As I took our snapshot of the Berkeley real estate market this month I saw some decrease in median price of the active listings, but a substantial decrease in the sold prices from June to July of this year. Overbidding continues on the most desirable homes, taking the median sold price 5.5% over the median list price for single family homes. Distressed properties now make up a surprisingly high percentage of the active single family homes at 23%.

Homes for sale in Berkeley CA as of August 12, 2010*

• 104 single family detached homes for sale in Berkeley CA or homes for sale in 94701 – 94710 are on the market
  • Median list price in Berkeley is currently $625,000 for detached homes for sale, down from $649,000 last month.
  • Prices range from $250,000 to $6,495,000 (the Spring Mansion) for detached homes for sale in Berkeley CA 
• Average days on market for detached homes for sale in Berkeley CA is 45 days
• Distressed properties (Potential Short Sales and REOs) represent 23% of the single family homes currently for sale in Berkeley CA:
  • 11 properties are Potential Short Sales
  • 13 properties are REOs (Real Estate Owned by banks)

• 52 attached (condos, townhomes, duets) homes for sale in Berkeley CA
  • Median home price in Berkeley is currently $427,000 for attached homes for sale
  • Prices range from $189,000 to $764,000 for attached homes for sale in Berkeley CA
  • Average days on market for detached homes for sale in Berkeley CA is 80 days
  • Only two attached properties are currently distressed properties, 1 potential Short Sale and 1 REO.

Homes that sold in July 2010 in Berkeley CA

• 49 single family detached homes for sale in Berkeley CA sold in July 2010, compared with 60 homes sold in June 2010.
  • Median home price in Berkeley was $685,000 for detached homes that sold, compared to $780,000 median sold price in June. In both months the median sold prices were in excess of the median list price by more than 5%.
  • Prices ranged from $266,500 to $1,999,500 for detached homes that sold
  • Average days on market was 24 days for the detached homes that sold in July 2010

• 6 attached (condos, townhomes, duets) homes for sale in Berkeley CA sold in July 2010, compared with 8 attached homes sold in June 2010.
  • Median home price in Berkeley was $377,500 for attached homes that sold, compared to $384,000 median sold price in June. In both months the median sold prices were below the median list price by more about 2%.
  • Prices ranged from $242,000 to $520,000 for attached homes that sold.
  • Average days on market was 24 days for the attached homes that sold in July 2010.

Please feel free to contact me for any specific information about sales in the Berkeley, CA area!

Saturday the 17th, there’s an Alameda Green Home Expo taking place at the Alameda Town Centre. The expo is free, and starts at 10 am, with talks on a number of great topics. I am honored to be included, and will be speaking on “Busting Green Home Myths.” My talk is scheduled for 11:45 (or so).

The Green Home Expo will showcase the latest environmentally friendly products, services, and technology used in the homebuilding and home improvement industries. There’s an impressive list of nearly 50 vendors, including contractors, landscape designers and architects, plus vendors who sell organic food and plants, children’s toys and clothing and furniture. And it will host speakers who will talk about green landscaping, building and home restoration, and lowering energy costs.

For Berkeley residents the timing is ideal, as it coincides with the short window of opportunity to apply for Money for Energy Efficiency (ME2) grants. Next Tuesday, July 20th, is the deadline to get your address included in a lottery for up to $8500 in grants from the City and PG&E. For more information, visit my blog: GreenBungalows.info
 
As always, I’d be delighted to give speak with you about these and any other topics about your home, the market, green improvements — or just to catch up! Hope to see you at the Green Home Expo!

The City of Berkeley opened the application period for its Energy Efficiency grants, not with a bang but a whimper this past Tuesday morning. If you are considering making improvements in your home to make it less drafty and a more consistent temperature, and to lower your energy costs, there’s a small window of opportunity to get some help from the City. My home is the poster child for a home needing such improvements. Lovely as it is, my home has single pane windows that have gaps around them, an ancient octopus furnace, old water heater and insufficient insulation.

