Monday Morning Numbers 5/31/10

Hope everybody is having a good Memorial Day weekend. And while you're having that cookout or going to the summer kickoff party, take a minute to think about something. We ask some of our young men and women to go off to some pretty awful places and do some pretty horrible things in the name of our freedom. And some of them don't come home. That's what today is set aside to commemorate. So take a minute today to remember them today.

Let's get after the numbers:

Active Listings: 97

Contingent Listings: 42

Pending Listings: 55 (28.4% of the inventory)

New listings: 9

Months of inventory: 4.2

Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

No big changes this week. We broke a string of 7 straight weeks of double-digit new listings, but not by a lot. We appear to have a slight trend toward higher inventory over the past few weeks, but nothing earth shattering.

Later this week I'm going to take a look at REO activity, with an eye toward what lies ahead of us in coming months. I have some local numbers on loan resets that might shed some light on what we have coming in the next couple of years. Don't miss it.

Focus on Mesa Oaks & Country Club

This week our two higher-end areas, Mesa Oaks & the Country Club roll around in our rotation of neighborhood focuses. For a little background on these areas and a description of the homes, check out my first post on them from last year.

Since I last reported on these areas, we've seen inventory drop off hard. Back in December, we had 12 active listings. Today, we have 3. All of these are traditional sellers. We only have one contingent listing at the moment, a short sale.

Sales activity has been light here, but compared to the inventory it's actually pretty robust. We have 2 pending sales in the area, both traditional sellers, and 6 units have sold over the past three months. One of these was an REO, one short sale, and the other 4 were all traditional sellers.

So why has inventory dropped off so much here? I suspect that a lot of it goes back to one of the points that I mentioned last year when I wrote about the area. We have a lot of long term residents in these neighborhoods. Many of them were there long before the boom, and short of death, divorce, or relocation, these aren't sellers who put their homes on the market frequently. We don't see move-up buyers selling here to get something bigger and nicer - these are the move-up target homes in our market.

With as little activity as we've been seeing, it's hard to say how prices have been holding in the area. The one REO that sold up in the past three months was, in my opinion, nearly stolen at the sales price that it got, and that might not bode well for comps in the area for a few months. But for the most part, there isn't a lot of supply. That should help the cause. But right now, just about every sale up there resets the market one way or another.

I think that I'm going back to REO's next week. I have a data source for some enlightening information that might give us some insight into what's coming down the pipe in our area. If I have time to compile some info, it should be interesting.

Monday Morning Numbers 5/24/10

And another Monday morning rolls around... Let's take a look at our market stats for this week:

Active Listings: 97

Contingent Listings: 37

Pending Listings: 57 (29.8% of the inventory)

New listings: 10

Months of inventory: 3.9

Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

Another week without any big change in these numbers. The raw number of active listings has been edging up slightly over the past few weeks, so it'll be interesting to see if we get over the 100 level in the next week or two. Despite that, sales activity has been high, keeping our months of inventory pretty stable. And remember that post last week on the rise of traditional sellers in our market? Not so much last week - 8 of the 10 new listings were distressed sales.

Later this week I'll take a look at Mesa Oaks and Country Club activity.

Focus on Traditonal Listings

About a year and a half into this blog, and I've covered just about every neighborhood and market segment a few times over. But it occurred to me that I've not yet covered a market segment that encompasses about 25% of our sales these days - traditional sellers.

I've been noting in the past month or two that we've been seeing what seemed like an increase in the number of traditional sellers among our new listings. When I did my 2010 First Quarter Update last month, I wrote a little bit about this. I'll update the numbers on this a little bit today. Year to date, traditional listings have accounted for 40.3% of our new listings on the market, compared to 30.1% for the same period in 2009. That's a significant enough increase that I think it warrants some investigation.

The first and most obvious question here: Why? It seems counter-intuitive - we're at what appears to be the bottom of the market. Why would anybody who doesn't have to sell a home right now go on the market?

I said something last month about letting you know if I had a "Eureka!" moment. Well, so far, no such thing has occurred. In thinking about this over the past several weeks, I've come to the conclusion that there is probably no single reason for this change. There are a lot of contributing factors here. Even though we don't have a great price level for people who need to sell a home right now, life goes on.

For instance, we have an aging population, and people sometimes need to sell homes because they need to downsize or move into a place where they can get more assistance on a day-to-day basis. And sadly, several of the traditional sales that we see are trust or probate sales after the previous owner had passed away.

