your absolute rock-bottom cheapest house for sale be?  You have so many excellent contenders for the role, it’s hard to pick just one city!  When I searched for properties under $100K countywide, I got more than 200 results.  Heck, even under $50K I still have to sort ten different houses!  How low can we go?  $40,000?  $30,000?

6024 FORTUNE Way, Oakland, CA 94605
$14,000

BEDS: 1
BATHS: 1
SQ. FT.: 700
$/SQ. FT.: $20
LOT SIZE: 1,800 Sq. Ft.
TYPE: Detached
STORIES: Other
YEAR BUILT: 1923
COMMUNITY: Oakland
COUNTY: Alameda
MLS#: 40549840
SOURCE: EBRD
STATUS: Pending
ON REDFIN: 25 days

Partially burned property. PRICED TO SELL! Great investment opportunity. Make your offer today!

Yes, this one is pending, but the state of this house combined with the street name make it a winner.  And remember, if it’s partially burned, that means it’s partially burn-free!

Great news: the fireplace looks like it’s still standing.