Sacramento Real Estate Blog

Here are Sacramento home sold prices per square foot of homes sold during the period May, 2005 to November, 2005, as given by MLS data.

Keep in mind if you’re using this data for comparison purposes on your own home that “sold price per square foot” is a very blunt instrument at best. If you need help in understanding a home’s value — either as a buyer or as a seller — give us a call and we’d be happy to help.

As always, information comes from multiple sources and is believed accurate but has not been verified.

I’ve updated our Schools pages with links to the latest API scores and the like. I may be adding a table of school districts in each county and links to GreatSchools pages and district pages for each, but for now I’ve mainly fixed broken links and several other issues I found — those pages were looking a bit long in the tooth, since this is their first update in a couple of years.

Enjoy!

John over at Uneasy Rhetoric has a good article about proposed expansion to Sutter Hospital, including some great links to Heckasac’s entertaining rant about lofts. I wish we’d entered the loft-o-mania phase two years ago when I had a buyer who wanted a loft, and all I could mumble at the time was “Lofts? — isn’t that a San Franscisco thing?”, or words to that effect.

Fortunately for us the team has a new buyer who wants a loft this year, as well as a lot of good recent business in the non-loft category.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that I’ve reached one of my important career goals this year, that of getting a real estate broker’s license. I just checked at the Department of Real Estate, and sure enough, I passed the test and they’ve upgraded my license. The broker’s license recognizes people who’ve trained hard enough and are competent to conduct real estate business on their own. I anticipate continuing at REMAX for the time being, however, though it’s nice to know I can explore the possiblity of perhaps opening up a full service shop (real estate sales plus financing).

More importantly, I’m naive enough to believe in what Ben Franklin was alleged to have said about career development. “Empty your purse into your mind, and your mind will fill your purse with coins.”

Of course, back in those days you could wear powdered wigs and carry a purse around and it was no big deal.

Times change.

Oh, and speaking of times changing, I’m pleased to say that my real estate broker’s license became effective yesterday, December 6th, even though I learned of it today. I always remember December 7th instead as a date that will live in infamy, so I’m glad it came through yesterday.

Our colleagues over at NorCalHomes.com have published a really handy Sacramento Zip Code Map you can download. Click on that and save it before they take it down!

The reason it’s nice to have this handy is to make better sense of the upcoming posts(s?) about Sacramento prices by zip code. I’ve just done a snapshot of home prices by zip code over the last six months (total), and will be publishing the results here shortly.

I’m going to try to focus on some new topics that I haven’t written about much here yet, relocation and schools.

We’ve had a schools section of the web site for a long time now, and it’s had a trickle of visitors during all this time. We’re going to beef that up somewhat, and have a section devoted to relocation as well.

One of the surprises I found when I started looking at who was visiting our web site was how many folks visit our site come from right around Sacramento. The reason this was surprising was that we do such a great business with relocation clients, so I would have expected most of our visitors to have been from out of town.

This got me thinking in turn about what I wrote about earlier — the small number of folks from the blog who visit the search pages. It occurred to me that by focusing on the changing real estate market, I was satisfying a sort of vague intellectual curiosity about where the market’s headed, and I was making some nice new friends who enjoyed thinking about such things.

However, my experience with buyers and sellers is that they tend to have more urgency than that. Sure, they do their research to find the right property, but as a rule someone moving from Ohio or Michigan or New York is more likely to be concerned with where the good areas are to live, what schools will be best for their children, and the like.

We’ll to continue to write about the Sacramento real estate market to some extent as well, of course, so if you’re a die-hard Sacramento market junkie, take heart, we’re certainly not going to abandon you completely.

However, at the same time, we do want to bring in more information to appeal to those “out-of-town” folks who’ve been so good to us in the past.

…money for God’s sake. So sang 10cc. You can look up anything on the Internet.

So that’s what I’m doing here later on a Friday. Grindingly, exhaustingly late on a Friday. Just cranking out a few words before calling it a night.

So how’d the broker’s exam go? Well, just fine, I suppose. Reasonably gruelling, really. Consumers, take heart, they just don’t give those brokers’ licenses away. Yet all in all, certainly not as hard as the state bar or med school. Definitely nowhere near as hard as as quitting smoking — now that was a challenge.

Anyway, by this time next week or thereabouts, we should know if I’m still a salesperson or have become a broker.

It’s kind of a strange goal, in a way, to have a broker’s license. To continue working at REMAX, I don’t need one — all the state requires when in the employ of a real estate broker is a “salesperson’s” license. From a press release sort of perspective, one might say that having a broker’s license gives me enhanced knowledge that let’s me serve clients better.

