Sacramento County Real Estate

Sacramento County Real Estate Market Update

Posted by John Lockwood on March 4th, 2008

Greetings, market statistics fans! Straighten up those pocket protectors and hang on to your slide rules, because it’s time once again for us to catch up on our REM sleep with yet another thrilling installment of our never-ending saga: Sacramento (County) Real Estate Market Updates!

And the crowds went wild.

The good news: 905 units sold in February, up some ten per cent from January. Unit volume was even up marginally from last February — and, yes, this still holds true when you adjust for the leap year. February’s unit volume was the highest since last July, when 977 units sold.

The average home sold for $273,603 in February, up slightly over January’s average of $269,301, but down 29.9% from last February’s average sale price of $390,043. The median sale price of $249,000 was down 29.2% from last February’s median of $353,000. Sold price per square foot is down 28.8% from February to February, at $162.76 this year versus $228.63 last year.

The 905 units that sold in February is not bad for a late winter month where the average over the preceding twelve months was 968 units per month. Currently there are 9,866 homes on the market, which works out to be 10.2 months of inventory. 33.9% of the homes in active inventory are short sales, but as we’ve reported earlier and a variety of our colleagues in other markets have reported since, the closing rate for short sales is much lower, at 6.6% in February. Bank foreclosures (REOs), in contrast, make up 28% of the current active inventory (2,763 of the 9,866 available units), but in February they accounted for 59.2% of the homes that sold in Sacramento County (542 out of 905 total sales).

Sacramento Area Foreclosures, Short Sales, Condos, etc. etc.

Posted by John Lockwood on February 25th, 2008

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.

Sacramento Real Estate Median Sale Prices

Posted by John Lockwood on November 1st, 2007

Well, it’s that time of the month again, when all the real estate bloggers race to publish the latest real estate statistics based on what happened last month. The October numbers are still trickling in, so I’ll publish a full market report in a day or two, but meantime I thought I’d whet your appetite with a chart.

This one shows median prices for residential real estate in Sacramento County, according to MLS data.

(Chart the chart for a larger version).

Sacramento Real Estate Blog

Home of the Sacramento Market Update and Ask The Realtor®