After writing my recent short piece on Sacramento’s Fabulous Forties, I began to wonder how a really desirable area like that would fare compared to what’s around it. In part, my interest was sparked by a discussion with a client about a different area, Arden Arcade, where the price differences between the available luxury homes and the rest of the environment is quite similar to East Sacramento. I’ll have more on that in a later article.

I should point out that what I’m about to show here — the “high end victorious” — is not a universal for all markets. For instance, in many of the updates I’ve done in Placer County, the showcase community of Granite Bay was often the one with the most drastic price reductions and the highest inventory.

The numbers for the fabulous forties tell a very different story from Granite Bay. In this case, the Fab Forties are a sort of time machine — an island, if you will, in the midst of East Sacramento — that seems more or less immune to the downturn around it. To get enough activity to make any kind of comparison worthwhile, I studied the whole years 2005 and 2006 for both: 1) The fabulous forties alone, 2) All of East Sacramento (95819), including the fabulous forties.

For all the metrics, the fab 40s did very well compared to East Sacramento as a whole. While East Sac’s average sold price dropped 2.1% and the average sold price per square foot dropped 1% during this period, in the forties the sold price average increased by 12.7% and the sold price per square foot increased 7.7%. Similarly, while the median price dropped 3.4% in East Sacramento from 2005 to 2006, the median price in the fab forties increased 16.1%.

But what about units sold? Yes, there too, the forties won out. The fab forties experienced a 10.3% increase, from 29 to 32 units, while East Sac as a whole saw a 2.2% decrease, from 276 units to 270. Average days on market did increase by 25.5% during the period for the fabulous forties, but compared to East Sac’s increase of 56.3% this bump was nothing to get excited about.

To be sure, when we start talking about a small area like the fab forties, it’s possible that the numbers suffer somewhat from the size of the sample. 270 sold homes gives you a lot more stastical significance than 32, for example. Nevertheless, given the clear victory in every category and the fact that we didn’t even factor out the fab forties in our East Sac results (which would have magnified the difference), I think we might comment in New York fashion that the Fabulous Forties are indeed fabulous “not for nothing.” I’m really starting to love that area. One of these spring days if things slow down a bit I may try to do a photo tour.

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