True enough, I suppose, but for that matter I’ve been working the Blogging / Web Development side of the business so hard recently that I let my team do just about all of the direct client work. Well, that’s the traditional role of the broker with or without the license — providing general advertising and rainmaking so that others can close the business. But that sort of begs the question, too, since REMAX’s team model pretty much lets me accomplish that even with a good old regular sales license.

I suppose off in the future I may well open up shop as John Lockwood Realty or the like.

Rejected names include “Honest John’s Used Houses” and “Low Tide Realty”.

There’s no tide in Sacramento to speak of. Maybe a smackerel of it down by the river.

I suppose what I think about most when I think along those lines is wanting to make sure I would have a better business model than I have now. (Because otherwise, of course, why do it?). One possible avenue to explore would be opening a thorough-going buyer brokerage. It turns out that working with buyers is 80% or so of our business anyway, and making it official might have advantages both for us and our clients. Another possibility that ties in nicely to a focus on buyer representation would be originating loans, but there’d be a learning curve there I suppose.

Of course I tend to see much of that challenge through the eyes of a web developer, too. One area of my site that I wish performed better is our loan prequalification form. We tend to get lots of inquiries via that form, but find that we actually refer out more bona fide loan business through our work with buyers who respond to our MLS real estate listing information. So I wonder how to make that better — perhaps as simply as calling it Loan Preapproval, but more likely through developing a more full blown loan application 1003 form processor. Actually I see a good one as being something I might offer as an ASP to Realtors®.

But that’s yet another project, isn’t it?

By the time you read this, I may be at the Department of Real Estate, taking broker’s exam.

There is probably as much real estate minutiae rolling around in my head now as there’s ever likely to be, so if anyone has a Trivial Pursuit Game going, I’m your boy.

Except I’m not good on the sports questions. Really not good on them. Trust me.

This is our “tale of two cities”, part two. While Rocklin was doing quite well in October, and our earlier market reports showed Granite Bay’s market to be fairly strong as well, October was a definite “off month” in some respects for the upscale owners of Granite Bay.

Of course, it’s hard to feel too sorry for sellers in Granite Bay, I suppose, given that those sellers who did sell in October sold there homes for an average price of $1,104,527, or 96.7% of the average list price of $1,141,797. The median selling price, meantime was a paltry, six-figure, $901,000. The average sale price seemed to be up by a huge amount, 39.2%, but meantime the average square footage also increased some 24.2% from last year, so on a cost-per-square-foot basis, year to year appreciation was 12.1%.

Where we’re really seeing October as an off month, however, is in the number of units sold. Unit volume was down over 51% from last October’s 37 units sold to a total sold this October of 18. This isn’t just that there were no homes for sale, either. Eleven listings expired in October, putting the expired to sold ratio at 61.1%. Inventory stands at some 9 months worth, and the average home on the market has been on the market already for 70 days.

To see what’s currently available, our Granite Bay site has a nice breakdown of homes by subdivision.

We could call this a tale of two cities, part one, since I just ran the numbers for both Rocklin and Granite Bay. We’ll get to Granite Bay in a future post, but suffice it to say that the news is very different in both areas.

Now mind you, we’re talking about two towns away here. The fact that two towns can be so different points to one of the dangers of predicting the behavior of “the real estate maket” using broad strokes like “the real estate bubble”. Real estate sales performance is so profoundly local that even from one town to the next one can experience a wide variation.

OK, on to the numbers. Rocklin did well in October, with homes appreciating 8.9% on a cost per square foot basis from the yaer before. The average home in Rocklin sold listed at $548,209 and sold for 98.7% of list, for an average sale price of $531,213. Rocklin’s median home sale price in October was $497,495.

Last October, the median was $433,000, and the average sale price was $450,768.

Unit volume is down only about 16%, from from 88 units sold last year to 74 units sold this year. Average days on maket are up slightly, from 29 days last October to 32 days this October, but the latter figure is actually fairly low by recent standards in greater Sacramento.

One figure that’ smore troublesome than other for Rocklin is the ratio of expired listings to sold listings, which is fairly high at 48.6%.

I wanted to just briefly take a moment to thank all those who trusted us this past year with your real estate needs — even if it was only to ask a question about the market or fill in a request for more information about a home. It’s really been a pleasure working with all of you.

And so, Happy Thanksgiving! In honor of the occasion, here’s a picture of the family turkey:

Come Thursday I’ll be magically transformed into the family pig.

Stay tuned.

El Dorado Hills real estate sales in October totalled 52 residential units sold, down somewhat from last October’s total of 60 units. Average days on the market were up fairly dramatically, from 29 days last year to 52 days this year, a 79% increase. Inventory is at 6.3 months.

