As we originally reported two months ago:

Purchased for $1.495 million in September 2015, the 1,418-square-foot Lumina unit #2A at 318 Main Street returned to the market this past June listed for $1.649 million and touting: “Best priced 2bed/2bath home in San Francisco’s premier luxury high rise condo!”

While the June listing has since been withdrawn from the MLS and effectively scrubbed from most sites, 318 Main Street #2A has now been listed anew for $1.588 million and with an official “5” days on the market according to all industry stats. And yes, the “best priced” line appears to have been dropped from the new listing rather than changed to “bestest” or “betterer.”

And on Monday, the list price for 318 Main Street #2A was further “adjusted” to $1.495 million, a sale at which would represent total appreciation of 0.0 percent for the Lumina two-bedroom, not accounting for the cost of a couple of closet and bathroom upgrades since the unit was purchased as new.

24 thoughts on “Best Priced Two-Bedroom in Premier High-Rise Drops Another $93K”
  1. I’m curious if you get a certain enjoyment out of denying the housing market is rising by cherry picking people that overbought.

    1. I think it’s just stubbornness at this point. Socketsite made the call about a year or so ago that the market had turned south. Turns out that call was wrong as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of reliable data. But instead of admit that, they look for cherry-picked examples of the exceptions (which do exist) or cite flat-out nonsense and ignore everything else. The real world continues chugging along regardless.

    2. I dont know if he/she enjoys posting them, but I enjoy reading them! Overbuying in an over heated market might be a harbinger of other things

    3. this post features the chronology of one property, which in and of itself is interesting enough to read about, i don’t see where the “denying the housing market is rising” comes from.

  2. You think it’s funny now, in a year or two it’s going to be a laugh riot. Whole cherry orchards as far as the eye can see.

    1. That’s possible. Point is that right now>/i>, with case shiller numbers hitting record highs last week, and the NASDAQ hitting yet another record high today, there is no SF downturn. Yet you wouldn’t know that from the cherry-picked isolated examples here.

      1. Thats just silly. The market for stocks can tank in hour when panic sets in housing is totally different momentum wise. Are you implying he housing market in sf has a direct immediate response to the ebb and flow of the stock market?

        1. Didn’t say (or imply) anything of the sort. SF housing price trends can be directly viewed by looking at case shiller, which is at record highs. Point of citing to NASDAQ is that SF housing demand is roughly tied to the fortunes of the tech industry right now, more so than, say, Cleveland. NASDAQ trends are a pretty good indicator of the financial state of the tech industry. SF housing trends aren’t going to be affected by daily (or even weekly or monthly) NASDAQ ebbs and flows. But if NASDAQ fell 20% and stayed there for many months? Yeah, SF housing would likely be hit by that in the months that followed. Conversely, as NASDAQ keeps hitting record highs, SF housing is likely to be affected by that in the other direction.

          1. “SF housing price trends can be directly viewed by looking at case shiller”
            No they can’t. Case Shiler is the whole bay area. SF is just a small fraction of that.

          2. Yeah, I remember people resorting to that argument during the bust: “case shiller might show prices down 20% but not in SF because, you know, case shiller also covers the neighboring counties which, you know, follow totally different trends and economic principles. Prices may have crashed in Marin but not here in SF!” Argument is equally invalid now that things are going the other way.

            But fine, then just look at all the recent apples-to-apples sales rather than those cherry-picked in one direction. Or look at SF data for median prices or $/sf. They all show the same thing: prices plateaued the second half of 2016 but then have risen since. Or you can look only at cherry-picked outliers and delude yourself if it makes you feel good.

  3. I enjoy reading these apples to apples sales and find it a little funny how sometimes people get bent out of shape or go out of their way to point out how the last buyer overpaid or there are things wrong the property or it is being mishandled by the realtor etc. The huge machine of the real estate industry covers how hot the market is all the time so having a voice out there like socketsite providing some other data points is useful.

    Btw I’m not an SF r/e bear (though I do think risk/reward and the level of urgency has changed). In some ways, I’m surprised we are not higher. I don’t think people always realize the enormity and experimental aspects of central bank policy over the last decade that forced money out of fixed income and savings and into risk assets- whether that is the SP going from 666 in 2009 to over 2500 today or unconventional institutional money doing long lock-ups with VC’s and flooding Silicon Valley with money (or buying a house or two in SF) . . .

