February 2008 Santa Cruz Real Estate Sales
March 14, 2008
Oy vey. Ooof. What’s a good thing to say when you’ve just managed to crawl out from under a ton of bricks that got dropped on your head? I have been slammed. Slammed, I tell you! But you probably won’t find that nearly as interesting as I do. A lot’s been happening…
Like what’s up with that Eliot Spitzer guy, anyway? There’s a guy you think would know better. You’d think. It just goes to show, the world is just full of surprises.
One thing that’s going to come as a surprise to some folks is the February real estate sales data here in Santa Cruz county. The bottom line? Business is up. That’s good news, but if you think about it, you’d realize it couldn’t actually get much worse, and even with this improvement, we’re really just kind of skipping along the bottom. If you don’t already, I invite you to subscribe to my Santa Cruz real estate newsletter, which comes out once a month, or just cruise over to my page of Santa Cruz Real Estate Market Data, which is updated monthly.
In case you’re too lazy to do either, let me summarize it into a tasty new chunklet: Santa Cruz County home sales rose 9.1% in February, woo hoo! That’s compared to January, of course. Year over year, home sales are off 46.7% from February of 2006. And, of course, I don’t have the hard data handy to back this up, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’d bet most Februarys have at least 9.1% more sales than the Januarys that precede them. So although this 9.1% sales increase is good news, mostly it’s good because if it were a decrease, that would have spelled some serious trouble.
That 9.1% is the sales volume - that is, the number of units (single-family residences - yes, your home is just a unit, like a Big Mac or a jar of Ponds Cold Cream) sold was 9.1% higher in February than in January. But if you already own a home, you may be more interested in knowing about home prices- is your home worth more, or less? Good news, good news - median home prices rose a rockin’ 11.9% from January! But don’t pop the champagne corks quite yet - prices are down, county-wide, 5.2% from February 2006.
Of course, all markets are local, so it doesn’t do a whole lot of good, really, to look at the county as a whole. But we’re Americans (a lot of us, anyway), and we like those tasty news chunklets, so probably you’d be satisfied with just knowing that one glib statistic. But if you demand more - if you are, say, a reader of The Economist - you might want to know, say, how Soquel is doing? The median price in Soquel is up a whopping 4.2%! Whereas if you’re in Watsonville, alas, the median price is down 28.7% from February in 2006. But that’s good, the rate of decline is slowing there - it was down about 40% for all of 2007.
I hope to get back to a more regular update schedule here on the blog - I need to learn to walk around the dangling net with the ton of bricks snared inside. Note to self.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 11:26am
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It’s a Swing Thing
February 18, 2008
Ahh. It’s Monday, and it’s a holiday. It’s already 8:49 AM, and my phone hasn’t rung once so far today. I’m sipping a cup o’ Joe, reading my blogs, while I ease into my day. I stumbled upon a cool animated graphic, courtesy of CNN Money/Fortune, which I think many of you will find of interest:
It’s a Flash animation, and there is no accompanying article, so it makes for an easy read. It’s interesting to see how most of the steep market declines we’ve seen over the past 50 years have been relatively short. It’s also interesting to see how prices just keep rising over the long term.
Of course, the debate is still open as to if Real Estate is a better or worse investment than the stock market - how much of the price rise shown in the chart is due to inflation, etc.? I’ll leave that to you and your financial planner to discuss, but if the answer comes out that buying a house is an OK thing to do in a down market, with an upside looming around the corner, I’ll be here.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 10:00am
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Median Santa Cruz home price drops to $599,000
February 16, 2008
Finally, the real state of the Santa Cruz county housing market is starting to show up in median home prices:
[From Santa Cruz Sentinel - Median home price drops to $599,000]
By JONDI GUMZ The median price for a single-family home in Santa Cruz County dropped to $599,000 in January, down 18 percent since December and a level not seen since 2004. … Only 63 sales closed escrow, a new low, the previous was 107 in 2006. A third of the January 2008 sales were for homes less than $500,000, more than double from previous months, and the subset of sales over $1 million, which had been as high as 25 percent, was 14 percent, the lowest in months.
For too long, the median home price has defied the reality out there on the streets, giving many buyers and especially sellers a false sense of what’s happening. Sometimes, we would see the median price inch up month over month, but for a long time it held steady at over $700,000.
But now, there’s been a significant drop in the median price, down to $599,000. Of course, it is worth noting that this is the figure for the county as a whole, and that some areas continue to hold up their values very well. That would be the usual suspects - Santa Cruz, Capitola, and pretty much anything near the beach.
And don’t go blaming Watsonville on being a drag on prices - hardly anything is selling down in Watsonville, although it had a much better month in January than it did in December, which was pretty much a train-wreck for sales. No, these lower-prices are county-wide, and even in Santa Cruz and Capitola, there are more bargains to be had than in recent years past.
The article is a good read, and it mentions that inventory is relatively low in many parts of the county, that many people who might want to sell are keeping their homes off the market, because now is not a good time to sell. That’s true, but what’s left unsaid is, what would happen if these same people found themselves in a situation where they had to sell?
Might we start seeing rising foreclosures in the rest of the county? Up until now, Watsonville (and to a lesser extent, Boulder Creek and the rest of the San Lorenzo Valley) has grabbed the lion’s share of the foreclosure activity. That’s because people tried to sell their houses, and found there were few buyers for them at the prices they were asking…and when you can’t make your house payment, and nobody wants to buy your house…you know the rest of the story.
Is this what lies in store for more of Santa Cruz county? I sure hope not, because what’s going on in Watsonville is pretty heartbreaking.
Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 9:46am
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