The average El Dorado Hills home sold in October was 2827 square feet, and sold for $703,492, or 98.2% of the average list price of $716,315. The median sale price this October was $612,000.

Adjusted for square footage (the avearage of which itself has grown 4.9% over the one year period), homes in El Dorado Hills appreciated 10.2% on average from last year.

Just trying out some things to see how the feed is working. Had this been an actual real estate sale, there no doubt would have been a mortgage. Please stand by.

Some of you will recognize in the title an old Bob Dylan song title. You may be old like me, or just well educated.

I recently learned that this is true to a great extent of my blog readers — you ain’t going nowhere. I’ve been getting into Web Analytics lately — the art of probing into your web site traffic to find out more about your web site and what your visitors are doing or not doing. The reason for looking at that, of course, is to make the web site better, which in our cases means to help more people search for and buy or sell houses.

Hopefully using someone on my team to do it, because then I get paid, and this frees up time for more blogging.

You thought I was just sitting here blogging because I like the green pasty monitor glow my skin gets. Well, yes, there’s that, too. But really the main thing that frees up time for blogging is the fact that some of you buy houses. Well, not some of “you”, per se, because as we said above, you ain’t goin’ nowhere. One of the first things that stands out from the web data is that blog readers have a high bounce rate.

“Bounces” is web analytics lingo for looking at a single page then leaving the site. Sort of the HTTP version of “wham bam, thank you m’am”.

Well, what can I say — you’re welcome. And don’t call me “m’am”.

Those of you who are old like me are probably thinking that a more appropriate tune comes from the Shirelles. “Will you still love me tomorrow?” Well, maybe so, but that would be a return visitor report. You can have a high bounce rate and still be loyal as heck to reading your one page.

Actually, I’m not sure you need web analytics to figure out that blog readers aren’t the biggest category of buyers (percentage-wise), but it’s nice to see my hypothesis confirmed in the numbers. Visitors to the site who are just clicking from growabrain (my thanks to them) or following some blog roll link are a different breed of cat from those who actually type in “Sacramento Real Estate” or the like into google (thanks to them, too). Not that having a readership is wrong, mind you. What kind of writership would I be without one?

And not everyone who leaves here goes out looking at tee shirts or the like. A few of you have checked out some of our search offerings. (BIG thanks to you).

I think I should get that old search image right up on top of the blog — in case someone really in their heart of hearts is clicking through from growabrain and just kicking, drinking some coffee, killing a few minutes in between freecell games and the like — you know, being a blog reader (I am one, so I know how it goes), and then all of a sudden god forbid has a minor stroke or something and decides she needs a house in Sacramento right now and let’s go search for one and then call the PLUS Team Realtor®.

Here’s old Sparky now:

Let’s face it, you missed him, didn’t you? I know I did. I like how he reminds me of Johnson Smith catalogs, or maybe Monopoly.

Folsom’s October real estate sales numbers were fairly typical for the Sacramento area. At 81 units sold in October through the MLS, unit volume was down somewhat from last October’s total of 105 units sold. The average sale price was $532,853, or 99% of the average list price of $538,354. The median sale price was $499,000.

Last October the average sale price was $460,658, so using this figure, homes appreciated 15.7% from October to October. However the average cost per square foot increased from $226 last year to $264 this year, a 16.9% increase.

Average days on market are higher this year (32) than last year (25), but this year’s number is favorable compared to many local markets. Inventory is fairly high, but much of this may be seasonal. Current inventory is 5 months.

Buyers in Sacramento’s downtown/midtown areas (95814 and 95816) seemed to be “all about the bargains” in October. Price per square foot was down considerably from September’s average, though with only fourteen units sold overall in October, our results are hardly significant statistically.

Anyway, let’s have at the numbers. The average home sold in October for $398,500, or 100.4% of the average list price of $396,979. The median sale price was $397,500. The average size was 1288 square feet, a fact that accounts for our year to year sales price appearing to go down by 8.2% from last year’s average of $433,868. Adjusted for square footage, there was a 9.2% increase during that time.

Nevertheless, prices were off from their September high. In September the average home sold for $374 per square foot, while the average sale price per square foot in October was down to $309. Inventory is 4.8 months. Unit volume and days on market are similar to last years. Average days on market are up to 27 from last year’s 25, and days on market are down from seventeen to fourteen days . Either value is extremely quick compared to other local markets, and even compared to September’s value of 31 days.

Downtown in October, it was the smaller and less pricey homes that were sold off. What’s sold sold at $309 per square foot for 1288 on average — what remains averages 1586 square feet at $347 per square foot — a difference in list price of over $150,000.

