OAKLAND — The laws of supply and demand have caught up to Bushrod, the north Oakland neighborhood west of Rockridge and northwest of Temescal, now considered the hottest real estate market in the country.

The real estate firm Redfin, in its annual analysis of data gleaned from its website, rated Bushrod the hottest market in the country based on traffic to its website by potential home buyers.

“North Oakland in general is pretty hot,” said Ben Brunetti, whose company, Urban Homestead, refurbishes and builds houses throughout the city.

Bushrod is centered around Shattuck Avenue from a few blocks below Ashby Avenue on the north to the west side of Highway 24 below the 51st Street exit at its southern extremity, and from Telegraph Avenue on the east to Martin Luther King Jr. Way on the west.

Temescal and Rockridge historically are pricier and haven’t had enough houses for sale to meet demand, Redfin Realtor Tom Hendershot said in an interview.

Buyers are seeing that they can get “a little more for the money and still have basically the same services” that nearby Temescal offers, Hendershot said. He cited its proximity to freeway onramps and the Ashby and MacArthur BART stations as two important reasons.

“What’s driving it is the lack of inventory. Tech jobs, too, are overwhelmingly one of the reasons. People are flush with cash. In bidding wars, people with the most money win,” Brunetti said.

“Oakland’s become a hip place over the last number of years,” he continued, noting Temescal’s trendy restaurants such as Pizzaiolo, Burma Star and Bakesale Betty’s and the shops of Temescal Alley.

“There’s a joke in this part of town that it’s closer to San Francisco than San Francisco is,” Hendershot said, noting that it only takes 20 minutes to get to downtown San Francisco on BART.

Oakland in general has been a hot real estate market for years, in large part because of a dearth of properties available for sale, which drives up prices.

Bushrod’s housing stock — typically three-bedroom, one-bathroom, 1,250-square-foot bungalows — have been drawing young tech workers who are starting families and have outgrown their San Francisco condos, Hendershot said.

Sellers tend to be cashing in after holding properties a few years and are moving out of the region, he said.

The median price in Bushrod last year was $817,000. Redfin’s website currently is showing seven properties, ranging in price from $549,000 to $1.2 million. Homes typically sold in about two weeks at 115 percent of the listing price, it reports.

“When we bought our house in 1984, this was a black, working-class neighborhood,” said Leah Fortin, who has lived in Bushrod for decades and seen its demographics and character change over the years.

“There’s so many babies on the block, you wouldn’t believe it. And that’s not counting kids,” Fortin said at her family home on 62nd off Telegraph.

It is a far cry from when future major league baseball players Rickey Henderson, Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson, and A’s manager Billy Martin before them, honed their skills on the ballfields at Bushrod Park as youngsters. Their painted images adorn the recreation center there, next to a Jehovah’s Witness property on the corner of Racine Street at 59th Street.

Fortin’s girls attended Peralta Elementary, a well-regarded arts school on the other side of Telegraph, where “there were just a handful of white kids at the time,” she said. Nowadays, she added, all the families she sees going there are white.

Brunetti put $80,000 into a home he bought for $311,000 in 2009 in the Santa Fe neighborhood, just across Martin Luther King Jr. Way from Bushrod’s western border.

Last year, he sold that house for $950,000 and moved to Berkeley.

Fortin paid $50,000 for her house during the height of the crack epidemic. “When we moved here, it was incredibly affordable, partly because crime was so bad,” she said.

But crime has not been much of a concern in her more than 30 years there, she said. “What I’ve noticed as a trend is that as it gets popular and more affluent people move in, crime goes up, because there is more to steal.”

Still, she’s never feared for her safety. “I’m so used to living in Oakland,” she said. “I think about it, but I’m cautious.”

Fortin wistfully regretted that in all their years in the neighborhood, she had never been able to convince her carpenter husband to take on a fixer-upper as an investment.

Contact Mark Hedin at 510-293-2452, 408-759-2132 or mhedin@bayareanewsgroup.com.