san francisco real estate

Internet real estate listings are full of photos of homes for sale, allowing buyers to spend hours looking at pictures. With such a large selection, you'd think that real estate agents would think twice before allowing poorly photographed homes to appear in their listings. But still, there are plenty of ugly listing photos out there.

A home described as a "charming opportunity" doesn't look so charming, lawns need to be mowed, and cameras need to be focused. A website in Seattle keeps track of such detrimental listings, and the photos should be enough to turn a potential buyer away. Even multimillion-dollar homes aren't immune.

But good photos can help a home sell fast, San Francisco photographer Herman Bustamante told HousingWatch. He photographs real estate and has seen $1 million homes sell within a week with professionally taken photos in the listing.

Too many real estate agents will take listing photos themselves to try to save some money, but it will cost them in the long run, Bustamante says.

I've lived in three apartments in San Francisco over the past decade. For each one, my landlord has always been a "mom and pop" team, an older married couple who bought the house or building as income property or kept it after they moved elsewhere, and decided to handle the renting and tenant management duties themselves. Now brokers and agents have taken control of much of the city's apartment rental market, and the same thing is happening in many American cities since home sales have slowed down.

I've had a good relationship with all of my landlords -- one woke up at 2 a.m. after my frantic call and rushed over to fix a gushing sink pipe; another stopped by with homemade chicken soup when I had the flu. But that type of renter-landlord relationship is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

It's not surprising that recent college grads want to live in bustling urban areas. What's surprising is how much space they are willing to give up these days to buy condominiums in super-cool city locations. In an effort to keep prices down for cost-conscious young buyers, new apartment buildings around the country are being built with an average unit size of around 500 square feet, reports MSNBC.com. But different cities have different notions of "small": In Portland, Ore., a small condo is around 520 square feet; in San Francisco, the 98-unit Cubix building in the super-hip SOMA neighborhood is selling condos ranging from 250 to 350 square feet.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, real estate sales were up in May, thanks to the increase in home purchases due to the tax credit rush. According to DQ News, sales for median to high end neighborhoods rose, helping take the median price for homes north of $400,000 for the Bay Area -- the first time in 21 months.

Good news to be sure, but is this just a one-month surge, or could this last?

The housing market is bouncing back in San Francisco, where sales of houses and condominiums jumped 50 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier. Improving technology stocks and a limited housing supply are credited with the increase.

And not just more homes were sold, but at higher prices, with the median price rising 5.4 percent to $685,000. The city and the metro area have ranked first or second among the most expensive U.S. housing markets for 19 of the past 20 years, as homebuyers flock there for its weather and high quality of life.

But how much home can the median price of $685,000 buy in San Francisco? For about $680,000 there are plenty of foreclosures to choose from, many near the border of Daly City. Most are near the edges of the city, but a few are near its center. Here are three San Francisco homes for sale in different parts of the city that are worth taking a look at, and are all in good neighborhoods:

San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood is undergoing a transition that's taking it beyond what it's been known for: excellent hilltop views of the city. For a little more than $1 million, you can buy a house in this vibrant neighborhood. It's not likely to stay that affordable for long.

The New York Times recently highlighted Bernal Heights for its culinary scene and its mix of markets selling foods from around the world.

What can you get for around $1 million in Bernal Heights? This home at 160 Manchester St., for example. Here are the details:

The San Francisco Giants are off to a hot start this season, making the prospect of living near the team's ballpark an especially appealing adventure.

This condo at 657 Third St. is two blocks from AT&T Park, and you can just hear the stadium calling your name as you walk by on a game day -- or is that crowd noise?

Every time I visit a big city, I like to spend a week doing nothing more than going to a live theater performance every night, with sightseeing and a fancy dinner wrapped around it.

For $499,000 in San Francisco that can be done by buying a home within walking distance of its theater district, allowing you a place to stay after a night on the town. Here are three homes for sale for $499,000 or less in different neighborhoods. But all are within a walk or a cable-car ride to Union Square and its nearby theaters and restaurants. With the hilly terrain of Nob Hill, you may want to take a cable car or taxi back home after the show.

For millionaires it must always be a good time to enter the housing market. After all, they can still afford a home when prices are high, and now that they're low again, million-dollar bargains abound. Recent price drops in San Francisco's Telegraph Hill make the area worth looking at again.

I recently wrote about a stunning condo for sale in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood that had its price drop by 5 percent. Now I've found a single-family home in the same hilltop neighborhood that has dropped nearly 11 percent in price --- from $3,350,000 to $2,995,000.

What do some people do when they can't afford their soaring housing prices of San Francisco? They move to the suburbs. Guess what's constituting as a suburb of San Francisco these days? Cities as far as Portland and Seattle, 600 to 800 miles to the north.

In this age of telecommuting this type of scenario is now an outlandish possibility. Newly transplanted Pacific Northwest residents can keep their high-paying San Francisco jobs while enjoying such perks as a $350,000 home that can accommodate a small family. (Rather than living in a cramped Mission District apartment for the same price.)

What does just under $2,000,000 get you in San Francisco? We'll compare three houses -- one downtown, one in Hayes Valley and one in the Sea Cliff neighborhood -- to see what San Franciscans can get for their money.

You've got to love San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. This is where it all happened, man, during the Summer of Love. You can take a walking tour of The Haight, as it's called, and come across houses where the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix lived. Located near the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park, the Haight is one of the quintessential San Francisco neighborhoods. The classic Victorian and Edwardian homes in this neighborhood can range from $300K for a onr-bedroom condo all the way up to $5M for a five-bedroom mansion.

We compared three great single-family homes in and around Haight-Ashbury, all priced under $3 million:

Living in the San Francisco neighborhood of Pacific Heights is expensive. Home prices average $3.1 million, and some mansions price for as high as $13.5 million. But for less than $2 million, we found three excellent homes in Pacific Heights.

Much of the affluent neighborhood was built after the 1906 earthquake, although some Victorian homes built before then still exist. It's a scenic area with stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and the San Francisco Bay. And luxury abounds in the district, which embodies Hollywood's vision of the city: blocks of colorful wedding-cake mansions from which you can see for miles.

Of course $2,995,000 is an outrageous amount of money to pay for a fixer-upper house. But in San Francisco's Presidio Heights neighborhood, it's a deal if you consider how far prices have dropped in the stylish neighborhood in the past year.

The house at 3150 Jackson St. is for sale for $2,995,000, although a Trulia listing has it for sale at $2,695,000. Whatever price you get, it's a lot less than it would have been a year ago compared with other homes in the neighborhood.