No Pig Lipstick for September
Everyone else is talking about this cosmetically advanced porcine this week, so I thought I’d work it in to the conversation somehow.
Welcome to my job. I’m fortunate because — if you ignore my broker / management duties — I pretty much get to blog for a living. Given the blog that’s turned out to be successful and the way I choose to feed it, this entails a lot of sifting through Sacramento market data.
Blogging. About data. I have achieved nerdvana.
As many of you know, the usual schedule for talking about the market is one month behind. So in October, I’ll write about September systematically and tell you want happened, zip code by relentless zip code.
However, having achieved nerdvana, and therefore being overly excited about the data, of course I have to peek ahead sometimes. Such was the case today when I peeked ahead to see how September is shaping up so far, even though we’re only a few days into it.
Wake Me Up When September Ends
Oh, all right, it’s not all that bad — but I do hate to see such a bigger-than-average price drop in a single month. August’s average sold price per square foot was $140.87, and September’s average (so far) is $130.61.
To be sure, some of this is simply that some of the foreclosures that didn’t sell in August finally closed in September, and August’s prices were higher than July’s, so you can look at this larger price drop as catching up on our bad news.
And to be sure, averaging the whole county is always a bit misleading, since part of the drop in prices when you do this is actually a shift in what areas are selling large volumes of home. For many months now, overall the biggest gains have been in the most inexpensive areas. (In fact, a good future article would be to look at total average price change county-wide versus an average of price changes by area).
Still, I hate ten-dollar-per-square foot price drops in one month. I honestly do. To be sure, we largely enjoy representing buyers, so the news is not necessarily bad from our clients’ point of view. But still there’s a point at which my optimism for first time buyers runs smack into my sympathy for existing owners.
