Sacramento Regional Real Estate Trends for April 28, 2007

Well, I'm embarrassed. Turns out that the "big drop" in high-priced inventory we saw over the last month was due to a recently made error in my code, and did not occur in reality. This same error has led me to understate overall inventory and prices as well, with the most effected being El Dorado County. I will spare you the technical details on why this happened, but rest assured, the error has been corrected.

So, let's begin with price level inventory:


As you can see, El Dorado County inventory has actually been increasing more rapidly than the other counties over the last month.

As for overall inventory, the four-county area now stands at 15,812, which is 18.7% higher than last year at this time:


The asking price trends are easier to correct for, since the large deviations are easier to mentally correct for:


Interestingly, the flipper data seem to be the least effected by the missing data:



I'm leaving out the weekly change data this week since it's too distorted to be of any value.

Thanks for bearing with me. The more complicated my code becomes, the easier it is for errors to creep in. If you have any questions about the details, or what the previous four weeks of data should look like, send me a email or write a comment.

Sacramento Regional Real Estate Trends for April 22, 2007

Four-county inventory remained steady this week after last week's big jump:


Two reasons for the lack of increase were the 200+ drop in $200-$300K inventory in Sacramento, and the 100+ drop in $900K+ inventory in Placer:


At 15,066, four-county inventory is running 15.3% higher than last year at this time.

With the drop in higher-priced inventory, average market prices in Placer fell by 4.5% over last week, although the median held steady. Average prices in Yolo came down a bit as well, most likely due to the rapid increase in $300K-$400K inventory:


Some interesting data on the flipper front in Sacramento. It appears that flipper inventory is now growing more rapidly than overall inventory for the first time since last year:



Although overall flipper inventory is still lower than its peak values from summer 2006, it now stands at 21% of the market.

All four counties saw the number of listings with price drops increase w-o-w:



Nearly 10% of all listings in Sacramento County had a price reduction last week.

Sacramento Regional Real Estate Trends for April 14, 2007

Inventory took off like a rocket this week, increasing by 631 listings, or 4.4% over last week:


Here are the weekly increases by county:

Sacramento: 4.1%
Placer:            5.3%
El Dorado:    5.0%
Yolo:               3.8%

Overall inventory is running 17.6% over last year at this time.

Increases are beginning to occur in all price ranges, with each county showing its own particular bias:


The all-time high for the $200K-$300K range in Sacramento continues to grow, but we are starting to see movement in the $350K-$400K range as well.

As for overall prices, all of the counties saw asking price drops last week except for El Dorado:


The slight increase in El Dorado is probably due to some of those expensive listings coming back on market.

Weekly change trends held fairly steady, with roughly 9% of listings showing price reductions:


In Bizarro World, I mean, Flipper World, we saw a glimmer of false hope emerge. Flipper market share in Sacramento actually decreased this week for the first time in months:


Unfortunately, this "reduction" was only due to the huge influx of non-flipper inventory that came on market last week:


Sippn and others have brought up the fact that many of these "flippers" are really bank REOs. Although it is impossible to say for certain on each individual listing, it should be possible to parse out aggregate REO data using certain filtering criteria. Once I work out the kinks, we should have a slightly clearer picture of what the market is up to.

Up, Up, and Away!

Rollingwood Details

Following up on a post by Lander (via News10), here are some details about the Rollingwood condo conversion in Fair Oaks:

- Rollingwood was bought by a "Pismo Beach developer" and "Condominium conversion maven" by the name of Al Nevis for $39.4M, or $144K per unit.

- The Nehemiah Sacramento Valley Fund (a non-profit run by Pacific Coast Capital Partners) sunk $5.5M into the project also.

- One of Nehemiahs subsidiaries runs a downpayment assistant program for low-income buyers.

- In May 2006, the IRS ruled that seller-funded down payment assistance programs do not qualify as tax-exempt.

- According to the article, sales at Rollingwood almost completely dried up after that ruling. Coincidence?

Can anyone confirm that these buyers received "assistance" from Nehemiah? Also, does anyone have any insight into how profits from this deal were split between Nehemiah and Nevis? How much of the profit escaped being taxed?

Silent Pain

There seems to be a vacuum in the media coverage of the housing collapse here in Sacramento. I see reports every day from other areas, where the local media seem to show an interest. Here's some examples I found on other blogs in one minute:

Antelope Valley struggles with memories of '90s housing crash LA
New-home sales rise, prices fall Stockton
Local foreclosures on the rise, so far SLO
Condos Feel the Mortgage Crunch DC
Housing Boom Tied To Sham Mortgages DC

All of these articles have personal stories of how the bubble collapse has directly affected someones life. All of these reporters took the time to put a national story into a local context. Rarely does this happen in Sacramento.

So, I'm putting the call out. If anyone has a personal story to share about the housing bubble, shoot me an email, and I'll publish it here. If you wish to remain anonymous, that's fine too.

It's time to put a human face on this.

Distressed Properties Update

Our latest in the Distressed Properties series shows some very interesting results. We see that distressed properties went up from 2,136 in March to 2,598 in April, representing a 21.6% increase in just one month! Inventory rose from 13,416 homes to 14,932 homes, a 11.3% increase. Worth pointing out is that in the last 30 days, we saw 1,557 homes sell. That calculates into 9.6 months of inventory right now. Back in January I predicted a 17% peak for distressed properties. Looks like I underestimated the market!

