Vickis' Blog: Local Real Estate Stats

      
The summer real estate season is over in Davis and the students have come back to town to fill up the rental homes and apartments. The number of homes sold in Davis was down in the summer quarter compared to the same period in 2008.

Why are sales down? One reason might be the change in lending standards that have occurred since the financial “meltdown” that took place last fall. With tighter credit standards, it’s harder to get home loans, so less people are qualifying as prospective buyers. Fewer buyers can mean fewer sales, and usually lower prices. The median price is also affected by the simple fact that entry level homes and first time buyers are moving faster than the rest of the market due to the $8,000 first time buyer tax credit…

The first question local friends and neighbors ask when the subject of real estate comes up is "how much are prices down"?  It's a simple question that can lead to complicated answers.

The question needs to be more specific -

For what time period?

This year?

From the market top?

The answer is different depending on the type of home you are talking about.

Condo or Single Family Home?

Conventional wisdom says that the high-end homes have taken a bigger hit because the volume of buyers at that level has fallen off.  Conventional wisdom also says that lower priced homes have held up better because there is still demand at the low end (more so now with first time buyer tax incentives).

There was a headline in the New York Times this…

Well, another year comes to a close for Davis, California real estate.

So we make a quick check to see how the market did compared to 2007. 

Although no chart goes up forever, we count ourselves lucky in Davis that our housing market has not been hit as hard as some other areas of the country.

In other areas of the Central Valley, we have seen the volume of sales increase in 2008 because the median home price was falling at 20% or more from 2007. In some area markets, 50% or more of the sales are short sales or foreclosures.  This is not the case in Davis.

Since prices have remained relatively stable in Davis (down just 5% from 2007), we have not seen the pick up in sales volume that other towns in the Sacramento area have experienced. The chart…

After dropping to 36 homes sold in July, with the Average price per square foot falling below $300, sales of single family homes in Davis, California rebounded slightly in August.

As you can see, the number of homes sold steadily increased each month to a peak of 65 in June, then fell off to 36 in July. It has now rebounded to 46 in August.  Meanwhile, the average price per square foot has remained in the $300 to $335 range all year.

There are currently 112 single family homes and 20 condos listed in the MLS for Davis. 

Average days on the market remains at 57, just about where it was a year ago.

The accompanying chart tells the story:

According to the June real estate reports from the Sacramento Bee , Home prices in Sacramento and Yolo County have dropped by 27% to 30% from a year ago, and this price drop has spurred a buying frenzy which has shot homes sales volume up 30% to 60% over the June 2007 activity.

But the little town of Davis, just 12 miles west of Sacramento and sitting in the heart of Yolo County, is bucking this trend. For Davis, the median price has dropped just 6% from a year ago, and maybe because of that, the volume increase seen in other areas has not hit Davis, with sales for 2008 YTD actually down 33% from the same period in 2007.

There are some circumstances that might contribute to this anomaly, so let's take a moment to talk about them;

The rest of Yolo County…