Sacramento Real Estate Blog

I just took a minute to look at the condo numbers for October in Sacramento County, and I found that the numbers did not vary very much from Sacramento’s residential market overall. Actually the numbers were slightly more favorable.

Traditionally, people say that the condo market is the first to turn down when the market stalls, and the first to recover when it recovers. Either that generalization is too broad to be worthwhile, or we may be seeing signs of a stabilizing market.

This year’s average sale price for a condo is down 3.7% from last year, slightly less than the drop for single family homes. The average condo sold in October for $250,375, as compared to $260,049. Sold price per square foot dropped more dramatically (8.7%), while the median sale price split dropped 5.1% during this time.

With 781 units in inventory and 76 selling in October, inventory stands at 10.3 months. As one would expect with so many units for sale, the ratio of expireds to solds is up over 100% (127.6% in October, as compared to 55.4% last October). Unit volume is down 24.8%.

I was just looking around today at some fellow bloggers and marvelling at how many real estate blogs have sprung up in the last few months. I predict that soon they’ll be almost as numerous as Advanced Access template sites were three years ago. I used to do link building back then and everywhere I turned there was another Advanced Access site with its navigation elements taking forever to download. My friend Jim Cronin over at the Real Estate Tomato is doing his level best to get one of my competitors placed well for the Sacramento market, and she’s doing a creditable job. Meantime I even bumped into a Connecticut blog a little earlier today. Connecticut, for Pete’s sake. They don’t have more than about three web sites in the whole state, but now someone over there has a real estate blog.

And of course, running parallel to the bubble in real estate blogs, there’s also a bubble in real estate bubble blogs. Certainly the real estate market will level off some day, though reasonable pundits may certainly disagree on how high above 79 cents the prices are likely to be at that point. My own opinion is that they’ll be a lot closer to the current prices than 79 cents before prices start to rise again. The inevitable upshot of prices leveling off will be a decline of interest in the real estate bubble blogs, so now is definitely the time to start courting the key words “Real Estate bubble bubble” or “Real Estate B2“.

That is to say, now is the time to do that if you have nothing else to do. My business has slowed a spot from last week, but I’ve still enough active files on my desk to keep me off the street, and the promotion work on the Hunger Blogathon is taking up the rest of the time. Here’s the Flier by the way — sponsoring me would be a good thing.

I just enjoyed visits and/or links from some bloggers whom I’ve met for the first time, with some neat new area blogs. Peter Scott, who’s launched a new blog for the Carmichael area, was good enough to notice my tongue-in-cheek anti-bubbler statistic.

By the way, there seems to be a raging debate in the real estate blogging community — which I fast appear to be losing — as to whether the correct epithet is “bubbler” (as I contend) or the more common “bubblehead“, (which is fast gaining ground in Arizona). Either way, it denotes those cheery fellows who earn their living the honest way: garnering Adsense clicks from readers who enjoy their predictions that the human race will give up the need for housing by the year 2005 — woops, too late now, better start being homeless before the hard landing hits.

Also I wanted to thank Diane Cohn, from whom I just saw a link come through. I think it may just be that Diane’s got a new URL going — Diane’s been actually blogging for some time about Real Estate in Reno, and I want to say we met awhile back, but anyway Technorati just flagged the link for me so thanks, Diane.

I feel pretty old school in a way, seeing that all these bleeding edge bloggers are running videos on their blogs, and here I sit with the blogological equivalent of an amber monocrhome monitor or dumb terminal or something. Well, you whippersnappers, back in my day we blogged in assembly language and were happy to do it, too! Back then we called sandwiches flat breadies, and blogs were known as Webbo Newspapers.

Another blog of mine will serve as host to this year’s Winter Hunger Blogathon. This is a continuation — and hopefully vast improvement — on the somewhat poorly publicized Summer Hunger Blogathon, which we won’t link to. Now let us never speak of it again.

Actually even the infamous Summer blogathon was still a success of sorts. I sponsored myself. I cut the check I said I would. I wrote a lot more than I would have otherwise. No animals were harmed in the filming of the blogathon. And so forth.

But this year’s Winter Blogathon will be even bigger and better because:

• I’ve cajoled others into sparing me the embarassment of being the only blogger.
• You can steal my flier if you want to host a blogathon of your own.
• I’m going to do a much better job of publishing this blogathon than the last one. Heck, the last one didn’t even have a stealable flier to distribute, let alone a whopping five day lead time for organizational purposes. Also, I’m not going to be embarassed about pestering famous people to help me spread the word on this one. In fact, I may work my way through Pittsburgh Real Estate’s famous list of famous people, if I get really ambitious. However, I hope those whom I don’t bug won’t suffer from hurt feelings by thinking they’re not famous — they should just take that opportunity to introduce themselves.

Anyway, I’ll see you on that other blog, December 1st through the 15th. Be there or be square.

We have the market update for October for El Dorado County on our new blog, here.

Wow, it’s been a really great week. Justina and Chris closed escrow on their first home, a beautiful newer 3-bedroom in West Sac. Meantime some other Internet buyers, Pat and Joe, closed escrow with my colleague Trish on a lakeside condo in Cameron Park. Thanks so much one and all for your business — it has been a pleasure working with you.

Meantime today I showed some out of area buyers a second condo that they’re purchasing as a rental for their daughter and her friends at Sac State today, so I hope to have an offer written on that in a day or two, and meantime today I wrote up a second offer for another really nice client that’s on it’s way to the listing agent as I write this — woops, no, wait a minute, before I could finish the post she called me up and gave me a verbal acceptance! Sweet…

On the management side, things are also moving forward. I am pleased to announce that Bridget Felmley-Gay has displayed the courage, foresight, and extreme good sense to join me as John Lockwood Associates’ Employee #1 (or Employee #2 if you’re supposed to count the Broker). Welcome, Bridget, it’s a pleasure to have you!

