Sacramento Real Estate Blog

Looking at the real estate market for Folsom in August, we find a market that’s somewhat stronger in many respects than Sacramento County as a whole. I expect to see Folsom being one of the first Sacramento County markets to recover from the downturn we’re currently experiencing, but of course, that’s a “foreward looking statement”, which is how Wall Street says “guess.”

On to the numbers. Sixty homes sold in Folsom in August, down 13% from last year’s volume of 69 sold homes. The average home sold in Folsom for $478,254, down some 7.1% from last year’s average of $514,805. This year’s home being slightly bigger than last year, the average sold price per square foot in Folsom dropped marginally more, 8.5%, from $248.10 last year to $227.09 this year. The median price in Folsom dropped 11.7% from August to August, from $497,500 last year to $439,450 last year.

Compared to Sacramento County as a whole, Folsom sellers are competing with a fairly low percentage of bank owned homes. 6.7% of the homes that sold in August of 2007 were bank owned (REO), compared with 0% (no bank owned sold) in August of 2006. In inventory, bank owned homes make up 5.3% of the unsold homes, with 23 REOs to a total of 436 active homes for sale. Inventory is relatively low at just under six months.

There’s been some talk lately of vacation and second homes are the best investments especially in a slow real estate market and I would like to offer my own hometown here as a perfect place for such an investment.

Pollock Pines, CA is a little “city” of about 4700 people about 50 miles from Sacramento. Described by many in the past as a bedroom community or a place people retired in, this friendly city is now home to many who work in Folsom, Placerville, and even Sacramento.

The great diversity in home prices seems attractive to many as well. In 2006, 156 homes sold in Pollock Pines for a minimum price of $179,000 to a high of $873,000. In 2007, 103 homes in Pollock Pines have sold for a low of $87,500 and a high of $830,000.

Currently on the market are still 147 single family homes for sale between $129,000 and $2,650,000 putting the median at just under $360,000.

But you better be prepared for snow in the winter - Pollock Pines is at 4000 feet above sea level.

We’ve changed the way we publish our video photo tours, using new software that lets us create a movie in a number of different formats. The good news for our clients is that we’re able to publish their video photo tours of their home more widely than ever before.

For example, today we published the video for our seller’s listing on 3400 Fort Jim Road to a number of online video hosts, including:

• Google Video
• Yahoo! Video

And of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t also include it on YouTube.

In addition, we’ve published links to the video in our vFlyer ad for this property. The link in the lower left corner of the flyer now takes you to the video. What’s cool about having it here is that the video link also appears in the Craigslist ad (I won’t link to that here because it gets updated once per week, but I checked, and it’s there).

I will be holding 2792 Sterling Way in Cameron Park open this Saturday from 11 am - 1 pm.

We have a flyer for it here on the main site, but I wanted to reiterate. This is a two story four bedroom (all upstairs) two and a half bath home (two full baths upstairs, one half bath downstairs) on a quarter acre lot. The kitchen has been completely remodeled with granite countertops and new stainless steel appliances.

The home also boasts a family room with a granite front fireplace and a bay window in the living room. All in all, it’s a great place to entertain family and friends. So stop by and take a peek!

Asking price $459,000.

This report covers residential real estate sales for East Sacramento (95819).

East Sacramento’s real estate market continues to defy the statistics for the rest of Sacramento County, with strong prices and low inventory. This year’s average home sold for $486,300, 11% more than last year’s average of $438,041. Granted, this year’s home was just over 100 square feet bigger, but even adjusted for square footage, prices rose slightly from August to August. Last August the sold price per square foot was $346.55, while this August that number had risen .4% to $347.85. Only the median price showed any wear and tear, dropping 1.9% from $415,000 to $407,250.

As we reported for July, the numbers for East Sac continue to be strong. For example, in August, where average days on market decreased. This year the average was forty days, 13% lower than last month’s forty-six. Likewise the expired to sold ratio is down this year, from 56.5% to to 26.7%. Inventory is low at 3.63 months, down from 3.91 months last month.

Foreclosures are the exception to the rule in East Sacramento. Of the eighty-four active units in inventory, only 3 of them (3.6%) are bank owned. No bank-owned homes sold in August of this year or last year.

We’ve put up a new section on the web site dedicated to listings of Sacramento foreclosures. Here we have a complete list based on the MLS that we’ll update every week or so of bank owned properties (also known as REO or “Real Estate Owned”) throughout Sacramento County. Those areas with no foreclosures in inventory don’t appear here — those that do are arranged in order from the areas with the most foreclosures on top, on down.

The current page is a kind of “browse” interface, but I may also put together a minimal sort of search interface on top of this as well, probably featuring price range and area to start out with.

As far as I know this is the only complete and free list of foreclosures available in Sacramento. All the properties here are listed in the MLS and so are available to buy now.