Another sad reality is that hard times take a toll on people's relationships. It's not a simple as that, I know. But I've stopped counting the number of divorce situations that I've heard about over the past year or two, it's depressing to dwell on that. And that often leads to the sale of a home. Sometimes there's equity (or close enough to the loan amount to make up the difference). Of course, some of those also wind up as short sales. But that is another source of traditional sellers.

And we even see a few forward thinking folks who look at this market as a great time to move up to a larger home. It's a bit of a delicate dance to pull off, but it can be done. Let's say that you have enough value in your home to pay off the mortgage if you sell it, maybe a little bit more. And you have your eye on a big new house up the hill. You have a growing family, and that 1200 sq. ft. tract home that you bought 7 or 8 years ago is feeling a little cramped. Well, if you think about it, the beating that you're taking on the sale of your house is way more offset by the bargain that you can get on the bigger, more expensive house. And that house is likely to fare better in term of appreciation down the line. If you can hold your current home, maybe rent it out, and still qualify for the new one, you might be better off selling the old one a few years from now. But if you can't qualify or aren't comfortable with that scenario, it might make sense to just bite the bullet and sell the old house now.

One other thing to consider is that even though prices aren't exactly stellar, it's actually a good time to be selling from an inventory standpoint. If you need to sell, so long as you price your house reasonably well, you shouldn't have to wait long for an offer, and you might even find yourself with a choice of offers to work with. And waiting for prices to go up might require you to hold out for quite a while. As I've said several times, we're probably at the bottom of the market, but any price appreciation coming out of this is probably pretty slow.

Now, the second question that comes to mind when you think about an increase in traditional sellers is how will that affect the market? For a little insight into that, let's do a comparison. I pulled out the 1960ish tract homes that sold in the first quarter of this year, and compared traditional sellers to REO's. The REO's sold for a median of $180,000, and about $125 per square foot. The traditional listings, on the other hand, sold for a median of $214,000 and about $181 per square foot. A lot of that goes to condition. REO's do tend to be in rougher condition. But it's more than that. The REO seller doesn't have as much at stake as the traditional seller. They mostly just want to be rid of the property, and they put them on at fire sale prices. An extra $10-20K is a number on a spreadsheet to the financial institutions. But it's real money to the traditional seller, so they don't tend to be motivated to just dump the property at a rock bottom price.

It's going to be interesting to see how the shift in listings is going to change the market. You would think that in the coming months, we would start to see traditional sales move up in the share of sold units. I had predicted earlier this year that we'd probably see them stay pretty steady at around 25% of our sales. Now I'm not so sure. If this trend does continue, and we do see traditional listings account for more like 35% of our sales in the next few quarters, it can't help but have a positive impact on our market.

Monday Morning Numbers 5/17/10

We had our Relay For Life event in town this weekend. Historically, Lompoc has had the best per capita total for the entire state in funds raised. I don't know how it came out this time - I know that funds for these types of thing are way down pretty much everywhere - but the track was packed when we were there. Let's take a look at our numbers this week:

Active Listings: 94

Contingent Listings: 36

Pending Listings: 57 (30.5% of the inventory)

New listings: 10

Months of inventory: 3.8

Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

No huge changes here. Not as many new listings this week, but we were still in double digits for the 6th week in a row. This time out, 6 of the 10 that came on were distressed properties.

Later this week, I'm going to take a look at the traditional listings that appear to have been increasing in recent months. I want to see how they compare to distressed listings in some key statistical measures, and see if I can figure out why we are seeing more of them of late. Should be interesting to research (and hopefully to read).

New link - check it out

Just wanted to call your attention to a new link that I put up over on the right hand side. You might recall that a couple of weeks ago when I updated short sale activity, I made note of Diane's CDPE certification. Along with that came a website that we've put up to provide information to homeowners in distress. It's a great website, full of useful and updated information on the various options for these homeowners. If you know anybody who is having mortgage problems, send them to this site. It could help them make an informed decision on how to approach the problem.

Focus on North Lompoc

Up the road we go into the north part of our fair city this week. For a definition of the area and some background on it, go check out my first post on it from last year.

This isn't typically the most active area in our market, partly because it's not as heavily populated. It is, however, one of the more diverse areas in terms of the ages and styles of homes, so if you can get enough data to be meaningful, it can provide some insights into our broader market. Alas, the numbers this time around are pretty small. I'll try to make some sense of them anyway.