Sacramento Regional Real Estate Trends for April 7, 2007

The second quarter began with a bang here in Sacramento. Real estate listings jumped by 381, or 2.8% from last week:


Asking prices failed to recover after last week's sudden drop, mainly due to the expiration of hundreds of expensive listings that weren't renewed yet this week. El Dorado inventory in particular failed to rebound completely after last week:



Also, changes in Sacramento County asking price data are being driven almost completely by the huge increases in $200K-$300K inventory. Houses in that price range now make up over 26% of all listings, and are well above last year's peak.

Week-over-week change data has shown remarkable stability over the last four weeks. Price decreases and new listings each have comprised about 9% of the market since the beginning of March:



As for the flippers, things seemed to be holding steady in El Dorado and Placer, while Sacramento continued to deteriorate. Yolo County had a surprise jump in FITs this week as well, which brought it back to its deteriorating trend as well:



At the rate things are breaking down in Sacramento, all flippers there will be FITs by October, unless something gives.

Sacramento Sales Data Graphs: March 2007

While everybody is marveling at the February uptick in the latest NAR report, we at Sacrealstats are already in March. Here are the latest monthly sales graphs, with data courtesy of Agent Bubble. As you can see, last months good news was short-lived. Prices are down 8.4% from last March, and 11% from the peak.

Countrywide Financial REOs in Sacramento

A fellow by the name of Dimitris has started up a blog tracking Countrywide Financial's REO inventory, and I thought it would be interesting to see how CFC is doing here in Sacramento.

(For those of you who are interested, CFC currently posts a list of all the property they have repossessed due to foreclosures (REO). The list can be found here. Beware, the list takes a long time to load.)

Once I was aware of these data, I became very interested to discover what CFCs approach was for ridding itself of these houses. Boy, was I surprised.

According to Dimitris, CFC has 177 REOs in the Sacramento area. Running the addresses against my database yielded some startling results:

- Only 42 of the 177 were listed in the MLS as of March 31. (38 on March 24)
- 68 appear to be purchase defaults (purchased within the last four years)
- 109 appear to be refi defaults (purchased more than four years ago)
- On 29 of the 68, CFC is asking for a profit based on REO book value

Here is a typical example:

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8032 GOLDEN RING WAY ANTELOPE, CA 95843

Total Gain: $42,037 Percent Gain: 13.4% Asking Price: $354,900 Bedrooms:3 Baths: 2 Sq. feet:1622 Listing History: Down 15.5% from $419,900 On 2006-04-09 Down 4.1% from $369,900 On 2006-12-30 Down 2.5% from $363,900 On 2007-02-24 Previous Sales: Sold on 2004-04-13 for $294,500 Sold on 2006-12-01 for $312,863 MLS# 60134688 Google Maps Assessed Value Property Tax Bill

---

Although this is a relatively small data set, it does betray an undercurrent in this market that has remained pretty well-hidden until recently. How many other REO holders are keeping back inventory? How long can they hold out before they're forced to sell? One thing's for sure: A third player is about to enter the Sacramento market in a big way.

As a companion piece to this post, I put together a bonus Countrywide Edition over on the Flippers In Trouble blog. Enjoy.

First Quarter 07 Sales Stats

Let's take a look at the sold stats from the first quarters of 2005-2007. I compared stats for all four surrounding counties (Yolo, Sacramento, El Dorado, and Placer).

2005 - 7,574 sales
2006 - 5,395 sales (drop of 28.8% from 05)
2007 - 4,174 sales (drop of 22.6% from 06)

Now, let's take a look at the data broken down by month:


The interesting thing to note here is the increase in sales that typically occurs from February to March. In 2005 and 2006, we saw increases of 53% both years. However, in 2007, there was only an 11% increase. Also worth noting is that for 2005, the highest sales month was June with 3,627 sales and for 2006 it was March with 2,366. Think about what this means for 2007 if we're only at 1,528 sales in March and March has typically been the highest (or very close to it) month of the calendar year.

Sacramento Regional Real Estate Trends for March 31, 2007

Four county inventory dropped slightly by 73 listings to 14,064, due to end of the month expirations:


Interestingly, the vast majority of these expirations occurred in the $900K+ range. In Placer, El Dorado, and Sacramento Counties, there were 362 $900K+ listings that expired:


These expirations had a major impact on average prices in all three counties:


So, where are all these expensive houses located? Once again, we turn to Google Earth for the answer:




Although the listings were highly clustered in El Dorado and Placer, only 39 of the 362 listings are two-year flips. Are these just people trying to get lucky, and failing? Are they investors with a 2+ year time horizon? Are they builders trying to offload newly built spec inventory? Will they re-list by next week to get in on the hot spring selling season? Stay tuned.

On the weekly price change front, decreases continued at an 8% rate in Sacramento and Placer, and a 6% rate in Yolo and El Dorado. In Sacramento, 780 listings saw price reductions over last week:



In flipper world, the conditions in Sacramento County continued to deteriorate this week, as FITs continued their upward trend that began last April. One bright spot seems to be Placer County, where FITs seem to be conceding market share back to the regular resale market. And yes folks, the numbers are dropping as well:




Could this be the beginning of the healing process for the Placer County market? I have no idea, but I would like to leave you with something to think about. This graph has been floating around the mortgage bubble sphere for a couple of weeks, and I think it is worth sharing. It is an ARM reset schedule for all adjustable-rate mortgages outstanding as of January 1, 2007. The data was gathered by Credit Suisse analysts, and it is the first time I have seen this data:


As you can see, we are clearly in the earliest stage of what could become a major credit event that could continue for the next several years. How many people have ARMs in this town? How many people cannot afford their newly adjusted payment?

We are about to find out.