So on July 6th, the first day to apply for an ME2 grant, I was up early for a change, to be sure to apply as soon after 8 am as possible. To make a rather long and frustrating story short, their website was not ready for prime time, but is supposed to be fixed now. If you apply and have problems, be neither surprised nor discouraged!

Berkeley homeowners have until July 20th to make a reservation, and then request the application form on-line. That will enter their address into a lottery for award of the limited grant funds. The “standard” award  per single family home would be $1400: $200 credit towards an energy audit, and $1200 for attic insulation to R38, basic air and duct sealing. The maximum award is $5,000, and that requires substantial measures be taken to reduce your energy consumption by more than 40% from current levels. The maximum awards will go to homes that have also insulated walls and floors, upgraded heating systems and replaced windows with multi-paned glass. If all awardees of the grants used the maximum amount of $5K, only 120 homes could participate in the program. It is likely that applicants will reserve more than they actually qualify for, in which case there might be money released later to homes on the wait list.

Money for Energy Efficiency is funded through a million dollar federal stimulus grant awarded to the City of Berkeley by the U.S. Department of Energy. For all of the details (and there are many!) visit the City of Berkeley Energy Efficiency site.

Homeowners will need to be willing to share the results of the initial energy audit to the City, as well as demographic information about your property. If energy upgrades are performed a Post-Improvement Energy Assessment Report shall also be provided to the City. Applicants need to consider whether the grant amount is sufficient to compensate for a certain Big Brother aspect.

To learn more, visit the ME2 program webpage.

Finally there may be Money for Energy Efficiency (ME2) in Berkeley!

Federal stimulus funding will be available for whole-house energy retrofit programs, beginning July 6th. The City of Berkeley will be coordinating cash incentives to increase the energy efficiency of your home, apartment building or business. Funding is provided by the US Dept. of Energy and is available for all types of buildings and income levels! Energy retrofits help you save money, improve building comfort, safety and durability as well as reduce your carbon footprint!

Rebates:
·         Up to $8,500 for single-family & duplex homes (including rebates through PG&E)
·         Up to $30,000 for commercial & multifamily properties
 
The City is holding two public workshops so homeowners can learn how you can qualify for this funding!

North Berkeley Senior Center
Tuesday June 15th 6-8pm
1901 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley CA 94709

South Berkeley Senior Center
Thursday June 17th 6-8pm
2939 Ellis Street, Berkeley CA 94703

Funding exists for grants for only 120 single family home and duplexes, so a lottery will be held to determine who will be given the early applications. It will be fascinating to see if,  like the earlier solar program, all those spaces disappear in a heartbeat! The City of Berkeley is still updating their information about the energy efficiency grants. Check out the current information, and be ready to pounce on the 6th of July if you are serious about making energy improvements to your home. It’s a shame that those of us who care deeply about making these improvements in our older, drafty but charming Berkeley homes must be in such tight competition for such limited resources. I’ll be seeing you in the queue on the 6th!

New Rockridge homeowners

Rockridge is one of Oakland, CA’s most popular neighborhoods, both for home buyers and for visitors. The many eclectic shops, first-rate restaurants, bookstores and cafes make it a destination, and on weekends College Avenue is buzzing with activity. The BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station is right across the street from two culinary destinations. Oliveto’s has won numerous awards for its locally-sourced California cuisine with a Mediterranean accent. Below the restaurant is a very popular cafe, surrounded by the Market Hall, an epicurean garden of delights. There you can find the full range from a morning pastry and latte, to all of the finest ingredients for the feast you will prepare: fresh pasta, organic produce, cheeses from around the world, locally-sourced fish or meat. . .the choices are dizzying as are some of the prices. Excellent quality is the standard, and the market is a feast for all the senses. A wonderful flower market adds to the ambience with a tapestry of colors. For those who are more than a BART ride away, you still can enjoy some of the pleasures of the Market Hall through the mail. Across the street is a less expensive but still high-quality and very popular choice, Cactus Taqueria. This is a family-friendly home of burritos, tacos and home-made agua frescas.