The queries are a tad on the slow side but are not too bad. If it gets too painful I may go ahead and do some tweaks to optimize that. Let me know if you have any problems using the list — otherwise enjoy! Let me know if there’s any particular statistical data that might be useful, and if it’s not too heavy on the rocket science I’ll put it together.

They’re going to live there for a while, so it’s technically not a flip. But my clients that bought a fixer close to Curtis Park last October have made such a difference to their house I was amazed. I spent some time with them this morning and came away quite stunned.

The stairs leading to the front door have been redone. The house has been painted. The floors are new (bamboo) and the bathroom has been completely gutted and redone with new fixtures and vanity. (They did it for $1000 which is extremely thrifty!) The kitchen cabinets have been removed and all new appliances have been put in. The garage which was almost falling over has been stood back up. The lawn is back (there was carpet on the ground!) and all new plants and flowers dot the backyard and front. The termite-ridden back deck has been removed and a new one will be put back up.

And it is all sweat equity.

In their own words, they never spend a single weekend doing anything but working on the house and if they do anything else they feel guilty. Oh, to be young and working on your first home! Sigh!

Purva Brown just listed this beautiful home just a stone’s throw from my house.

Because it’s just down the street from me, I know that it’s in walking distance to a dog park, and even nicer, to Cameron Park Lake, which recently was the subject of my Cameron Park Lake video (based on my walk around the lake of the same name).

But seriously. You should live here. It works for me.

In response to a floor call inquiry, I pulled up information on condos located around La Riviera and Salmon Falls and came away pleasantly surprised. Yes, I know I’m going to get blamed again for being an optimist in this market but this time it seems like I might have the numbers to support my theory that real estate in the right location does well for its buyers in any market. And homes around the American River seem to agree.

Even condos, which historically fall in value faster than single family houses.

Consider this: in the overall Sacramento condo market, in which there are or have been 1478 condos for sale in the last six months, only 39% have sold or are pending sale. Contrast this with the La Riviera neighborhood, where there have been only 31 condos for sale. And 51.6% of those are pending sale or have already been sold.

Difference in median price? Not astoundingly different. Overall Sacramento market condos - the median sits at $215,000. For La Riviera, it sits at $210,000.

We recently listed a beautiful 4 bedroom, 2 bath home on over three acres of peaceful Placerville pine forest. This 1950 square foot home has a great back yard with a huge deck and pool that is ideal for entertaining. Inside, the seller’s pride of ownership and taste for decorating shows throughout. Please check out the video (below).

3400 Fort Jim Road, Placerville, CA 95667

It’s nice to know I’m not the only person running around saying, Buy, buy, buy.

I was listening to the radio the other day and heard someone very respected for his opinions on finance (no, I will not drop names, but I will say this person is respected because he’s a self-made millionaire) say that if you are a first-time buyer you have almost nothing to lose by buying now. So what if prices fall another 10% - if you plan on holding on to the house for five years or so, you will still walk away with a nice profit, tax-free. However, if you get too cute about trying to time the bottom of the market, you will most likely miss it.

And yes, I know I get paid to sell homes. But even if I weren’t, this would be my advice: buy a home. Especially if you’re a first-time buyer. The opportunities are out there. And so are the bargains.

The table below shows the bank owned properties that are currently listed in the MLS for Sacramento County, sorted by the area with the most foreclosures first. All of these have already been foreclosed on by the bank and we can assist you with the purchase of any of these homes. The average price for these real estate owned properties is given in the last column.

We will have listings available on the web site soon!

Ever since Elite Properties fell out of favor with a certain search engine we all love, John has been having sleepless nights and in general been very negative. So imagine my surprise when he came up with the most positive thing he has said in a long time with the fortune cookie.

It’s like I don’t know him at all.

But I think some people are like that. They need a challenge to show their true colors. No, I’m not rambling. This is related to real estate, I promise. Because see, those are the people that are selling real estate today. We like challenges. We also like our first time buyers, and we like this not rushed phase where our clients can actually feel like they’re shopping and we have enough time to devote to our very best clients.

Those of us are making very strategic moves. Slowly but surely. And we’re here to stay.

Remember that when the market turns around and you want to hire a discount broker who will list your home for $1,000 because he just got his license yesterday. (Sorry to be bitchy, but now that John’s the optimist, we need some balance around here.)

And oh yeah, we’re back at the number one (and number two) spot!

I’ve been looking into the possibility of publishing a list of bank owned properties in the Sacramento area.  It’s not a difficult task, since I have most of the data in the database that feeds our condo listings and SacramentoHomeShopper.com’s listings by zip code.  In fact, arguably it’s easier than displaying “regular” listings, since Metrolist’s export facility becomes brain-dead after a certain number of listings, but it should handle the number of REOs in a walk.

Judging from August’s real estate market update, Sacramento County buyers are favoring the bank owned properties, and with good reason — the discounts are fairly substantial.