Yet another developer has their eye on a high rise condo project for downtown. Jeff Gualt, division president for KB’s new “KB Urban Division”, will be working on condo projects throughout California, according to an article in the Sacramento Business Journal (via Living in Urban Sac).

Gault said he will focus first on the Los Angeles area, then move on to Orange County, San Diego and the San Francisco and Sacramento areas. By next fall, he expects to be operating in Sacramento, looking for downtown sites for condos that would sell units at $400,000 to $800,000.

I wanted to take a moment to put some of the market changes we’re going through into some perspective.

Naturally as Realtors® we watch the market probably harder than anyone, and if things get really tight, we start counting the pennies in the savings jar. Well, first of all, as a professional, let me assure you that I don’t have any idea how many pennies are in the jar. So we haven’t quite gotten to the total economic collapse of western civilization yet.

Our office manager recently held a meeting to discuss marketing in the changing market, and we got an interesting perspective from Gay Berge’s remarks to our local Realtor® association to the effect that “A bad market is not a market where you have lots of nice homes to sell and single digit interest rates.”

This is an important point to drive home. Yes, the market has cooled somewhat, days on market are up from last year, and total unit volume is down — in almost all the markets we’ve examined. But rumors of the market’s death are greatly exaggerated.

On the seller’s side, what we see happening is the same thing that happens in a good market, only more dramatically. Sellers who overprice their home — sometimes helped by (let me be kind) “overzealous” agents — are finding that their homes don’t sell. What wasn’t well publicized was that the same thing happened before the press started talking about a housing bubble as well, but with low inventory and lots of willing buyers, sellers — especially sellers who were only modestly greedy and not yet quite drooling — could often enjoy the increases over recent comparable sales (”comps”) that they wanted.

What’s happening now is that there’s more inventory, and buyers are seeing many price reductions happen on individual homes. We believe we’re at a point now where buyers are starting to shoot themselves in the foot waiting for prices to come down. Seeing lots of price reductions on individual homes, buyers are sure that “prices are coming down”, so they’re waiting for that to happen.

Before I get into what I think about that, let me tell you I’m not against waiting just because I want more escrows this month. Remember I haven’t counted the pennies yet, and yes, I’d like more escrows and more paychecks for my team, but there are plenty of good reasons to wait — new job coming up with more money, you’re working on getting your credit score to increase with your lender, you don’t have enough information yet, you like where you’re living now and/or you like paying rent. If it’s not time to move yet for you for any number of good reasons, you should wait.

But waiting to buy because you’re waiting for prices to come down at this point is emphatically not a good idea, in my opinion.
The reason I say this is that I’ve seen interest rates go up for five or six weeks in a row, and no one I know expects it to come down to 2002-2003 levels any time soon. Yesterday we quoted Freddie Mac’s forecast that interest will continue to climb gradually over the next twelve months.

Yes, it’s still single digit, and no, it’s not fourteen percent or anything frightening like that — but the difference between the seven-point-something percent that we’re likely to see next year and this year’s six-point-something is quite likely to absorb any fall in prices we’ll see during that time.

Freddie Mac reported an increase in the average mortgage rate yesterday in their weekly mortgage market survey. The thirty year fixed rate averaged 6.36% at half a point, up from 6.31% the week previous. Meantime, the 15-year fixed rate averaged 5.89 percent at 0.6 point, up from last week’s average of 5.85 percent.

“According to our most recent economic outlook, we expect rates to continue to rise gradually over the next 12 or so months. Because the housing sector is so sensitive to fluctuations in interest rates, this will have the effect of returning the housing sector to a more normal pace of activity, by historical standards.”

Watching the Sacramento market, I’m already seeing signs of a slow down from last year in many areas, but time will tell how quickly this slowing translates into any change in prices. I expect sellers’ expectations to be a trailing indicator.

When we last reported on the market for Sacramento’s duplexes, there were 5.9 months of duplex units in inventory. Currently that number stands at 4.8 months. Seventy listings were sold (closed escrow) in October, about the same as last year’s 71 listings.
During the same time, forty-two listings went “pending” (i.e., escrow was opened). On the red ink portion of the ledger, we saw forty-one listings expire, and fifty-one listings were withdrawn or cancelled in October. The expired to sold ratio was 58.6%.

The average duplex sold in October for $431,219, or 98.8% of the average list price of $436,528. The median sale price was $425,000. Last year’s average sale price was $378,294, so the average sale price has increased 14%. The median is up 16.4% from last year’s value of $365,000.

