About three or four times per month, I get to say the following: real estate is local.

To me, this is what makes writing about “the” real estate market much more interesting than it would be otherwise.  You see, there is no “the” real estate market — there are just lots of little local markets.  A given market at a given time may behave differently than how you would expect.  The reason may be either that it’s too small to be statistically significant, or because it just flat out doesn’t follow the rules (or both).

Based on my background writing about greater Sacramento County, I generally expect that most local markets around here will have

• Declined in price between 2007-2008.
• Increased in demand between 2007-2008.

In the Downtown Sacramento area (95814 and 95816), in contrast, what I find for July is that the market:

• Increased in price between 2007-2008.
• Decreased in demand between 2007-2008.

To be sure, the average sale price did drop 5.3% from July to July, from $486,849 in 2007 to $460,809 in 2008.  However, a more accurate indicator of price, sold price per square foot increased 4.8% from 2007-2008 downtown, with the average home fetching $284.53 per square foot in July of 2007 and $298.19 per square foot in July of 2008.

While most of Sacramento County was losing value from July to July, downtown Sacramento was gaining value, but losing buyer interest.  This year only eleven units sold in July, down 42.1% from last July’s 19 units.

Comments are closed.