If, for the past year, you've procrastinated about buying a home in Silicon Valley, waiting has just ripped a hole in your wallet the size of $58,800.

In one month, single-family home prices jumped more than 10 percent— from $566,200 in February to a new record $625,000 in March, according to Richard Calhoun, owner/broker of Creekside Realty in San Jose.

Calhoun is a board member of the area's multiple listing service, RE InfoLink in Campbell. Calhoun tracks and crunches the data supplied by the service.

The double-digit jump comes suddenly on the heels of San Jose experiencing some of the slowest-growing home values in the nation in recent years.

Last month, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's quarterly "Western Economic Developments" reported that, in terms of home-price appreciation last year, the San Jose metropolitan area ranked two spots from dead last— 218th in 220 metropolitan areas.

That slow pace of appreciation may have lulled some homebuyers into a false sense of security that prices would remain low or even drop. For them, that was a losing bet.

The reserve bank report did not give the specific rate of appreciation, but oh, what a difference a year makes. Real estate agents say the current market's sizzling rate of appreciation could be just the beginning.

Sales are as hot as prices. The number of homes sold in March stood at 1,440, near the 2-year-old record of 1,470 homes sold in May of 2002, says Calhoun, who publishes his findings in the Bay Area Real Estate Market Newsletter.

Low interest rates, move-up buyers tapped out on capital gains tax exclusions and pent-up seasonal buying have combined to generate so much demand that the sales-price-to-list-price ratio moved up to 100.8 percent, which means the average sales price is 0.8 percent more than the asking price.

Also, with limited inventories, homes selling like hotcakes are on the market for a median of only 11 days before they are turned over to new owners.

"There is no question that the real estate market is appreciating significantly for the first time in four years," said Calhoun. "Remember, the median price in April 2000 was $560,000, and for February 2004 it was only $566,200 (moving only about 1.1 percent in three years). Now, in just under one month it jumped to $625,000," he added.

It's an expensive wake-up call for procrastinating buyers.

"It's about the cost of waiting," said independent real estate broker Janet Houde of San Jose, president of the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors.

Real estate writer Broderick Perkins, executive editor of San Jose-based DeadlineNews.Com, writes regularly for
Los Gatos Weekly-Times.