Days on market are up to forty-five days, from last year’s thirty-three.

As the old joke has it, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, those folks who sold their home in Cameron Park in October realized a 20.1% increase in the value of their home over the last year, on average, adjusted for square footage. October’s average home sold for $481,884, or 98.6% of the average list price of $488,663. The median home sold for $499,900. Median home sale prices rose 23.0% over the one year period, while average sale prices rose 18.1%.

The bad news is, the rest of the numbers seem to be telling us this can’t go on forever. Darn it — I live in Cameron Park. I want my home to appreciate in value twenty-something per-cent per year forever as much as the next guy.

But even as we’re seeing homes go up twenty-something per-cent per year, inventory currently stands at 10.2 months worth. As bad news go, that’s pretty impressively bad. That’s a lot of folks waiting to sell. We’ll see how it shakes out in months ahead. Unit volume in October was down 50% over last year, from 38 units sold in October of 2004 to 19 units sold last month. What I’ve noticed in Cameron Park seems to be taking place again, that we seem to have special trouble with larger, more expensive homes, priced well over one half million dollars. Homes in the $400,000 range seem to move well, but as price goes up, we probably encounter stiff competition from El Dorado Hills on the one side and Shingle Springs on the other.

Roseville’s October Market Update is online.

Inventory is up in Roseville, over five months. I expect we’ll see even more of that as we go through November and December, and see some of it start to get sold off in January and February. Of course, the other possiblity is that sellers frustrated with the results may simply let their listings expire and re-list in Spring.

We’ve just updated lists of condos in Sacramento County organized by price range from our main condo page.

Also we’ve updated our list of Granite Bay Real Estate by Subdivision.

Sacramento county’s condo market in October was strong in terms of appreciation from last year, but inventory has built up quite a bit over the last couple of months.

The average condo in Sacramento County sold for $262,923, or 99.9% of the average list price of $263,091. The median price was $246,000. This year’s sale price marked a 19% increase over last year’s, or 23.8% on a cost per square foot basis. Days on market are up, though not dramatically so, from 24 days last year to 34 days this year. Unit volume is down from 164 units last October to 92 this October.

Low unit volume is contributing to a fairly high inventory. We last looked at condo inventory in early September, comparing against August’s sold data. At that time we reported just under 3 months of condo inventory for Sacramento County. As of November 3rd, we’ve found that that number has more than doubled, to 6.2 months. The ratio of listings that expire to those that sell is also up during that time, from a “sellers market” style low of 12.5% in August to a more average value of 33.5% in for October.

If we break down the high inventory by price, we find that the lower end of the price range is experiencing slightly more inventory build-up. Homes listed below last month’s median of $246,000 have some 6.6 months worth of inventory, while homes above have 5.8 months.

We’ve published a new real estate market update for Elk Grove. I’ll let you read about the inventory and days on market there, but meantime I leave you with this nice “bullish” graph:

Placerville real estate sales for October showed strong price appreciation from last year, but unit volume was down and inventory is high. The average home sold in Placerville through the MLS in October listed for $423,769 and sold for 97.6% of list at $412,508. The median sale price was $412,313. This October’s average sale increased 21.7% from last October’s average of $339,900, but averages have been up and down in recent months.

This October’s average days on market of 47 are up 30.6% over last year’s average of 36 days. Unit volume is down over 48%, from 31 units last year to 16 this year. Of course, low sales volume contributes to rising inventory, and Placerville’s inventory of residential units stands at 7.7 months as of November 2nd. The ratio of listings that expired in September to those that sold was fairly high in October, at 41.9%.

Average interest rates rose again this week, Freddie Mac reported in its weekly Primary Mortgage Market Survey. Just to quote one value, 30 year fixed mortgage rates were at 6.31% on average with one point, up from 6.15% last week. The survey reported stronger economic growth than expected.

The immaculate late model Mediterranean style home we we mentioned earlier in Natomas is now available in the MLS.  See the complete details here. Or if you’d rather listen, check out our 24-hour Toll Free Audio Flier at (877) 735-5657 ext. 22.

Showings begin tomorrow, so you can schedule a showing using our Showing Request Form, or if you know of anyone looking in this area, please use our Email the Listing to a Friend service.

Over on the Roseville site, we have a series of new Roseville Real Estate Listing Pages. We wrote some software to go up to our IDX vendors and get this practically in “real time”, so unlike our condo and duplex listings, we shouldn’t have to let you know it’s been refreshed — just go up there and have at it, and our IDX company will refresh it six times per week.

Yahoo News just carried this AP news story of another Fed rate hike. Looks like we’re in for at least a couple more quarter-point hikes.