Sacramento Real Estate Blog

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.

Related links:

How Have the Credit Crisis and Bailout Affected The Real Estate Business
Sacramento County Real Estate — Sold Prices and Unit Volume Charts
Sacramento County Real Estate Market Review :: September, 2008

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.

Related links:

How Have the Credit Crisis and Bailout Affected The Real Estate Business
Sacramento County Real Estate — Sold Prices and Unit Volume Charts
Sacramento County Real Estate Market Review :: September, 2008

Metrolist MLS designates two areas as comprising “Downtown / Midtown” in Sacramento, 95816 and 95814. (To see which is which, you may find the zip code maps we’ve published elsewhere, for 95814 and 95816, to be of use.)

Today we look at 95814 by itself, which we have to do with a grain of salt. The reason is that the numbers of homes sold in this area are in general far too low to allow much in the way of generalization, much as you couldn’t guess the average height of the American male either by a single basketball player or horse jockey.

Nevertheless, for the sake of those who live there, we’ll report that this year’s nine sold units was an improvement on the the twelve-month average of four units sold per month. There are fifty-five units in inventory, which works out to a little over fourteen months worth. Only one of the four is an REO, giving us a charmingly low foreclosure rate of 1.8%, but again, remember, our overall sample size is low even at 55 actives.

The average home that sold in 95814 in July sold for $465,737, or about 97% of the average list price of $480,717. The median sale price was $475,000.

Related links:

The Real Estate Market in Downtown Sacramento
Downtown Sacramento Real Estate Market Report
Sacramento Real Estate Market - Downtown Sacramento (95814)

I just finished running the numbers for Antelope, and found a few things as expected, and a few surprises.

First of all, here’s the author’s bias: I love Antelope. I think that dollar for dollar it’s one of the nicest areas in Sacramento County, and if I were looking for a home in Sacramento County on a budget, that’s probably one of the first places I’d look.

So I was a bit surprised to find a somewhat high value for inventory in Antelope (11.71 months). Also curious was that there were so many foreclosures (REOs represent 19.6% of the current available inventory, which is higher than the county as a whole, which runs around 12.5%).

Otherwise the numbers are fairly normal. The average sold price dropped 6.3% from July to July, from $356,017 last year to $333,714 this year. This year’s crop of homes, however, is some 19.5% bigger than last year’s however, so the actual sold price per square foot dropped a huge 21.5%.

Of course, when you compare this year’s average 1852 square foot home with last year’s average 1550 square foot home, even if all the sales took place in the same time period you would expect the 1852 square foot home to sell for less per square foot (given that the fixed value of the land is spread over a bigger house). So when you take this into account, it’s possible to adjust the sold price per square foot yet again, and we come up with a more realistic drop of 12.1% from year to year.

Days on market increased 53.7% during this period, from 41 days on average last July to 63 days this July. The expired to sold ratio was about 97% last year, and about 97% this year as well. Unit volume has fallen 20%, from 45 last year to 36 this year.

The real estate market in Carmichael, California (95608) in July was a bit stronger than Sacramento County as a whole. Unit sales were the same as last year at the same time (thirty-six), though less than the twelve-month average (forty-four). The average home sold in Carmichael in July for $416,588, or 95.6% of the average list of $435,906. The average sale price this year was down 8.6% from last year’s average of $455,987, however, unlike many of the snapshots we take, the average size was down somewhat, so the average sold price per square foot was down only 4.2%. The median price dropped dramatically (13.8%), from $429,000 last year to $370,000 this year.

With unit volume staying the same and falling expireds, the expired to sold ratio in Carmichael dropped from 83.3% last year to 58.3% this year.

With 328 units unsold as of this writing, there are currently 7.5 months of inventory in Carmichael, somewhat less than for Sacramento as a whole but still in the “Buyer’s Market” category. The thirty-one foreclosures (REOs) listed in the MLS make up 9.5% of the total.

Related links:

How Have the Credit Crisis and Bailout Affected The Real Estate Business
Sacramento County Real Estate — Sold Prices and Unit Volume Charts
Sacramento County Real Estate Market Review :: September, 2008

The real estate market in Fair Oaks in July was pretty typical of Sacramento County. The average home sold for $476,462, down 1.4% from last July’s average of $483,236. However, at the same time, this year’s home was 6.4% bigger than last, so price per square foot dropped 7.4% from July to July.

I think we should borrow a phrase from Jebediah Springfield and call this process of buying a larger home for roughly the same money “embiggening“. It happens quite a bit in a lot of markets, and is certainly a commonplace in El Dorado County as well.

Back to Fair Oaks. This year’s median home sale price was $400,000, down a substantial 13.8% from last year’s median of $464,250. The average home that spold spent 48 days on the market, up 9.1% from last year’s avearge of 44. Unit volume was down to twenty-seven units, a drop of 32.5% from last year’s 40 units.

Currently there are just under 10 months of inventory in Fair Oaks, with 372 units active. Of these 472, twenty-one, or 6.8%, are bank foreclosures.

The expired to sold ratio stood at 100% (i.e., exactly the same number of listings expired as sold) in July, up from last year’s figure of 87.5%

Related links:

Fair Oaks Real Estate
Fair Oaks Real Estate Market
Fair Oaks Real Estate Market

I recently congratulated my friend Susan when she closed escrow on a beautiful home in East Sacramento. At the time I told her about some earlier articles I had written about East Sacramento in general and the fabulous forties in particular, and told her about the sense I had that East Sacramento was a sort of a market anomaly — in a really good way — in that in the midst of falling prices elsewhere in Sacramento county, East Sac was holding its own quite well.

July’s numbers certainly bear this intuitive feeling out in a really big way. East Sac is doing quite well indeed. While the average price of a home in Sacramento County fell 7.4% from July of last year to this July, the average price of a home in East Sac rose an incredible 18.5% during the same period, from $468,094 to $554,571. To be sure, this year’s “average home” was a good deal bigger, but even adjusted for square footage, the sold price per square foot did a little better than staying relatively steady. It actually rose 7/10 of one per cent from July to July (when on larger homes you’d expect it to fall just by virtue of bigger sizes). So while greater Sacramento County’s sold price per square foot fell 9.5%, East Sac’s actually rose slightly.

At the same time, many other market indicators show East Sac going strong. Days on market actually decreased during the period, from 54 days on average last year to 38 days this year. The expired to sold ratio, which stood at a “buyer’s market” 66.8% last July, was down to 17.4% this July. At the same time the ratio rose in the county from 80.5% to 103.7%. Similarly, inventory in East Sac down to 3.91 months, compared to a county-wide average of 10.7 months. While unit volume dropped 47.3% county-wide, it rose 43.8% in East Sac.

So we have:

• Low inventory
• Rising prices
• Falling expireds
• Rising unit sales volume

Hey, I remember something like that. We used to have something like that in 2004 or so. What was it we called it again?

Oh yeah, I remember: Seller’s Market!

Sweet.

Related links:

How Have the Credit Crisis and Bailout Affected The Real Estate Business
Sacramento County Real Estate — Sold Prices and Unit Volume Charts
Sacramento County Real Estate Market Review :: September, 2008