June Sales (+Actives)

by Jim the Realtor | Jul 9, 2009 | Monthly Sales Count | 27 comments

The prime-time selling season runs from Super Bowl Sunday to the Fourth of July. How has your area been doing?

We should start seeing some of the unsuccessful sellers figure it out, and either cancel their listing, or lower their price over the next 30-45 days.

Here are the active detached listings for each area, the percentage of them that have been on the market for 90 days or more, the June Y-O-Y closings, and the change percentage in sales:

In bold: Triple-digit active listings, with more than half of those on the market for more than 90 days, and double-digit drop in Y-O-Y sales (beware!)

In italics:Actives = 10x last month’s solds (beware!)

Look at Rancho Santa Fe: 345 actives, and four sales last month! 86-month inventory!

‘Hotness’ Factor

by Jim the Realtor | Jun 30, 2009 | Monthly Sales Count | 35 comments

The market has been hot lately because the inventory is low.  There are only 5,880 detached, and 3,043 attached active listings in the MLS – about 38% of what it was in September 2007.

Waiting buyers are frustrated and should be jumping at new product – how are the June listings faring?

This is the chart of all the detached listings that came on the MLS in June, and the number that have gone pending.  If the market is hot, and realtors price them within 5-10% of being right, we should see a third or half of new listings selling:

Those towns are hot – there are plenty of buyers waiting, and close to half of every house listed sells right away. What about the ‘tonier’ parts of town?

Houses stand the best chance of selling when new on the market, yet SIXTY new listings have come on the MLS in Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe, and NOT ONE of them have found a buyer?

May Sales & Cost/SF

by Jim the Realtor | Jun 2, 2009 | Monthly Sales Count | 3 comments

These are the preliminary numbers of detached home sales, and cost-per-sf for May. While there are some signs of relative stability, all the hub-bub about the market improving hasn’t translated down to sales increasing yet – or cost-per-sf:

That’s a 21% decrease in cost-per-sf since last May.

March Sales

by Jim the Realtor | Apr 16, 2009 | Monthly Sales Count | 10 comments

In today’s Union-Tribune they quote nine different people about the real estate market, and the reports are remarkably similar.   Let’s give them some credit, at least they are getting closer to the truth – the lower end is hot, and the higher end is not:

San Diego County home prices remained virtually flat in March for the third straight month, with sales of entry-level homes the strongest, in the clearest sign yet that at least the market’s bottom rung may have stabilized.

The county’s median price was $285,000, unchanged from February and up $5,000 from January, MDA DataQuick reported yesterday. Sales skyrocketed to 3,020, up 43 percent from a year ago; it was the biggest increase for any March in five years.

Local buying has been dominated by low-priced foreclosure homes, which represented 51.1 percent of all resales last month, DataQuick said. It was the fourth month in a row that more than half of resales were foreclosure properties.

Prices on those discounted properties are clearly attracting heightened interest from first-time buyers and investors.   Agents such as Calvin Goad report multiple bids, often above the asking price. He recently drew nine offers on a $384,000 home in two days, with some over the $400,000 mark.

“Most of those buyers have been hanging on, trying to get the incredible deal, and the incredible deal is gone now – it was a couple months ago,” Goad said.

The only thing a stable median price might mean is that there could be more higher-end sellers who are starting to cave and actually selling their home, which would help balance the midpoint. 

Here is a link to the article:

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/apr/16/1n16housing235122-home-prices-county-still-flat-sa/

They didn’t get my quote right though.  There were 55 houses listed for sale in Rancho Santa Fe in March, and currently there are 327 active listings.