Meantime, Bridget and I are trying to find the time to write enough good stuff for a successful launch of our new Real Estate Blog focused on Amador and El Dorado County, and as you can see from one of the posts there, when Bridget joined me I acquired a new business name to use, Elite Properties.

Anyway, thanks to one and all for your business, support, and encouragement. May you all be having as wonderful an evening as I am.

Well, I was up, so I thought I’d jot down a few quick notes about this fascinating business of mine.

Yes, I do think this business is fascinating in many respects. I come from a software development background before this, and wanted to get into a field with less “head’s down” work and more people-related work. Well, it is that! This is the ultimate people business. That’s the good news. Sometimes it’s the bad news. The thing that makes it fascinating is this: the extent to which it’s good news or bad news depends entirely on my own growth as a person, which in turn feeds back into whether being around people energizes or depresses me.

Yesterday we had one escrow finally close after many weeks of pretty tough work on the part of a lot of people, including my clients. Congratulations, C & J on your wonderful new home in West Sac! And thanks to everyone — Linda at Stanford Mortgage, Celia at Placer Title, Lila at Realty World North — who helped me put this together for my clients. When you get a fax with a cover sheet that says “I’m SOOO——————OOO HAPPY! :)” from a client, that to me is what energizes me about this business and makes me want to make something happen for my other people. (Of course, for those of you who are now high on my heroic description, let me also point out that finally getting paid at the end of six weeks of work doesn’t hurt, either).

Then again, there have been times when I’ve received great news like that and a rejected offer from a seller who’s decided to take their home off the market in the same day, so again, the challenge for me has been how to stay with people and not let my personal disappointments as I go along discourage me. That has gotten easier to do as my business has improved over the years, but as a colleague said to me once — “Sure you get depressed, this is sales.” Tom Hopkins once pointed out in a somewhat tongue in cheek way how “exciting” it was to be in a profession where you can be at the peak of joy and the depths of despair in the same twenty-four hour period.

Anyway, that’s my take on Real Estate, as of what’s now 3:15 AM. It’s time to go before my tiredness really shows through (if it hasn’t already).

I was just having a discussion in one of the threads with one of the 99.999% of the folks in the universe (or whatever the actual number is) who don’t buy from me.

I hope I acquitted myself well, but I’m still not sure.

I must admit, I get along better with people who aren’t buying from me if we’re not talking about work. I get the feeling that sometimes folks who aren’t buying from me get a little mad because someone else bought something. Then I get defensive about making my living working with the .001% of the people who do buy from me, as if the housing prices in the Sacramento area are my fault somehow because I’m doing my job.

When I look at the real estate blogosphere — which incidently is a sphere about .00001″ in diameter, as scientists have recently measured — it seems to me that I detect a bit of a difference between those folks who work well with people who don’t buy with them, and those folks who, like me, don’t. I’ve actually met some Realtor® bloggers who are so good at working with people who don’t buy anything that they participate actively in the anti-Realtor® bias of their readers.

In its less extreme form, working well with people not buying anything and being a well established member of the “community of real estate bloggers” (whatever the heck that is) seems to go hand in hand. I’ve been thinking about that group a bit in the last couple of days, and how my relative isolation from its mainstream probably has something to do with the comments I don’t generate, which in turn is a function of how good I’m not with people who don’t buy anything.

However, on the off chance that my feeling like some sort of lone wolf in the Sacramento wilderness is instead a function of not posting enough pretty pictures, I’ve invested a whole dollar in an Istockphoto picture of a pointy fence. This is part of why I don’t get along with people, I’m sure: whenever I hear about buyers sitting on a fence, I feel like I should be posting some sort of medical warning about the dangers of picket-butt.

No, but seriously, being on a fence can’t be comfortable. If you want to rent, go ahead and rent. There’s nothing wrong with it, assuming of course you invest the difference that you saved in something as worthwhile as a home, or blow it on something really profoundly stupid and enjoy yourself. People should be happy.

Go be happy.

Todd Carpenter over at Loan Bark was kind enough to link to me recently, and as a result I happened across his really interesting article about the Yield Spread Premium. Todd’s got a good slant on the whole thing, that as a consumer you might want to focus on what you’re paying — i.e., rate, APR, and closing costs — not on how much the lender is making.

My own preference as a Realtor® when I refer a client to a lender is to find someone who is both very competitive on rates and has an excellent track record on closing loans. I’ve been using Linda Spafford at Stanford Loans a lot lately, the lender Vicki and I often used when we were the Real Estate Plus Team.

Well, with Trick or Treat over, it’s time to take my usual look at last month’s Sacramento County market data and see if there’s something punditious I can say about it.

Somebody Google “punditious” for me and let me know if I got there first. I can’t bear to look.

Meantime, let me punditulate as follows:

October was a slow news month, because October’s drop from last year looks a lot like September and August’s drop from last year. October’s median sale price was $350,000, down 5.4% from last year’s median of $370,000. Quoting myself from last month:

The year to year median sale price decreased 6.5% from September to September, from $374,900 last September to $350,500 this September. August’s year on year median sale price decrease, in contrast, was 4.6%.

So as you can see, in October we just about split the difference.

Inventory currently stands at 9.8 months, up slightly from the end of September. This year’s average price is down 3.9% from last year ($402,807 last year versus $387,275), while the average sold price per square foot changed more rapidly, being now down 8.3% from last year ($251.75 to $230.80).

Unit volume is off 44.4% from last year, from 1778 to 989. Meantime the expired to sold ratio is 111.4%, with 1102 expired in October versus those same 989 sales.

I’d like to see a graph for the whole thing since about last year. Looks like it’s time for me to be about my data entry to see what I can come up with.