Roseville Real Estate, April, 2007 Market Update

Those of you who took a semester of poetry in college (or who managed to become poetically well read some other way) will recall the opening words from T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Wasteland": "April is the Cruellest month". Let me assure you, Eliot was not writing about the Roseville real estate market's performance in April. That's the good news.

The bad news? He could have been. April posted the first double digit drop in the last several months for our favorite rule-of-thumb indicator, sold price per square foot. The value dropped 10.5% from April of last year to April of this year, from $251.62 to $225.30. A good portion of this drop comes from this year's crop being about 5.3% larger than last year. Because of this, the average sold price dropped less dramatically, from $467,015 last year to $440,245 this year, a 5.7% drop. The median sold price lost about as much ground, falling from $425,000 to $403,900, a 5.0% drop.

Unit volume, however, has dropped more dramatically than we've seen earlier. Last year, 116 residential units sold through the MLS, versus 99 this year, a 14.7% drop. Moreover, the expired to sold ratio is back "in the red zone" at 70.7% (up from last April's 63.8%). Unsold inventory currently stands at 9.5 months.