Focus On North Lompoc

This week, let's take a look at our activity in the north end of Lompoc. First, let's define what that area encompasses. Our MLS defines North Lompoc as the area north of North Avenue up to the river. Like the other sections of town, it also breaks it down to east and west along H Street, but for our purposes in these reports, I'm going to combine them, as I did with South & Central Lompoc earlier. And if you've been reading these, you know the drill - I'm looking at condos as a separate market segment, so I'm not including them here.

North Lompoc has a mix of 1960's construction along with homes built in the 1980's and 90's. The newer homes are mostly segregated into several tracts that all sprung up together, a few with HOA's. There are a very few homes in this area that were built before the boom period of the early 60's, but it's rare to see one come up for sale. There is a little bit of multi-family housing in here as well, but not nearly as much as in the central part of town.

This morning we have 9 active and 8 contingent listings in this area. Three of these listings are REO's, 14 are short sales, leaving one lonely "traditional" seller trying to get his home sold right now. We have 8 pending sales in here, 4 of which are REO's and 2 short sales, leaving 2 traditional sellers (see - I can do math!).

We've had decent activity in North Lompoc over the past few months with 17 sold units. However, almost all of those - 15 - were REO listings, and no short sales have closed here this year. In 2008, we had 76 sold units in this area, 46 of which were REO's (60.5%) and 8 short sales (10.5%). This tracks pretty much with the market as a whole.

It looks like the changes in home values here track very closely to the broader market as well. We've lost around 21% in value over the past year and about 49% from the peak of the market, both very similar numbers to the entire Lompoc Valley market. My best guess is that because we have a good mix of ages of homes in here, we'll probably see this area recover at about the same rate as the entire market.

Next week, I'll turn the focus onto our upper end neighborhoods of Mesa Oaks & Country Club homes.