2010 First Quarter Update

We've already wiped out a quarter of this year, believe it or not. And as you'll see when you read what happened in the first quarter, it was an interesting, and somewhat crazy three months for the Lompoc real estate market. This might be a long post, so let's get after it. This first set of numbers here are combined numbers between the Lompoc Valley Association of Realtors MLS and the Central Coast Regional MLS:

We had 101 total sold units in the first quarter of 2010. Let's compare that to the first quarter of 2009. We had, uh, 101 sold units in that quarter as well. You have to like that kind of consistency. For even more consistency, we had an average price per square foot on our sold units of $144. As compared to the previous quarter when it was - that's right, you guessed it - $144. Click here for the updated price per square foot chart. I've been saying for a while that our market has stabilized. This kind of stuff makes me look like a regular genius. Really, I'm not just making this stuff up...

Our sales continue to be dominated by distressed properties. 60.4% of the first quarter sales were REO's, and 14.9% were short sales. Those numbers have shifted very slightly towards short sales. I expect that as this year rolls along, we will start to see an identifiable trend toward short sales. The overall percentage of distressed properties remains at right about 75%, which is very close to where it's been for the past few quarters.

From this point on in the post, we're going to be looking at numbers that come only from the LVAOR MLS - it's way too time consuming to try to combine some of these numbers:

Cash is king, and its realm is expanding. 25.3% of our transactions in the first quarter were all cash deals. 33.3% closed with FHA loans, 18.4% VA loans, and 23.o% conventional financing. Yes, you read that right - we had more cash deals than conventional loans in the first quarter. Great googly moogly! Conventional loans did come back up significantly from the 4th quarter of 2009 (12.9%), and FHA dropped off (49.5%).

Market times have been getting shorter, with a median days on market (DOM) of 22 for the quarter, compared to 26 for the previous quarter. Escrow times have remained pretty close to the same with a median of 43 days.

A whopping 65.5% of our transactions closed at or above the list price in the first quarter. This is up from 58.5% in the 4th quarter. If you'll remember, I talked about this in the 2009 Year In Review, and I had thought that it might have skewed more to the lower price ranges, but that turned out not to be the case. Looking at this quarter, that continues to be true. We had very nearly the same percentage on both sides of the median. And going back to those cash deals - it used to be that we talked about the "cash discount". And while it is a smaller number, 45.4% of our cash deals went at or above list.

I've been noting in the past month or two that we've been seeing more traditional listings, so I decided to take a good look at new listings coming on the market to see if it looks like things have been changing. We had 131 new listings hit our MLS in the first quarter. That was surprisingly up a fair bit from the first quarter of 2009 when we had 108 new listings (21.3% increase). Breaking them down, 35.1% of the new listings that came on in the first quarter of 2010 were REO's (compared to 43.5% in 2009). 27.8% were short sales (28.2% in 2009). That leaves 36.7% of the new listings for the first quarter of this year as traditional sellers, up from 28.7% a year ago. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how this is happening. I have a couple of half-formed ideas, but no real answers. If I have a "Eureka!" moment, I'll be sure to share it with you.

So there it is - in a nutshell, we're in a flat market in terms of value, as we have been for quite a while. We still have a lot of buyers in the market, and I think that we will continue to have them for the foreseeable future. We're still in a low inventory market, bouncing around a 4 to 4.5 months of inventory level, despite having an increase in overall new listings for the first quarter. We'll see where we go from here. Check back in regularly, and watch it with me.