San Francisco Home Listings Preliminary

I’ve just compiled a rough draft data set of all Bay Area home listings. The data set isn’t refined enough to release quite yet, but I thought I’d share some images taken from Google Earth after I imported it. As of April 13, 2006, there were over 27,000 homes listed for sale in the Bay Area, with 20,106 listed as "Active Listings" and 7,529 as "Pending Sales". In the following images, the pending sales are the red dots, and the active listings are white. Each dot represents one property (house, condo, land) offered for sale in the Bay Area. The first image illustrates the impact Bay Area investors have had on the regional market. Notice the tendrils of speculation that spread out along the highways into the Central Valley, up to Sacramento, down to Monterey, and up into the foothills of the Sierras. The Monterey and Salinas home markets are way too small to survive on native demand. There are over 750 active, and 150 pending listings for Salinas in the Bay Area listing service. That ratio of 1:160 listings per person, in a city of roughly 150,000 people, mirrors the one in San Diego. Santa Cruz and Watsonville are close enough to San Jose to almost be considered suburbs. I’m not sure about commuting over 17, though. Here’s what 25,000+ home listings look like in a region with roughly 6,000,000 people: I’m going to let the rest of these speak for themselves. Once I refine the data set, I’ll post it here. Max