Finally, four days into the month, I’ve make it past the devil-may-care tomfoolery of my award winning April Fools humor, and I’m on my way to posting those words that are loved by thrill seekers everywhere — market statistics. Yes, chart fans, it’s time to put on your glazed expression for this month’s Sacramento County market update.

Prices are down. Unit volume is down. The expired to sold ratio is up. Days on market are up.

But, as always, let’s flesh it out a little more.

Based on data from the Sacramento Metrolist MLS, the average home sold in Sacramento County in March of 2007 for $379,016, down 5.0% from March of 2007. Since buyers took advantage of the price savings to select homes that were slightly larger, sold price per square foot dropped more rapidly, 7.7%, from $247.89 last March on average to $230.26 this year on average.   The median sale price drop split the difference, as it were, at 6.8%.  This year’s median price was $340,000 compared to last year’s median of $365,000.  The expired to sold ratio went up from 44.8% last March, to 68.8% this March.

Inventory is in “buyer’s market” territory, but not alarmingly so, at 7.7 months.

One of these days I really have to get some meat into the charts for Sacramento County, as I’ve done elsewhere for Amador County. Simply tallying up the numbers month to month is getting less and less helpful, I suspect, since the more interesting question is something like when prices were last at this point, and how the average rate of decline over the last twenty months or so compares to the average rate of growth for the sixty months prior to that.

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