By Maura Webber Sadovi
Special to The Wall Street Journal Online

Beyond San Francisco's tourist-friendly Fisherman's Wharf, iconic cable cars and hilly streets, lies a housing market that is not for the faint of heart. At the height of the dot-com boom, the city's housing market was notorious for aggressive bidding wars and eager buyers offering cash to scoop up properties. While those days may be over, prices remain among the strongest in the country. Median home prices in San Francisco County rose 12% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier to $820,482, nearly four times the national median of $213,000.

This three-bedroom, two-bath San Francisco home is on the market for $849,000.

The cachet of San Francisco has helped keep prices scorchingly high even as the Bay Area's economy struggles to recover from the tech-bust. Job levels are on the rise in the Bay Area, which includes San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties, but in February they were still about 12% below their previous peak in 2001, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There are signs that the housing market in San Francisco County is cooling. The time it takes to sell properties rose in the fourth quarter and Robert Kleinhenz, an economist at the California Association of Realtors, said he expects the rate of appreciation in the county to slow to about 5-10% in 2006 from the double-digit pace of recent years. Still, brokers say the change is a matter of degrees, not a drastic shift. "Last year, I would have had 12 offers on a property and instead this year I only had four," says Marilyn Saner of Zephyr Real Estate in San Francisco. "It's still a good market."

San Francisco Market Snapshot

	4th Quarter 2005		4th Quarter 2004
Median Home Price	$820,482		$735,862
Change in Sales From Year Earlier	2.2%		-2.5%
Median Days on Market	28.5		25.1
Average Apartment Rent*	$1,667.13		$1,617.29
Apartment Vacancy Rate*	4.9%		5.8%

*Apt. information is for San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties; all other information is for San Francisco County only.

Sources: California Association of Realtors, Property & Portfolio Research, Inc.

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