This May’s Sacramento County Condo Market is down by any measure you care to name from last year. The only exceptions are those where the market is more “down” if the numbers are more up. That is to say, days on market are up and expired listings are up. If you’ve been putting off a lowball condo offer, now might be just the time to go ahead and write it up! Or at least, it’s a good time to check out the inventory.
(”No, no, no, John, we’re waiting until they’re three for seventy-five cents, and then we’ll do it…”).
Anyway, unit sales are not that badly off, really, down only 14.6%, showing that there’s still a strong pool of first time buyers and some demand (unit volume is off 25-50% in other markets we’ve studied). Days on market are up dramatically, however. With inventory currently at 6.2 months, days on market now average 51, as compared to only 21 days last May. The ratio of expireds to sold is up to 58% (75 expired /129 sold), compared to last year’s 7.3% (11 expired / 151 sold).
The average condo that sold in May was listed for $251,799 and sold for $250,627. The median sale price was $235,000. The median price was down 3.7% from last year, while the sold price per square foot was down 2.7% (from $223 last year to $217 this year).
I updated the Sacramento County Duplex Listings page a few days ago, and today I got a plea from a buyer asking me to do the same for the area New Home Listings. While I was at that, I also of course went after the Condo Listings.
I have to apologize for my slowness to update listings lately. There are just more things to do than there are hours in the day, but I’ll try to make ammends and get back to a more regular schedule. And remember, whatever else is going on with those more or less static listings, if you visit my Search Page or the Advanced Search Page, those results are updated almost as often as my own MLS system. (The MLS is updated in Realtime, whereas the web site search results are a snapshot of the MLS that gets updated six times per week — so it’s pretty current!).
I’ve been working with some first time buyers who recently opened escrow on a wonderful home in one of our suburban counties. These buyers did a good job of getting up to speed on the different neighborhoods and picking out the ones they really felt at home in. Like many buyers (though not all), they needed to check out several communities, and finally zeroed in on the one they wanted.
Anyway, the mechanics aside, what makes this such a “buyers’ market tale” is this little historical tidbit, which would have been unlikely in the extreme two or three years ago. To prevent the innocent, I’m going to adjust the actual numbers a bit, but I’ll try to be true to the percentages.
Original starting price of home three months ago: $565,000.
List price after buyer reduced price: $489,500.
Offered price: $474,000.
What makes this even more of a buyer’s market tale in my opinion is not so much the price reductions, nor even the low offer, but the fact that the low offer was pretty much accepted on the face of it (there was a minor “counter-offer”, but not on price). Frankly I was pretty surprised not to get a counter on price, but naturally I was quite happy for my buyers, who reaped the benefit to the tune of perhaps seven or eight thousand dollars.
So you can consider this a buyers’ market tale, but it’s also an excellent example of how starting too high on price can lead you (though waiting too long) to eventually be in a position where you feel a little pressure to take an offer that’s lower than you might have otherwise. That was always possible even in the bullish seller’s market we were in two years ago — it’s even more of a trap to be avoided now.
Remember the now defunct Things to Do Blog?
Well, no worries. We recently came across this nifty bit of Sacramento Museumiana, the List of Sacramento Museums. My daughter, being thirteen now, is probably likely to say nay to whatever I can find on this list, but man, I’m going.
I’m doing a blogathon for America’s Second Harvest over at my other site.
I had an ambition to put together fifty new pages of material in a short period of time, so I decided to go for it. Then I thought that since I was going to try for that, I might as well put the writing to some secondary good use if possible, especially since the search engines might not reward me for my efforts directly.
If you want to sponsor me, please feel free to do so anonymously or let me know so I can get an easy few posts out of some thank you notes. If you’re a blogger, I’d especially appreciate write ups or links pointing to the original Blogathon Kickoff Post.
I’m eating well today. You probably are too. Not everyone is so fortunate, so please pitch in.
Well, it’s been awhile for Roseville market fans. My last update to the Roseville site was in January, but today I played catch-up and posted the market updates for the period since then.
I should probably do a yearly or eighteen month price chart for Placer County, since I suspect that based on Roseville’s numbers that the bubblers will find more to love in Placer County than in those quirky El Dorado County numbers I just published.
Let’s face it, people. El Dorado County holds its value better. It’s probably because I live here — so that’s a draw in itself.
Anyway, for a picture of doom that your most pessimistic bubbler will just relish, check out Roseville’s numbers for May, especially as they compare to April and March.
Enjoy.
I just went into MLS and looked at some average sold prices for all residential home types for El Dorado County for about the last seventeen months or so, starting from the beginning of 2005.
What’s THIS market doing? Looks to me like it’s varying day to day. Isn’t it supposed to be either bubbling or not bubbling?
Apparently the data doesn’t know what’s expected of it.
Lousy empirical data — doesn’t it know that soapboxes are tottering, and people might break their legs?