To whet your appetite while we put this together, we should have a report on the top thirty or so zip codes in the county for foreclosure listings — coming soon to a Sacramento real estate blog near you.

I love fortune cookies.

Maybe I’m just hungry now, thinking about Chinese food, but the quote I saw on Google Desktop, which ultimately comes from the Quotations Page, struck me as being a lot like a fortune cookie:

“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”

– Sir Francis Bacon

(Mmmm… unexplained Bacon).

I’m hoping this is true, and that it’s my fortune for what I’m going to do now that I’ve lost a bit of ground in the search engines, which happened recently.

And here I thought gaining that ground was making more opportunities than I found.

You mean I have to do it AGAIN???

Well, I guess that’s what’s meant by bringing home the Bacon.

Anyway, I better get going on this appointment I have, or I’m going to miss my opportunity for dinner, Chinese or otherwise.

I’m back from vacation and ready to go! A new listing is coming up tomorrow in Cameron Park. The sign might take a few days to install, but the home will be in the Metrolist MLS and here, of course. It’s a four bedroom, three bath home on a quarter acre lot. Terms are very negotiable, so be sure to take a look.

I will have a few Open Houses, especially since the weather has changed and buyers don’t immediately keel over from the heat once they step out of their cars. It’s fall. Great time to plant trees.

Now, don’t you want a nice big backyard for that tree?

Residential real estate sales in Sacramento County in August were sluggish compared to a year ago at the same time, with a noteworthy number of the sales being made up of bank owned properties. The average home that sold in Sacramento County in August was a 1717 square foot home that listed for $374,731 and sold for $364,256, or just over 97% of list price. The average sale price was down 11% from last year’s average sale price of $409,081. At $325,000, this August’s median sale price was down 12.2% from last August’s median of $370,000. Sold price per square foot was down 12.7%, from $242.92 last year to $212.15 this year.

Unit volume was down 30.4% from last year. Last August, 1216 units sold, while this August, the number had dropped to 846. The expired to sold ratio rose from 77.2% to 106.3% — i.e., more homes expired in August than sold.

All around, August wasn’t a great month.

In my opinion, the real story that stands out in August is the number of foreclosures. Last August less than one per cent of the homes that sold were REOs (”Real Estate Owned”, i.e., bank owned properties). This August that number has risen to 25.3%.

Bank owned properties are selling faster than non-bank-owned. Though REOs made up 25.3% of August’s sales, they comprise 16.2% of active inventory. So clearly they’re outselling non-REO properties, even though they’re often sold as is.

There’s a good reason for this, of course: price. Recall our average sold price per square foot in August: $212.15. If we break that down between REOs and non-REOs, we get $177.10 for the bank owned properties and $222.49 for the properties that are not bank owned.

The difference in price between REOs and non-REOs works out to something just over a 20% discount.

We have more of them.

Let’s go shopping.

Let’s try it out.  Supposedly all one has to do to create an enclosure in Wordpress is link to an audio file.

Quiet, numbskulls, I’m broadcasting.

Well, this post is sort of a mixed bag.  On the one hand, it’s a heads up about Maureen Francis’ article about FHA, Foreclosures and Foregiveness.

Under the hood, it’s more of a test post.  I’m writing this post from out a new browser, Flock, which I learned about through the Web 2.0 list of Web 2.0 Links.  (I think that title was written by someone who works in the Department of Redundancy Dept.)  Anyway, this new browser, Flock, is interesting in that it contains integrated blogging tools and an RSS reader with, and can detect whether a page you’ve landed on has a feed, among other handy Web 2.0ish tricks.

The blogging tool is fairly primitive once you’re used to Livewriter, but it’s interesting that it all hangs together.

Blogged with Flock

Well, here it is only 2007 and I’m finally getting around to uploading some video to the Internets.

I’m so behind. I’m sure others have already abandoned video in favor of smell-o-vision and other more leading edge “new media”.

My ultimate goal in this is to have yet another place (or bunch of other places) for my clients listings to go, such as YouTube and Yahoo Video. I also want to do some real estate screencasts about topics buyers and sellers may find useful.

As an experimental first video created with Pinnacle Studio, here’s a slide show based on my walk around Cameron Park Lake. The YouTube version is below, or there’s a slightly larger MP4 Version available from my Cameron Park Real Estate page.

I sometimes find myself feeling badly about some of the information I publish here, especially the market updates, thinking that the information they contain might be somewhat boring or trivial. Given this message I read today from Amazon.com, however, I’m beginning to think my web site is the soul of profundity itself. Thank you, Amazon, for lowering the bar, and for giving me a good laugh.

The language in this is quite off-color, so if that sort of thing offends you, don’t click it. Otherwise it’s a hillarious look at what a coroprate board meeting might look like if it were peopled by some of the commenters who might follow you home like a parade of unbidden rats from someone else’s blog.

This was originally published by CollegeHumor, a site that’s well worth your time if you have any sort of funny bone.