Sacramento County Real Estate Market Update
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).
