Focus On Central Lompoc

We're going back to looking at a specific area this week after a couple of weeks of looking at other topics. This week, let's take a look at what's happening in the central part of town. When we talk about Central Lompoc, we're hitting the area between Ocean and North Avenues. Our MLS divides it into Central East and Central West, but I'm not convinced that it makes enough of a difference to divide it up that way for one of these reports.

This area is a little bit of a mixed bag. There are a couple of newer developments and a handful of older homes, but it's dominated by 1960ish tract homes. We have a lot of multi-family in this area as well, a segment that I don't really track much unless I have a client buying or selling that type of property - there isn't a lot of volume of listings and sales in that segment in any case. I'm also not accounting for attached units (condos) in this post, those were covered a little while back in a separate Focus On post.

We have 18 active and another 13 contingent listings on the market right now. Of all of those units, 19 are short sales and 9 are REO's, leaving only 3 "traditional" sellers on the market. Because we are so heavy on short sales here, we're seeing that a lot of the inventory has been on the market for quite a while - the median days on market (DOM) for our active/contingent listings is 73.

We have 8 pending units in this area tonight, 6 REO's and 2 short sales. The median DOM for our pending units is 29. We've had a lot of sales in here in the past 3 months - 21 sold units, with a median DOM of 27. 15 of the sold units were REO's, and 4 were short sales. It doesn't take a math genius to figure out what these numbers mean - REO's sell in a hurry, almost always because they are well priced. Short sales tend to linger for a while. Traditional sellers are largely sitting it out and waiting for better days.

The REO bug didn't just bite in this area last year - it drew blood and left a nasty scar. 65 of the 87 sold units in 2008 were REO sales (74.7%). Another 8 were short sales. The amazing thing about this to me is that despite the disproportionate number of REO sales in this area, the decline in values tracks pretty closely with the market as a whole. We appear to have dropped somewhere in the area of 21% of value comparing values in the area from the first quarter of last year to the same period this year (the overall market number is 22.8% per my price per square foot calculation). It appears that the area has dropped around 55% from the peak, a bit more than the market as a whole at around 49%.

Going forward, I would expect that this segment of the market will recover a little slower than the market as a whole, but it's going to be spotty. Some of the newer areas like Riverside will probably bounce back a little quicker, but some of the 1960 tract homes near large apartment complexes will probably lag.

Next week, we'll move one more notch north and take a look at what's happening on the north side of town.