Recently I published market data for the three Roseville zip codes separately. This report covers Roseville as a whole.
The drop in prices in Roseville from May to May was about characteristic of Placer County as a whole. The average home sold for $179.23 in May, down 24.5% from last May’s average of $228.05. Average selling price declined 17.9%, from $418,710 in May of 2007 to $355,908 in May of 2008.
Though prices fell at about the same rate of Placer County as a whole, some other indicators fare better in Roseville than in the rest of the county. Inventory is 6.1 months in Roseville versus 8.3 months in the county as a whole. Likewise, unit volume increased more in May in Roseville. Unit sales in Roseville are up 33.6%, from 128 units in May of 2007 to 171 units in May of 2008.
John’s Law is a scientific law — a hypothesis about the way the world works.
It has a comfortably mathematical looking formulation:
G = 1 / R2
Let’s break it down. G is the global importance of a given issue to consumers, the general public, the world at large.
R is the number of real estate bloggers writing about it during a given week.
Stated in words, the overall importance of an issue is inversely proportional to the square of the number of real estate bloggers talking about it in a given week.
Some hubbub over ePerks has gotten everyone up in arms this week. I estimate that there are 20 real estate bloggers talking about it, at least. So I judge the importance of this issue to be 1 / 20 squared, or .0025. We probably had a hundred bloggers talking about Greg Swann bagging on some guy’s video, so the importance of that issue was about .0001.
Counting the actual bloggers is left as an exercise to the reader.
To date I’m the only one writing about John’s law, so its importance is 1 / (1 squared), which of course is one.
I hope no one will write about this law except me.
Here is a market report for East Roseville. Real Estate prices are higher in East Roseville than in Central and West Roseville. Moreover, prices have fallen less dramatically. Inventory is higher than in Central and West Roseville, at 7.4 months.
Following up on our report for West Roseville, here is our report for Central Roseville. Prices have dropped slightly more than in West Roseville, and (as you might expect), unit volume has increased slightly more as a result. On the other hand, Central Roseville has slightly more inventory to work through, but overall the differences between the two markets are quite small.
Here is a report on market data for West Roseville for May of 2008. Sales are down, but unit volume is up almost 33% from last year, resulting in overall inventory numbers of less than six months.
Those of you who played with toy databases as a child may remember the song:
I’ve been working on the database All the live-long day I’ve been working on the database Just to pass the time away…
Oh wait, that was about railroads, wasn’t it?
That’s so 19th century.
I haven’t been working on the railroad, but I have been working on my MLS "mirror" database, and lately I’ve been adding some statistics reporting capabilities to it.
To date, the statistics I can get from the report I’ve generated are not as comprehensive as my handy-dandy spreadsheet-generated statistics, but the killer thing is that I don’t have to sit and look up the data, I just pop in the zip code or county I want (city name coming soon), and the numbers pop out automagically, already formatted as HTML.
This is how I should have been doing things all along.
Placer County’s market remains slow in May, and is experiencing both falling unit volume compared to last year and lower prices. This May the average home sold in Placer County for $396,805, down 20.1% from last May’s average sale price of $496,667. Combined with a somewhat larger average footprint this year, the sold price per square foot figure dropped 25.5% from May to May, from $239.36 last May to $178.34. The median price fell 21% over this period, from $428,000 in May of 2007 to $338,250 in May of 2008.
We’ve been noticing for several months in Sacramento County that prices have fallen to a point where unit volume is increasing in a very dramatic way. The same phenomenon has not yet happened in Placer County. In Placer County, the decline in price has yet to be large enough to bring buyers out in huge numbers, so unit volume is still falling off. In May, 406 residential units were sold through the MLS, down 4.2% from last May’s 424 units.
In May, 44.3% of the homes that sold were bank foreclosures, up from 9.7% last May. Short sales made up 7.9% of the total, versus 4.7% last May. Non-distressed sales outsold short sales by about six to one. Currently in active inventory there are 10.3% bank foreclosures and 27.9% short sales.
There are currently about 8.2 months worth of homes in inventory. Based on last month’s sales data, it would take just 1.4 months to sell off the existing REOs, 8 months to sell off the non-distressed sales, and 22.2 months to sell off the short sales.
April saw declining house values throughout the greater Sacramento region. Placer County homeowners were not immune to this trend, however they can take comfort in the fact that the 24.6% decline in sold price per square foot value from April to April was at least not as pronounced as in Sacramento County, where sold price per square foot fell 33.9% from April to April. Nevertheless, prices fell enough to drive demand up, so in April unit sales rose 15.3% from the previous year, with 370 sales compared to last year’s 321 sales.
With buyers purchasing a larger home on average this year, the average selling price this April in Placer County fell less dramatically than the sold price per square foot. This average home sold in April in Placer County for $420,208, down 16.8% from last April’s average of $505,041. The median sale price fell 19.5% during this time, from $435,000 in April of 2007 to $350,000 in April of 2008.
Placer County Foreclosures make up only 9.8% of active inventory, but accounted for 43.2% of all sales in April. Conversely, short sales account for 26.2% of the active inventory, but made up only 9.7% of sales in April. Seen from the point of view of how many units are available in each category, we can break inventory down as follows:
Overall inventory: 8 months.
Bank foreclosures (REO) inventory: 1.5 months
Short sales inventory: 18.3 months
Non-distressed sales: 9 months
The expired to sold ratio in Placer County, one indicator of the direction the market is moving, is down this year to 37.3%, compared to last year’s figure of 56.4%.
Our Sacramento site has recently published listings for all Greater Sacramento Investment Properties, which includes the following listings for Placer County:
