There are several prerequisites for Berkeley home buyers to be able to take advantage of the new First Time Home Buyer Extended Tax Credit.
Income
First time (or move up) buyer status
Home Purchase Price – It must be $800,000 or below.
I wondered how many of the Berkeley homes which have sold year-to-date in 2009 would have met the price criteria.
So, unleashing my inner engineer, and love of graphs and charts, I set out to find the answer.
I resized the chart and table to fit the blog post – just click the following to view them full size
This is great news if you’re searching the MLS and plan to buy a house in Berkeley!
Almost every 2 bedroom home, and 2/3 of the 3 bedroom homes which met the $800,000 price limit.
The program is designed to help folks looking at less expensive homes, so if you’ve been looking for a 4 or 5 bedroom home in Berkeley – then the first time/move up home buyer program doesn’t really have much for you.
The graph is particularly interesting – I organized the sales prices by bedroom, and simply sorted each bedroom price from low to high – the horizontal line shows the $800,000 price point.
As is usually the case, about 80% of houses sold in Berkeley were 2 or 3 bedrooms. That’s one of the reasons that 4 and 5 bedroom homes sell at a premium – there aren’t many of them.
Berkeley home sales price data came from the East Bay Regional MLS, which includes only MLS sales and not every transaction. I searched for Berkeley single family home sales which have closed escrow between 1 Jan 2009 and 7 Nov 2009… and then used Numbers on my Mac Book Pro to create the charts and graphs.
Have questions? Call me Toll Free 800-887-6668 or email se****@be***********.com
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