Sacramento Real Estate Blog

The numbers are in, and sure enough, it’s another “red ink” month for Sacramento County real estate, at least from a seller’s perspective. Prices were down slightly on paper, but my favorite indicator, price per square foot, was down more dramatically. Interestingly, all this was happening at a time when my web site traffic is easily the best it’s been in twelve months, so I have a feeling that home buyers are getting very interested in the bargains that this downswing is creating. (The other hypothesis, that more and more ladies have been falling in love with my picture as time goes by, is probably not even worth entertaining.)

This January’s average Sacramento County home was 1698 square feet, and sold for $348,000, down 3.7% from last year’s average of $392,363. However, since this year’s home was 6.2% bigger than last year’s average of 1599 square feet, the net effect was to drop the price per square foot some 9.3%. Those numbers were $245.38 in January of 2006, versus $222.47 in January of 2007.

Also as predicted, unit volume was down, from a total of 1010 units sold in January of 2006 to 730 units sold in January of 2007, a 27.7% drop. Because the number of expireds rose eight per cent during the same period, the effect on the expired to sold ratio was to push it over 100%. This ratio, which is simply the number of listings that sold in a given month divided by the number that expired, was 88.1% in 2006 and 131.6% in 2007.

Sellers, what that means is that your home is more likely to not sell in it’s listing period (often 90 to 180 days, though it’s not fixed by law), than it is to sell. In a future article, we’ll take a look at how well / poorly priced those expired listings were versus the ones that sold.

Naturally, in such a market, average days on market even for homes that did sell has increased, from 49 in 01/2006 to 72 in 01/2007.