Posts Tagged ‘Condos’

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

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 County Condos – 2007 Market Year in Review

Our recent Sacramento Real Estate Year in Review article covered condos as well as other residential types like single family homes and halfplexes.  Today we turn to our attention to condos only, to see how they compare to the general category. 

When I looked at the numbers, the results were surprising given the traditional wisdom that condos are the first to fall in a down market and the last to rise in an up market.

Comparing 2006 to 2007 overall for all of Sacramento County, we find that the average condo sold in 2007 for $236,914, down 6.9% from 2006′s average of $254,370.  2007′s median price for a condo was $218,000, down 7.2% from last year’s median of $235,000.  On a sold price per square foot basis, the average condo’s value fell 10.8% during the same period, from $218.16 in 2006 to $194.51 in 2007.

As we saw for residential units overall, the numbers from December to December were more dramatic than the year to year numbers.  Sacramento County Condo values fell some 18.7% on a sold price per square foot basis from 2006 to 2007.  Though of course that’s a non-trivial drop, it’s somewhat smaller than the sold price per square foot drop of 21.8% from December to December for the residential category generally.

I suspect the traditional wisdom that condos are the big losers in a down market fails to take into effect the slight but real differences in the number of foreclosures on condos.  Among all residential categories, the number of bank owned foreclosures (REOs) sold in December was 47.2% of all sales — for condos that number was 28.1%.  Similarly in active inventory, short sales and REOs make up 55.7% of inventory for all residential units, but 46.4% for condos. 

There are two possible reasons for this.  The more obvious one is that condos are cheaper, so buyers were less overextended and therefore slightly less likely to default.  Another possibility — but I haven’t researched it so I only raise it as a conjecture — is that it’s possible more condos were owner occupied and fewer were purchased as investments. 

Whatever the reason, a slightly lower default rate has helped condos retain their value somewhat better than residential properties generally.

Sacramento County Condos – Market Update

The average condo in Sacramento County sold for $248,895 in November, a .2% increase (huh?  See the statistical notes below) from last November’s average of $248,451.  The median price, however, fell 9.5%, from $245,830 last November to $222,500 this November.  The average sold price per square foot fell 8.3% during this time, from $209.84 last November to $192.35 this November.

Some 22.8% of the condos that sold in November were bank foreclosures, much lower than the overall sold foreclosure numbers of 39.9% for Sacramento County.  Similarly, just over 41% of active inventory is either a short sale or foreclosure, significantly less than the approximately 50% number we reported earlier for the Sacramento County residential inventory as a whole.

Possible Problems with the Sample Size

One of the problems you have to be aware of when dealing with statistical data is sample size.  In general, the bigger your sample, the better you can make sense of numbers like averages, median, etc.  Thus, when you talk about the average life span of an American, you want as big a sample as you can find.  If you Google “Sample size and confidence” you’ll start to get a feel for the problem.

However, in dealing with monthly real estate data, the sample size is often smaller than we’d like, but in order to say anything meaningful, we have to deal with what data we have.

The Condo Market in Sacramento County

Like the general residential market that is a part of, the market for Sacramento County Condos fell off sharply in September. The median price for a condo sold in September was $195,00, down 18.6% from last year’s median price of $239,595. The average sold price per square foot showed a similar drop of 18.3%, from $220.46 per square foot last year to $180.15 per square foot this year. The actual average was down somewhat less, since this year’s average condo was slightly larger than last. As a result, this year’s average price of $219,964 was a drop of “only” 14.9% from last September’s average of $258,597.

While the actual number of expired listings only rose 5.3%, a sharp drop in the number of sold units pushed the expired to sold ratio up dramatically. As we saw earlier, the number of overall residential sold dropped 41.3% from September to September. Condo sales lost somewhat less ground, but still dropped a sizeable 34.9%, from 86 units last September to 56 units this September. The expired to sold ratio for both months was 110.5% last September versus 178.6% this September.

Bank owned condos are selling slightly less well than their single family counterparts. Typically for single family homes, we see bank owned properties outselling other properties by about 2 to 1 (based on the percentage of bank owned properties in sales versus actives). In condos, the numbers are about dead even. In September, 17.9% of the sales (ten out of fifty-six) were condos. In active inventory, 17.4% of condos are bank owned.

Even with that in mind, however, September’s average condo buyer negotiated a fairly sizeable 7.6% discount from list price. For homes that sold, the average list price was $238,130, while the average sale price of a Sacramento County Condos as we mention above was $219,964.

Sacramento Real Estate Listings Updated

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

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.

Listing Pages Improvements

Those of you who do real estate searches from the either our main search page or many of our other search pages have access to listings that are updated six times per week.

I’m not sure why it’s six and not seven.  Presumably it’s to give FTP a Sabbath.  The point is, it’s practically daily, so it’s about as up to date as you can get without calling a Realtor up and asking him.

In addition to the search pages, there are also a lot of pages where you can browse listings, such as our foreclosure pages, the condos pages, and the new homes pages.  These pages are driven by a separate database that we maintain, that we update once per week or so.  We’ve recently improved the import mechanism on these pages to fix a few issues, so we expect these pages to more closely match our MLS (Metrolist) as time goes along.

We just did an import as well, so we’re pretty current as of now.  Enjoy!

Sacramento Condo Market

This August, eight-six condos sold in Sacramento County, down 4.4% from last year’s volume of 90 units. The average price of condos sold in August was $227,889, down 5.5% from last year’s average of $241,267. On a sold price per square foot basis, however, the drop was a much more bubbler-friendly 16.2%. Last August’s average condo was 1098 square feet in size and sold for $219.73. This year, on average the size was 1238 square feet and the sold price average was 189.36 per square foot. The median price is down 8.8% from August to August, from $225,000 last August to $206,000 this August.

Interestingly enough, however, some of the changes in the condo market are in a positive direction. The expired to sold ratio is down, albeit slightly and still well within the “buyers’ market” range, from 102.2% last year to 94.2% this year. Average days on market however have dropped 16.7%, form 90 days last year to 75 days this year.

Anecdotally, we’ve noticed some really dramatic discounts in condos we’ve been showing recently, especially among short sales and foreclosures.

Twenty-four of the eighty-one units that sold (27.9%) in August were bank owned. There are 11.4 months of unsold inventory, with 902 units active and 79 units per month selling, on average, over the past year.