Focus on South Vandenberg Village

Last week I went into my first area specific "Focus on..." post on North Vandenberg Village. So this week, it probably makes sense to follow that up with South Vandenberg Village. Not a lot of folks realize that there's a difference between the two - most people just think of it all as Vandenberg Village. From a real estate perspective, they are very distinctly different areas.

Contrasted with North Village, which was built in several various phases over a period of 35-40 years, most all of South Village went up in the 1960ish time frame up until the new construction started at Providence Landing a few years ago. When we look at South Village, we really have to separate out the new construction from the established neighborhood. At some point down the line, I'm going to do a closer look at the resale market for newer homes throughout the Lompoc Valley, but for today, I'm going to ignore Providence Landing as far as South Village is concerned, so all of the numbers I'm going to give you here will only apply to the older homes in this area.

As of today, we don't have much on the market in South Village - a whopping 3 active units, and one of those is a contingent short sale. We only have one pending sale up there, and we've had only 2 closings in the past three months. This area had been much more active up until a few months ago. We had 22 sales up there in 2008. I don't have an explanation for why things have thinned out there recently, except to say that our inventory has been shrinking quite a bit across the board.

REO's accounted for 12 of the 22 sales here in 2008, which puts it pretty much in line with the market as a whole. When you look at the sold units, it appears that home values in this area have dropped about 15-20% over the past year, and about 45% off the peak prices we saw in late 2005. Again, this is pretty close to being in line with the market as a whole, perhaps a bit better. Values haven't held quite as well as neighboring North Village, but when you consider that there are some newer homes in the mix in North Village, this isn't surprising.

I expect that what we're seeing here in terms of recent activity is probably a fluke. However, it doesn't appear that we have a lot on the radar in the neighborhood in terms of upcoming foreclosures, so we might not see a big influx of new listings up there in the near future.

Next week's "Focus on..." is going to revisit REO's in our market. Yes, I know I just did a post on that last month. Diane constantly reminds me what a short memory I seem to have these days, but I'm not that far gone yet... But we have a new tool that's giving some good insights into what's going on on that arena, and with REO's being as big a part of our market as they are, it's a topic that's probably going to be covered frequently.