GLEN PARK REAL ESTATE

Happy beautiful June!

We are starting to move into the summer months now with schools letting out and vacations being planned. This is typically a slow time for the real estate market in San Francisco. This year the word on the streets is: Full steam ahead! Our inventory is so, so low and the demand is so, so high, that the general consensus in real estate circles is there’s no reason to hold back from listing a property (especially a single family) until the Fall. List it, present it well, and they will come!

When you look at the sales and pending sales from May, you can see that properties in general are getting into contract quickly, and when they are selling, it’s typically far above the asking prices, close to 30% over asking on average. That is up about 16% from the same time last year. Supply and demand, that’s definitely the refrain here. Properties are also getting into contract faster, and we are seeing properties that were languishing on the market a bit finally going into contract as well.

There is so much going on in the news these days, and AI is pretty much front and center in all arenas: housing, finance, job markets, existential dread, etc. San Francisco is the epicenter of all of this, and that makes for a very exciting and fast-paced, ever-changing world. This can be a great thing or a scary thing depending on your perspective, or perhaps both at the same time. No one really knows where all of this will take us, but for now it is definitely having an effect on most people’s daily lives.

I use Claude and ChatGPT to double-check things and to help make out esoteric and difficult-to-read recorded documents in preliminary title reports. There are many areas where this technology can be incredibly helpful, but I would like to caution people against taking the information a Large Language Model (LLM) like Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT, spits out confidently as the gospel. I see too many people doing this because, although these models seem like they have all the knowledge and can put it all together, they cannot and they do not.

The other day, a client of mine was told by ChatGPT how they could condo-convert a TIC in a 5-unit building. That’s not possible because the lottery to do so has been discontinued for the time being, and perhaps forever. When challenged on this information the response was that it was not looking at enough information and was only going off of its training data. Apologies!

That’s just one example. When I read the recent article in the New York Times about how a journalist sold his house using a chatbot, I was struck by how much was left out of the process, or at least not attributed to the fact that he was selling in an attorney state, unlike California, which is an escrow state. There was no mention of assembling the documentation and disclosures needed for the transaction. I was also interested to hear that the contract was just a page long, definitely not the case here in San Francisco! Our San Francisco Association of Realtors contract is 9 pages, and the California Association of Realtors Purchase Agreement, which is used in Marin County, is a whopping 17 pages.

There is a lot of nuance to negotiations and to ferrying a real estate transaction from start to finish. Many things can and do go wrong, and sometimes they don’t. I’m quite sure that a chatbot would not “know” how to handle many of the delicate human emotional situations that come up. For now I’ll stick with highly skilled humans, and I suggest you do the same–and not just because I have a personal self-preservation interest in this situation–but if you don’t know how it’s supposed to work and what the rules are, you can have just enough information to be dangerous and get yourself in trouble.

Speaking of AI, it is worth noting that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Databricks, all San Francisco companies, are all eyeing public listings in the next year or two at valuations in the hundreds of billions to near a trillion dollars each. That is an enormous amount of new wealth being created right here in our backyard, and a lot of those newly liquid employees are going to be looking at real estate. Stay tuned, it’s going to be interesting!

So yes, it’s multifaceted–just don’t forget to think for yourself and double-check everything with a true human professional. We aren’t there yet: Someday perhaps, but not today.

Now, for the Glen Park Transactions/Listings for the month of May:

Here’s a look at what sold in the month of May–