Sacramento Real Estate Blog

We’ve updated our listings database.  It was getting pretty long in the tooth there.

Most people who are users of our web site(s) probably don’t know it, but many of our web sites including this one, our Roseville real estate site and our Elite Properties company site actually rely on two different databases of listings.  When you use our search page, for example, you’re using a listings database that’s our IDX company gets from our Metrolist database.  These listings are updated daily, so when you do a search, you’re looking at listings that are within twenty-four hours of being as current as the ones that we as Realtors® can look at..

In addition to the search tools that our IDX company provides, however, we also wanted to allow you to browse for certain types of listings.  One thing our IDX system doesn’t do, for example, is show you short sales and foreclosures.  Because we don’t have direct access to the database our IDX company uses, we’ve created a second database that we can use in various ways.

For example, our foreclosure search page lets you search for foreclosures and short sales, or browse them by county.  Similarly our new homes section let’s you see homes that have just been built that are listed in the MLS, and our condo pages contain links to condos grouped by price and county.

As we mentioned above, we’ve also used this database on some of our other sites.  Many clients find us through our the maps of listings by zip code that we maintain on our company site.  These maps include zip codes in El Dorado County, Placer County, and Sacramento County.  Within each zip code you can find active listings and get recent market data.  We publish similar data for Placer County only on our Roseville site.

Unlike our IDX system, which is updated automatically on a daily basis, these other resources are updated manually as time permits.

We realize that from a software perspective, that’s not the brightest way to do it.  But if you’ve ever tried to get someone from Metrolist to call you back about a data feed, you probably have a good idea that it’s not half-dumb from an organizational perspective.

The good news is, it’s up to date now.  So as my wife is fond of saying, “Get your red hot houses here!”

Enjoy.

Related links:

Real Estate in El Dorado County — January Market Update
Sacramento Area Foreclosures, Short Sales, Condos, etc. etc.
Sacramento Area Foreclosure Search Page

Placer County experienced a large drop-off in unit sales in September, though not as dramatic as Sacramento County’s. With 235 units selling in September of 2007 versus 362 in September of 2006, unit volume was off 35.1%. Thus, although the number of units that expired (i.e., failed to sell within their listing period) was down somewhat, the ratio of those that expired to those that sold rose from 87.8% to 129.4%.

This September the average home sold for 9.7% less than last September, if you look at sold price per square foot. Last year the sold price per square foot was $240.28, while this September it was $216.99. The actual average sale price increased, from $486,086 last September to $489,748 this September, a .8% increase. Of course, the reason we use the sold price per square foot as a better indicator is that this average hides the fact that this year’s average sold home was 11.6% bigger! At $415,000, the median sale price this September was down 4.6% from last September’s median of $435,000.

Bank owned properties accounted for 16.6% of the sales in September, compared to less than one per cent last year. In active inventory, bank owned homes account for 9.5% of the homes available (based on 300 REOs out of the 3154 available homes).

Inventory in Placer County is high, but still the lowest of the greater Sacramento area we typically write about at 9.5 months.

Related links:

Placer County Real Estate Market Update
Sacramento Area Foreclosure Search Page
Sacramento Real Estate Listings Updated

For some time now, we’ve had a Sacramento Foreclosures section where you could browse for Bank Owned Properties or Short Sales by county in El Dorado, Placer, and Sacramento County.

We’ve now added a Foreclosure Search Form to make it a little easier to:

• Select only in the areas you’re interested in, across all three counties.
• Narrow your selections by price range.

We’ve kept it really simple, but hopefully this basic functionality makes things a bit easier.  Please give it a try and let me know if you run into any problems!

Related links:

Real Estate in El Dorado County — January Market Update
Sacramento Area Foreclosures, Short Sales, Condos, etc. etc.
Sacramento Area Foreclosure Search Page

I’ve updated our site home lists, including the sections for:

• Condos
• New Homes
• Foreclosures

Most of these sections are pretty much “browse only” as of now, but I plan to have a search tool in place for the foreclosures soon — probably some time this week.

A client once told me that it’d be nice to have such a thing for the new homes section as well, so I may tackle that this week as well.

Enjoy.

Related links:

Real Estate in El Dorado County — January Market Update
Sacramento Area Foreclosures, Short Sales, Condos, etc. etc.
Sacramento Area Foreclosure Search Page

We’ve improved our Sacramento Foreclosures portion of the site this morning with two enhancements.  First, if you scroll past the foreclosure listings offer, you’ll be rewarded with a set of foreclosure “Frequently Asked Questions”.  Actually, to be perfectly frank, I think the best questions here are the ones that aren’t frequently asked — and that may keep some people from ignoring the real opportunity that buying a foreclosure represents.  We’ve tried to answer those as well.

The second improvement is that we’ve now added Placer County and El Dorado County to the areas where you can browse short sales and bank owned foreclosures.  Those links are all available from the main foreclosure page, but for your convenience, here they are again:

Bank Owned Properties:

El Dorado County

Placer County

Sacramento County

Short Sales:

El Dorado County

Placer County

Sacramento County

Related links:

Real Estate in El Dorado County — January Market Update
Sacramento Area Foreclosures, Short Sales, Condos, etc. etc.
Sacramento Area Foreclosure Search Page

Like most greater Sacramento markets, Placer County has had its share of the reversal of fortunes of 2005-2007 (or make that 2005 to 2000-when?), but August’s numbers are less dramatic than others we’ve seen. The average home sold for $518,108 in August, or 96.4% of the average list price of $537,549. This year’s average home was 7.1% bigger than last year’s, so while the average sale price dropped only 0.6% from last year’s average of $521,393, the sold price per square foot dropped 7.2%, from $249.47 last year to $231.50 this year. Likewise the median price fell 8.4% from year to year, from $453,000 last year to $415,000 this year. This compares favorably to a 12.2% drop for Sacramento County from August to August, and 14.8% for El Dorado County during the same period.

Last year, of 338 homes sold, none of them were REOs (bank owned foreclosures). This year, of 275 sold homes, 40 (12.0%) were REOs. This is a huge jump in absolute terms, of course, but it is approximately similar to El Dorado County’s 11.6% REO sale rate, and much lower than Sacramento County, in which fully a quarter (25.3%) of August’s sales were bank owned.

Approximately 339 homes have sold per month over the past year, on average. There are 3242 active listings in Placer County currently, putting the unsold inventory figure at 9.7%.

Related links:

Placer County Real Estate Market Update
Sacramento Area Foreclosure Search Page
Sacramento Real Estate Listings Updated