buyers are back, kind of.

Mortgage rates kicked off the year with a bit of an identity crisis. After years of refusing to budge, they finally dipped below 6% and buyers rejoiced. Hope! Optimism! Relief! Finally! Everyone sitting on the sidelines was suddenly back in the game.

And then, almost immediately, nevermind.

In the last month, geopolitical drama hit, rates shot back up, and that little window of optimism started closing as quickly as it opened. Add in shrinking stocks and the fact that there are still barely any homes for sale, and now we have a spring market that feels a little… off?

Meanwhile, SF is on another planet entirely. Rents are up about 14% year over year, single-family home prices have jumped around 23%, and buyers are back to getting a little unhinged with their offers (like 9 offers and $400k over asking for a condo with EIGHT flights of stairs??!). The confidence of AI money is truly unmatched.

The market isn’t just what it is, it’s what people believe it is. If you think all this chaos (political or otherwise) settles down soon, this is your window. Uncertainty keeps people on the sidelines, which means less competition and more room to negotiate. If things stabilize, then rates ease and suddenly everyone’s back in at once, competing for the same three homes. But if your gut says this is just the beginning, sitting it out might make more sense.

Prices, rates, inventory are all very real. But urgency, fear, confidence, fomo are what actually make people move. Or not at all.

dream home = total nightmare

Not really news, more like a cautionary tale.

A family in North Beach thought they hit the jackpot: a 3,700 sq ft home with five bedrooms, amazing views, and walking distance to the best pizzas and pastas in town. For the very reasonable price of $4,858,490, they finally found their forever home.

Then the city said, aaaaactually…..

Turns out the house used to be a four-unit apartment building, and a previous owner converted it into a single-family home without fully getting the permits signed off. And in SF, removing housing units is basically sacrilege. (To be fair, this was all disclosed when they bought the house. They just didn’t expect what came next.)

Now the city says those four units may need to come back. As in: kitchens where the kids’ bedrooms are now, separate entrances carved out of walls, and all the fancy renovations potentially reversed. A process that could take years, cost millions, and turn that dream home into something entirely different.

The current owners have spent years appealing the decision, arguing they didn’t create the mess, they just bought the house. Tenant advocates say the lost units should be restored because SF needs all the housing it can get. So now the fate of their “single-family home” will probably end up in the hands of the Board of Supervisors.

Moral of the story: disclosures are not the optional reading you skim once you’ve mentally moved in. Actually read them. Do your due diligence. Because sometimes that dream home you buy… used to be four.

a house, with a side of social life

There’s a house for sale in Oakland right now that is technically a property, but in practice, more like a social experiment turned accidental utopia.

Radish is basically what happens when a group of friends asks, “what if we just lived together?” but then actually follows through. Not roommates. Not a duplex. A full-on compound with multiple homes, shared spaces, a big yard, hot tub, sauna, communal kitchen… basically, a tiny village.

Over the years, they’ve hosted six weddings, birthed eight kids, and shared more than 2,000 meals together. And somehow, they still like each other. Which feels like the real miracle here.

At first, even the people who moved in thought it sounded a little cult-adjacent. But the pitch wasn’t really about saving money or squeezing into a tiny space. It was about designing your life around community on purpose. Built-in friends. Built-in childcare. Built-in neighbors who are always down to hang out, no texting into the void required.

And now, they’re selling it. Because life got bigger. Kids, families, shifting needs, all the things. The original vision they had couldn’t keep up with their lives, so they’re moving on to create the next one. The price tag is somewhere between $4M and $6M, and the buyer they’re looking for isn’t a typical family. It’s another group of people who like each other enough to try the same thing.

And apparently this isn’t just an Oakland thing. On the other side of the globe, a group of 26 women in London spent two decades building their own cohousing community. Their only rule: no husbands, brothers, or sons allowed. Draw your own conclusions.

If the future of housing ends up looking a little more like intentional communities and a little less like everyone aging alone in separate boxes, that might not be the worst thing in the world. But no need to sell me on this, they already had me at “built-in childcare.”