Placer County Real Estate Sales Report
Slow and Steady Wins The Race In The Placer County Real Estate Market
Despite news that pending sales have declined nationwide in April, click here for the article, the Placer County real estate market pending sales numbers, year over year, have shown a 5.5% increase.
Placer County Real estate data is again hyper local. During the housing crash, national news was more relevant as the foreclosure news isolated California specifically. Now that foreclosures are down to 1%, or less, of the total number of homes for sale, home sales data varies neighborhood to neighborhood making national news not as relevant as it once was.
Sales are down 15% or so but that hasn’t stopped pending sales or home values from increasing. Make no mistake, the market here has slowed, no question, but while the rest of the country is experiencing very sluggish sales, Placer County real estate still remains strong.
Affordability, first time buyers being essentially absent from the market and the lack of investors now in our market has resulted in buying activity slowing. If it weren’t for the fact that many home owners are still either underwater on their mortgages or just underwater enough not to be able to sell, there would be a downturn in prices in all likelihood as the total number of homes for sale would certainly be increasing.
Due to still underwater home owners, I think we’re dodging a bullet that many other areas of the nation are not. It will still be some time before our market reclaims the home value heights we saw in 2006 before the crash but by that time, it’s likely the economic outlook regionally will be much stronger. (fingers crossed :-))
All with no government intervention. 🙂
Given that California was one of 5 states that represented over 50% of foreclosures during the housing meltdown, we’re due some good news on a nationwide scale.
Placer County Real Estate Sales
As the graph and table show, sales are down almost 15% year over year however, pending sales are indeed up over last year. What this looks like to me is a late start to the buying season. Pending sales are up 5.5% and if you remember, at this time last year the real estate market was as hot as dancing on the sun so this in itself is a very positive sign.
The total number of homes for sale has also gone up which is a result of sales slowing more than an excess of homes coming on the market.
The Placer County Average Home Sales Price Increases
The average home sales price in Placer County real estate has come up 11.5% over the last year. If you notice in the graph, from March to April there was a significant jump in the average sales price of 6.7%. That is an unrealistic jump in the average sales price from one month to the next so I would say that there must have been several higher end homes that closed that affected this number more than it has in past months.
The highest previous jump in the last year from one month to the next is from May to June 2013 where the average sales price jumped $18,000 but then settled back down. I would assume that we’ll see that next month the May 2014 number to be settled back down as well.
$27,000 jump in one month in the average sales price isn’t a sustainable number in my experience.
Placer County Real Estate Inventory Increases
The total number of homes available in the Placer County real estate market has increased 100% in the last year. This would be more significant IF we had 6 months of homes available for sale but that’s not the case.
At the current pace of sales, we have only 2.6 months of homes available for sale. Some areas of the county have more, some less. County wide, I consider 2.6 months to be low. The trend, however, is up as we can see from the graph below.
Summary
The Placer County real estate market is very healthy at the moment. I don’t see anything that would lead me to believe we’re headed for a downturn in values in the short term. While sales are down, take into account that pending sales numbers up, year over year. It just looks like a slow start to the selling season.
That said, we’ll see. Anything can happen and often does.
