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28 Dec

Sacramento’s Pocket Area Real Estate Update

Posted December 28th, 2007 | View Comments

The Sacramento MLS, Metrolist, lists the name of the 95831 zip code as “Sacramento South Land Park Greenhaven”, but one look at the map, and Sacramento area residents will immediately recognize that bulge of land around that they call “the Pocket Area”.

The numbers for November show a neighborhood that’s doing relatively well for Sacramento County, with homes retaining more of their value than other areas, and much better figures for inventory and unit volume as well.

Sold price per square foot declined only 6.1% from November to November.  Last November the average Pocket Area home sold for $398,204, while this year the average home sold for $390,719, a 1.9%.  The median selling price in Sacramento’s Pocket Area in November was $365,090, down 6.9% from last year’s median price of $392,000.

The foreclosure rate in the Pocket is 13% of active inventory, while short sales account for 8.7% of active inventory — a combined rate of 21.7% is much lower than Sacramento’s overall average, which recently topped 50%.

Other numbers also show the Pocket Area’s relative strength compared to other Sacramento neighborhoods.  Inventory is only at 5.67 months, putting the Pocket Area (technically at any rate) in the “sellers’ market” category.  Unit volume dropped only 4.2% from November to November, so the Pocket was relatively immune from the November slowdown that plagued the rest of the area.  Days on market and the expired to sold ratio are both down slightly from last year — lower numbers are “better” for sellers in each case.

  • inpd

    Thanks for the analysis. But it seems to be at great odds with listings at other
    web sites.

    For example, trulia.com allows you to segment your search by resale, new construction
    and foreclosures.

    For 95831 it lists 165 homes in all categories and 102 of them in foreclosure.

    I don’t mean to be critical, but I’m trying to understand which set of numbers
    (yours or the ones above are correct).

    Thank you for providing a great service.

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-agents/ John Lockwood

    Hi,

    I appreciate the note.

    When I throw in land and mobile homes and residential income and business opportunities, I get a total of 139 listings in MLS that are active as of right now for 95831. For residential only (my original post would have been based on that) there are 127 active listings at present, of wich 13 are REO and 11 are short sale, so the foreclosure rate for Active Inventory in MLS right now is 24/127, or 18.9%. Short Sale is a little hinky because their are two fields for it in MLS, so their might be 12 or 13 short sales instead of 11, but other than that those are the numbers as of the Multiple Listing Service (Metrolist) as of right now.

    As I understand it, Trulia is basically a screen scraper that goes after data that other Realtors publish on their sites, as well as data submitted to it manually through sites like vflyer.com, which I use. Part of the problem with Trulia may be that there’s a lag time between a home getting taken off the market and having it removed from their database (stale listings). I’ve had Trulia contact me to update listings there, and if agents don’t do it, they may tend to hang around. They may also not update the site until the property is actually sold, and so it’s possible their numbers may include some listings that are really in escrow (pending sale), not active. I’m not sure if that’s it, but if so it would help to explain the foreclosure rate being skewed upward, since foreclosures sell disproportionately to their numbers (naturally, because they’re cheaper). The other possiblity is that Trulia also reflects some for sale by owner homes, but I would expect that to skew the foreclosure percentages the other way.

    Thanks again for the input and for the compliment. If you’re looking for a home in that area and you need some help, please feel free to give us a call if there’s anything you want to see.

    Regards,

    John Lockwood

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