All of these urban amenities create the kind of buzz, or high latte factor or walkscore that clients like my latest couple want, and are willing to pay for. My buyers are a classic example of that profile: young professionals who are used to life in a major metropolitan area and want to be able to walk to a cafe, grab a latte and take public transit to work. In the evening or on weekends they want to leave their cars behind and walk to a restaurant, or just soak up the experience. Rockridge also boasts an especially nice, recently constructed library that serves as a community hub.

Wainscoting with Bradbury & Bradbury wallpapers

Long before College Avenue in Oakland was brimming with the latest shops and restaurants, it was a neighborhood known for the consistency of Arts & Crafts architecture. The styles of this movement are my passion, and that passion is shared by many buyers who want to make a bungalow their home. These homes are characterized by classic floor plans including a living room with a fireplace bracketed by bookcases below, and windows, often with leaded or colored glass above. Formal dining rooms are essential and many include a built-in buffet, often with leaded or beveled glass, box beams in the ceilings and wainscoting on the walls. The most desirable of examples will have unpainted wood and often the frieze area above the wainscoting will feature a stenciled pattern or a wallpaper frieze. The most common floor plan features a hallway off the dining room from which you access the two bedrooms with a bathroom in the middle. In the larger or remodeled versions there may be a stairwell to access more bedrooms upstairs. Many of the homes in Rockridge now have updated kitchens and baths that combine modern expectations with period aesthetics.

My clients were fortunate to purchase a wonderful brown shingled bungalow with an especially inviting broad porch that runs the width of the home. When I pulled up to their new home yesterday I noticed their neighbor sitting on his porch, and I suspect my clients will be spending many happy hours porch sitting, and watching the neighbors walk by!

In addition to the work of the JoinThePipe.org ladies, I want to share with you a video from Annie Leonard, a member and ally of our local Ecology Center. She stars in yet another great web video, which tells the fast-paced, fact-filled story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. The film explores the bottled water industry’s attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. These pictures are truly worth a thousand words, and I hope will save many thousands of water bottles:

Happy Mothers’ Day to all who are mothers!  To all who are nurturers, to all who help people, animals and plants grow and thrive!

I’ve been thinking lately a lot about water. We recently spent a weekend on Catalina, a delightful island off Southern California with some wonderful historic aspects, especially art tile. Being a small island, you must get there by crossing the water by boat of some sort, and we like most arrived by ferry, spending an hour being jostled by the waves and surrounded in every direction by water. It accentuated the sense of going on an excursion. Palm trees laden with dates, birds-of-paradise, bougainvillea and hibiscus colored the landscape in exotic, warm colors. It almost felt as if we’d ventured to a foreign country, and stepped back in time.

In most ways that stepping back in time was part of the fun: we were there for a Scottish country dance event held in the fabulous Art Deco Casino, and many of the women wore outfits appropriate for the 1920’s and -30’s. But I felt like I’d also stepped back in terms of regressing, ecologically speaking. I was coming from Berkeley, where for all our City’s faults, we long ago outlawed styrofoam cups, and were early adopters of recycling City-wide. At our first social event that weekend I was confronted first with a table full of plastic water bottles, and then a styrofoam cup for my tea.  When it came time to dispense with my cup, I found a garbage can full of bottles and cans, as well as paper plates and those damn styrofoam cups. When I asked a staff member if they recycled, he asked incredulously “Here? On the island?”

Island life represents special challenges. But the group as a whole seemed unconcerned about consuming water from plastic bottles, even though we’ve all heard the horror stories, and some have seen first hand how water bottles pollute so many waters, end up in land fill, and require such an investment of oil to produce. An estimated 1.5 million gallons of oil each year — enough to fuel 100,000 cars for that year – are used to produce an ever-growing demand for plastic water bottles. And 90% of those bottles will not be recycled.  Bottled water costs up to 10,000 times as much as tap water, while tap water, controlled by the EPA, is held to a higher standard than bottled water, which is controlled by the FDA. I know in some areas the tap water doesn’t taste so great, and that may have been the case on the island. But simple tap filters or filter bottles can solve that problem. You also can buy water bottles that include filters.

