Monday Morning Numbers 5/30/11

Good morning again. Every year on Memorial Day I have to say something about this - I think that we as a nation seem to have lost perspective on this holiday. We've turned it into some big "start of summer" three day weekend where we can get together with friends and have a few beers and grill up some steaks, or go out to the mall to take advantage of the great deals on their holiday weekend sales. And I have a problem with that. Not so much with enjoying the time off work, but with losing sight of what this holiday is actually commemorating. Over the years we've asked a lot of our military, and they've always answered the call. By all means, have a few beers and fire up the BBQ, but also take some time today to think about the young men and women that have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation.

OK, let's look at some numbers:

Active Listings: 139

Contingent Listings: 39

Pending Listings: 57 (24.3% of the inventory)

New listings: 11

Months of inventory: 5.9
Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

Inventory is down slightly from last week, and we're below the 6 month level for the first time since the beginning of this year. Aside from that, there's not much of note in the numbers this week. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to cover later this week, but when the muse comes to me I'll bang something out.

Focus on Mission Hills

This week the wheel turns again and lands on Mission Hills. For a little background on the area and a description of the homes here, you can take a look at my first post on it from way back in March 2009.

For a while there, Mission Hills was much like South Vandenberg Village in that there was almost no inventory and very little activity. Things have picked up a little bit, but it's still a pretty low activity area. We have 6 active listings up there this afternoon, with 3 REO's, 2 short sales and one non-distressed listing.

Sales activity has been stable and pretty much in line with the inventory. We have 2 contingent sales in the area (1 REO/1 SS) and only one pending sale, a non-distressed property. We've seen 6 sales over the past 3 months (2 REO/3 SS/1 ND). A look at those sales shows that for an area that has a pretty homogeneous house inventory, there is a very broad range of values. We had a couple of fairly nice units selling at or near the $200,000 level, and a couple of rougher ones selling in the $100-130K range. These are pretty much the same levels that we've seen up there for the past year or so.

Come on back next week and I'll come up with something new to say. Or maybe I'll just say the same old $#@&. You'll just have to check in to find out.