"The Bay Area appears to be shaking off the nation's housing doldrums."

"Local home prices are still going through the roof, even though far fewer properties are changing hands. That contradicts the national real estate trend of slumps in both price and sales volume."

"Why does the region's housing seem to defy gravity?"

"It's the wealth effect."

"The Bay Area is one of the strongest economies in the country today," said Ken Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at UC Berkeley. "The upper end of the market in the inner areas (San Francisco and the counties closest to it) is doing extremely well. This is a completely different trend than the rest of the country."

Read Carolyn's entire article from today's San Francisco Chronicle HERE.

"DataQuick's county breakdowns show that existing-home prices rose in April in the six innermost Bay Area counties -- Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara, San Francisco and San Mateo -- but declined in the area's furthest-out counties: Napa, Solano and Sonoma."

For a complete breakdown by county, view the full story from DataQuick.

Labels: Bay Area Real Estate, Continuing Study of the California Economy, Housing Inventory, Real Estate Cycles, San Francisco Chronicle