  4. Why post as anon? Anyway real estate agents always get super defensive when the market slows. Easy come, easy go.

  5. San Francisco has investors, and retail buyers, otherwise known as “emotional suckers”. The investors stopped buying last year. The emotional suckers, having been outbid over and over, kept bidding, not realizing that they were the only ones.

    Now the music has stopped. The emotional suckers have caught on that they don’t need to pay whatever is asked plus $100,000.

    In years past, the investors could hang on with rents that covered the mortgage and refuse to take any losses ever. But rents have been falling, so the investors NEED to get out: every where they turn are losses. They also want to move their money to the hot markets: Seattle, Las Vegas, etc. where gains are assured, mostly because the herd of investors thinks it is, and they are all buying there, just like here in 2011-2014.

    So Socketsite will be accused of cherry picking, so that the emotional suckers can be convinced the market is still rising, but the cherry basket is getting mighty full, and fuller each day. It will be harder to convince the emotional suckers that they should bid at all in a down market when rents aren’t rising and prices are falling. “What big losses you have, Grandma”, said Hansel and Gretel.

    1. “rents have been falling, so the investors NEED to get out”

      So inventory must be really high right now as the investors NEED to flee, correct? Oh, it has been, and remains, very low throughout 2017? A pain when the facts get in the way of a good narrative.

      “Now the music has stopped. The emotional suckers have caught on that they don’t need to pay whatever is asked plus $100,000.”

      Take a look at 265 Castro Street. Decent 3 br 2 ba but needs a ton of work. Listed at $1.9 million, which I had thought was a bit of wishful thinking given the hundreds of thousands it will take to get it in liveable shape and that it’s a pretty modest place to begin with. Sold yesterday for $2.3 million. So “whatever is asked plus $100,000” wouldn’t have even come close. And, of course, as the case shiller numbers revealed last week, SF housing prices have hit more record highs. Again, those darn facts. But keep telling yourself that Socketsite is tirelessly working to portray a representative sample and not cherry picking at all. The market has crashed and bargains await anyone looking to buy.

      1. apples oranges. Soma condos are oversupplied and vanilla, SF homes (regardless of their condition) are rare and there is still a huge market to get in. I don’t think your anecdote over-rules the editor’s anecdote. They are all anecdotes and they add up to real information. BTW, the two brands of cherries the editor seems to be posting a lot these days are SOMA condos and luxury SFH renovations (like that recent Noe Valley $5 million dollar one). Both of those categories ARE showing stress after some irrational exhuberance over the past couple of years. Other categories may differ, at least for now. Canaries in a coal mine, or noise? Jury is still out, but it’s worth thinking about.

  6. 265 Castro Street is not a counterpoint to the above example. List price doesn’t mean that much. By all means, provide an actual apples to apples. It’s an open forum and I and others are interested to see positive apples to apples (especially something in the same neibhorhood/property class) with the full picture– and I know there are a lot of positive apples to apples. Prior sale, what renovations were done, etc. For the average r/e buyer, it’s tough to get the full picture and we almost never get that from a realtor. Maybe it seems snarky to some to talk about official days on the market, but I have had realtors tell me that a place is just listed and is going to sell within the week even though I had seen the same place a year ago. Even if negative apples to apples are the minority, they still tell us something. Perhaps it is just condos or soma condos that are posting some negatives, but was that going on two or three years ago?

    And keep telling yourself that a lot of realtors are working tirelessly to portray a representative sample and that the NAR’s massive lobbying effort and lawsuits are in the best interests of consumers.

    1. “And keep telling yourself that a lot of realtors are working tirelessly to portray a representative sample and that the NAR’s massive lobbying effort and lawsuits are in the best interests of consumers.”

      Are you kidding me? Realtors and the NAR are the worst. Socketsite is a generally good, reliable counter to their crap. That’s why it’s a bit dismaying to see them playing the same types of selective/misleading data games now.

    2. And I was just pointing to 265 Castro to show that Tipster’s “no need to bid $100,000 over asking anymore” was way, way off. But, on the merits, I know the Castro area SFR market pretty well (I live right in it). There is no way a pretty much dump like 265 Castro would have fetched $2.3 million one year ago or two years ago. No way. It is crazy to me that it went for that much. Either someone bid way beyond everyone else (and may regret it) or there was an “auction” and that’s what it took. It’s not inadvertent that socketsite just happens never to feature outcomes like that one anymore.

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