We've been diluged with negative news about the state of the residential housing market lately. From sub-prime and Alt-A lending to foreclosures and tighter lending practices which might cause mortgage rates to rise, the state of the market is creating lots of questions. What's a person to think? Is this a good time to buy or sell your home? In our Real Estate News "blog" we will report what we are observing throughout the city. Some of our comments will be anecdotal, others based on statistic information but we will give you our insights in an unbiased way. Let's start with statistics. In the first half of 2007 the number of sales fell while the average sales price increased. In other words, there are more buyers than sellers in the market. Of the ten "districts" that Realtors carve San Francisco into, four (3,4,5,9) saw new all-time highs of single family home (SFD) sales prices and four (1,5,6,7) saw all-time highs for condominiums--TICs were not included in this statistic. Specifically, the number of SFD sales dropped 13% to 1,134 while the average sales price climbed 8% to $1,215,491. The number of condos sold dropped 5% and the average price rose to $888,841 (again, TICs were not included). We don't know how the gloomy real estate news--and subsequent stock market swings and Federal Reserve short term interest rate implications--is going to play out but we'll report frequently our real-time view of the events when they happen so you can make better decisions. Thanks to Aldo Congi and Malcolm Kaufman for compiling the San Francisco Association of Realtors statistics.