I was fascinated to find that a Sustainability Engineer, Pablo Paster, MBA, has recently gone through the exercise of calculating the resources required to import a one liter bottle of Fiji water to the US. He calculated a remarkable 6.74 liters of water required to produce 1 liter to drink here, plus other associated resource costs. You can read about his study from the linked blog.

I’m giving a special Mothers’ Day thank you to a pair of women in Amsterdam who have taken on a mighty challenge to us all, and have formed a website called JoinThePipe.org  Their mission is ambitious, but has already had considerable success: “We are a community of tap water drinkers with a dream……to build the longest pipeline in the world, long enough to bring drinking water to everyone without it.” They involved a few friends and family, then media and a few companies, and combined social media with a physical object, to promote their message and begin building pumps and water treatment in Asian and Africa. They developed not a shiny object, but a different kind of water bottle that both carries tap water and a message. reusable water bottle that users can link with friends, to make the “longest pipe in the world.”  The pipe bottles and carafes symbolize bringing clean water to any area where people are suffering and dying for that which other parts of the world have in excess. A video and image of the longest pipe and more details on how JoinThePipe grows the pipeline can be found on their site JoinThePipe.org. Sales of those bottles in Benelux, through sponsorhip of Aveda, have started their pipeline. I urge you to watch their short, and inspiring video.

JoinThePipe to make clean, safe tap water accessible to all.

Next, there were the showers. . . stay tuned for my next water rant!

We had such a successful recycling event for Earth Day that it made me consider ways to inspire our community on a regular basis to take the many small steps possible to reduce, reuse and recycle. Perhaps this too cute pug can be an inspiration. If a pug can do it, so can we all!

One of the reasons I donate my time to various non-profit groups is for the opportunity to work together with a group of colleagues on projects that are meaningful to our community. On Friday I got to experience the pure pleasure of those efforts seeing a successful result.

As our Earth Day acknowledgement I organized a free electronics recylcing day at the Berkeley Association of REALTORS on behalf of the GREEN Council of REALTORS that I chair. Those of you who stopped by on Friday to drop of some of your old electronics equipment saw what a great success we had! By noon we had covered the tops of eight conference tables with all manner of no longer-loved items. By 2:30 when the fellows came to start packing it up the room was brimming. Those strong fellows from the Alameda County Computer Resource Center worked extremely hard for more than two hours to sort and load all that we’d collected, and in the end we nearly filled a 24′ truck! Approximately 60 folks made donations, and were given one of our Green Bags as a thank you. People were surprised and pleased to be given the bags, and it was overall a great “feel good” event. So many people left saying: “it feels great to get rid of this stuff!”

 We know that some people had been storing items for years. To get such a good response next year we will need to advertise broadly, and well in advance. But given how smoothly this event went, we are excited about making it our annual Earth Day activity! If you missed out this year, we’ll be happy to accept your items next year!

Don’t want to wait that long? The good folks at the ACCRC are located at 620 Page Street, and are open each weekday to receive your offerings of electronics and small appliances.

As Chair of the GREEN Council of the Berkeley Association of REALTORS, I am pleased to have succeeded in organizing a recycling event for our members, clients, friends and our extended community. We will be accepting used, broken, out-of-date and otherwise unloved electronics equipment this Friday, April 23rd from 10 – 3 as our way of acknowledging EARTH DAY! Here’s a flyer with further details.

Come by from 10 – 12 and I’ll personally say Hi! and give you one of the GREEN Council’s special Eco-Bags, with outlet & switch gaskets, a bio bag, CFL and lots of good info for further greening of your home and your life!