Focus on Condos

Back in February I did my first post on our local condo market. If you want to read that post for some background and how I define the category, click here. It's time to revisit the topic and see how the activity has been in this segment of our market over the past few months.

Most of the market has seen a big dip in listing inventory, and active condo listings are down to a somewhat lesser extent. We have 14 active and 6 contingent condo listings on the market today. 4 of these are REO listings, and 12 of them are short sales (including all 6 of the contingent listings). We have 10 pending units, 6 of which are REO's, with no short sales. The REO/short sale activity in this segment is pretty much in line with the market as a whole.

Sales have slowed a bit in the market as a whole for the second quarter, which I've discussed briefly in a couple of the Monday Morning Numbers posts. I don't think that this is due to a lack of buyer activity, but more due to combination of low inventory and longer escrow times. Condos are no exception to this. We only had 6 sold units in the past three months. All six of those were distressed sales - 2 REO's and 4 short sales.

What I'm finding interesting right now is that the average price per square foot of our condos is up from the first quarter of the year by about 20%. Mind you, this is off of a very small sample size, so there's going to be a lot of natural fluctuation in that number. A lot of that jump can be attributed to the specific properties that sold. But in what's been a relatively flat market this year in terms of price, it's interesting to see that large of an increase. We'll see if it holds up.

Next week's focus will probably be South Village unless something else pops up that sounds more interesting.