Sacramento Regional Real Estate Trends for October 27, 2007

Since I'm late and in a hurry, I'll be light on the commentary this week. One noteable milestone was reached this week: the median asking price for a house in Sacramento crossed below the $300,000 threshold for the first time in recent memory. Also, FIT market share seems to be stabilizing. What this means remains to be seen.

Note: The picture on the left is from last night's thunderstorm. I think it captures the mood rather nicely...

So it goes

From today's Capitol Weekly:


So it goes...

Inventory Weirdness

As a followup to Lander's post, here's the latest inventory graph for Sacramento County (includes pendings):


Yep, mid-October inventory in Sac is the same as it was in late August. It's 10% higher than it was last year at this time. Calculated Risk has a good writeup on the new national sales/inventory data; Sacramento seems to be following the national trend.

Notable Listings

Today's notable listing is one I happened to stumble across while running some comps for a fellow blogger looking in the Folsom area. After taking a closer look at the tax records, it appears the so called "tightening of lending standards" still isn't tight enough. Read on...

3160 sq ft house in Folsom listed at $799K and sells for $764K on 7/2/07. Buyers get two loans with Countrywide, one in the amount of $611,200 and the other for $53,800. Total loan amount of $665K. Then just over a month later they get a third loan for $230K with River City Bank. They're now at $895K on a $764K purchase.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions...

Sacramento Regional Real Estate Trends for October 20, 2007

One big story this week has to be the decline in asking prices. The median asking price in Sacramento County has reached $300,000 for the first time in several years. It has fallen 21% since April 2006. Notice the exponential increase in the inventory of $0-$200K priced houses during the last few months as well:



On the overall inventory side, there was actually a slight increase over last week:


And, last but not least, after a slight moderation in growth rate, Sellers In Trouble inventory made another strong jump this week. Nearly one in four houses on the market in Sacramento County are now asking to take a loss:



SIT asking price losses in Sac County now total about $170,000,000, with an average loss of 17% of the previous sale price:



The flipper metric continues to improve, which indicates that bank-held REO property has yet to hit the market in a significant way. Since foreclosures are recorded as sales by the county, these houses will be classified by my data system as "flippers" when they're listed for sale:

Sacramento Regional Real Estate Trends for October 13, 2007

Not a whole lot of time this week, so I'll let the graphs do the talking. Not a lot of change over last week anyway.

Real Estate Tidbits

It's Friday, and I'm happy to be a renter! We just found a new rental property in Elk Grove since our current landlord has decided to sell his house. He had it listed for about 6 months before we rented it last year, but somehow he thinks things have turned around so he should be able to sell it for more this time...A few interesting (at least to me) things for today:

1) Elk Grove currently has 1596 homes on the market and an inventory of 14.7 months. However, what's more revealing of Elk Grove is that 49.2% of the homes listed in MLS are either a short sale or REO. 786 homes meet this criteria for Elk Grove!

2) I was talking to a pastor of our church the other day, and he told me one of the members came in for advice (the member is about 75 years old, retired, barely making it) on a housing situation. Apparently, this guy had owned a house for many years, and received a call from a lender saying his mortgage payments could be reduced by $600/month. The guy jumped on this since his fixed income wasn't getting any higher. Well, turns out the savings was only for 3 months, and now his payment has gone up to $4,000 a month, which is more than he makes for said month.

3) About a month ago, I wrote a post about a short sale I was involved in. I checked back with the sellers and they still haven't received a notice of default. 5 months of making no payments and they still haven't been served.

4) Came across what I'm going to call a bargain in real estate the other day in MLS. A 4400 sf home in Wilton at the Ranch was listed at $589,900 ($134/sf). The home was an REO and was purchased for $1.25M in June of 2006. 100% financing too. Bank took it back on 8/28/07 for $1,057,729. Not a bad day's work. It went pending within 6 hours of being listed too. Can't wait to see the sales price.

5) About a year and a half ago, I showed a client some condos in the Elk Grove area. The prices were $275,000 for their 3 bedroom model of 1168SF. Just saw the same condos in MLS listed at $165,000. Fortunately, the client waited and decided to rent.

6) Some friends I know decided in late 2005 that they had to have a house. They had bad credit, but they were convinced they had to buy now or forever be priced out (through a relative who happened to be an agent). They convinced the parents to get the loan fully in their name since the couple couldn't qualify on their own. I'm sure 99% of you know where this is going. Yep, the couple is filing BK and the parents are being foreclosed on as I write this and have to file BK too. The parents both had 800+ credit scores before this. Oh, they paid $445K for the house and they're now listed at $325K. And it was 100% financing with interest only payments.


Nothing like some cheery news to get the weekend started huh???

Sacramento Regional Real Estate Trends for October 6, 2007

The only real stat story continues to be the market stress indicators. As Agent Bubble recently pointed out, one out of every three listings in the four county Sacramento area is labeled as some form of "distressed". This is born out in the hard data as well, with nearly one out of four houses for sale in Sac County (and about one in five for the four-county area) actually selling for less than it sold for last time:






The rest of the data shows the typical Fall pattern taking place (albeit at a slower pace than previous years.) (Note: there is a slight 1.9% difference between mine and AB's inventory number. This is most likely due to the different data sources he and use being slightly out of sync in time.)

Distressed Properties Update

Well, it's official, 1 in every 3 homes in the 4 county area is now either a short sale or foreclosure. We had 739 new additions to the roster from last month. Inventory seems to be holding steady, but if it starts dropping anytime soon, expect to see this ratio to get even higher.