January’s Placer County real estate market numbers show prices continuing to drop, albeit at a somewhat slower pace than we’ve seen earlier for Placer County. From January 2006 to January 2007, the average sale price dropped from $526,087 to $509,030, nominally a 3.2% decline. However, this year’s buyers found their dollars buying more as well, so the average square footage rose 7.2%, from 2038 to 2185 square feet. As a result, the average cost per square foot showed a much higher decline of 9.8%, from $265.01 in January of 2006 to $232.97 in January of 2007. Meantime the median sale price declined 5.6%, from $450,000 in January of ’06 to $425,000 in January of ’07.

Days on market increased but not by much, from 61 on average to 71. The expired to sold ratio also didn’t change dramatically, rising from 91.4% last January to 99.5% this January. What we’re starting to see is that we’re comparing the buyer’s market now to the buyer’s market of a year ago, so some of the indicators haven’t moved as dramatically as they did when we first started comparing them.

Inventory is moderate at 6.8 months. By the way, I’ve changed how I calculate inventory from my earlier method of comparing current actives to last month’s sales, and now compare it to the average of the last 12 months, which probably paints a more realistic picture given seasonal fluctuations.

More nerd fun: I want to thank Google for their Docs and Spreadsheets software. Rather than shell out for another copy of Office for the laptop, I thought I’d see if I could get by with Google’s free stuff while on the road. Naturally it’s a bit slower than an application running on the desktop, especially on updates, but it’s serviceable for the everyday uses I have planned for it.

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