We have 12 active listings in this area today. Only one of those is an REO, 5 are short sales, and 6 are traditional sellers. This is pretty much in keeping with some recent trends. We also have 6 contingent listings in the area. One of those is a traditional seller, and the rest are short sales.

We've had decent sales activity here over the past few months. We have 8 pending units (3 REO/2 SS/3 Trad), and we've had 18 sold units in the past three months (8 REO/5 SS/5 Trad). This would put us right at 3 months of inventory in the area, which is a little less than the market as a whole.

The past couple of weeks, I've pulled the 1960's tract homes that sold in the south and central parts of town into a subset to try to compare apples to apples for sales over three month periods. That works better in those areas, because those types of homes account for the lions share of the market there. But as I said earlier, the north side of town has a more diverse set of homes. So I pulled out three subsets to see if I can identify any price trends. Alas, we're dealing with some very small numbers, around 5-8 units, so it's difficult to really home in on a trend with those kinds of numbers. In general, it looks like a mixed bag. The 1960's homes in this area appear to have a higher median sales price than the previous three months, but a little lower price per square foot (PPSF). The 80's homes are very close to the previous 3 months, and the 90's are up in median, but identical in PPSF.

What I take from that is that it looks like we're probably fairly stable in this area price-wise. But it's hard to tell for sure. When I look a few months down the line, it appears that the market share for distressed properties in this area is in decline. That should help us see some price recovery if that holds.

Next week I'm going to delve into the recent trend toward more traditional sellers, and see if I can make some sense of that.

Monday Morning Numbers 5/10/10

Good morning again. Hope everybody treated their mothers right yesterday. Judging by the crowd yesterday at Cajun Kitchen, I'd say most of Lompoc did just that. It's time again for some market stats. Let's get after it:

Active Listings: 90

Contingent Listings: 38

Pending Listings: 58 (31.2% of the inventory)

New listings: 22

Months of inventory: 3.9

Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

We've hit 90 active listings for the first time since last August, largely due to the biggest week of new listings that I've seen since I started tracking that number. However, our sales activity is better now than it was last summer, and our months of inventory remains low. As a point of reference, when our inventory was last at this level in terms of raw numbers, we had about 5.8 months of inventory. Half of the new listings that came on last week were traditional sellers.

Later this week we'll take a look at the north end of town. Come back and check in for that.

Focus on Central Lompoc

This week we're taking a look at what is probably our largest and most active area in our market, the central part of Lompoc proper. For a description of the area and some background, check out my first post on central Lompoc from last year.

Because this is such a large and active part of the market, activity here is one of the big drivers for our market as a whole. And this has been a very active area, and it appears that the news here is good. We have 24 active units on the market this afternoon. 9 of these are REO's, 5 are short sales, and 10 are traditional sellers. If you've been reading this blog for the past several weeks, you know that we are starting to see more traditional sellers in our market, and this is a good indication of that.

Sales have been steady here, with 7 contingent listings (2 REO/4 SS/1 Trad) and 17 pending sales (6 REO/3 SS/8 Trad). We've had 28 sold units in the area over the past three months. The mix here is a little heavier on REO's than the market as a whole (19 REO/2 SS/7 Trad).

Despite the fact that REO's have dominated sales in the area for the past few months, we are seeing what appears to be some price appreciation in the area. We're dealing with somewhat larger numbers here than we were last week when I looked at the Southside. Still, it's a pretty small data set, but the numbers do look promising. When I use my normal method of extracting the 1960 tract homes out of the sold units here, it looks like the median for sold units over the past three months is up about 3% from the previous three month period. And the price per square foot for these units is up about 7.5%. All very good numbers, and a good sign for our market.

Next week we'll just keep it rolling, and I'll move up the map to the north end of town.

Monday Morning Numbers 5/3/10

Looks like we have a beautiful Monday on tap. I know that we have a full schedule today, so let's get right after the numbers:

Active Listings: 81

Contingent Listings: 38

Pending Listings: 53 (30.8% of the inventory)

New listings: 10

Months of inventory: 3.6

Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

These numbers remain pretty stable, although the active listings dropped a bit this week despite not seeing a rise in contingent or pending listings. We had a handful of expired listings this week that probably contributed to that, and as a result we are at a low point for the year in months of inventory. Only 2 of the new listings were REO's, and 4 were short sales.

Later this week I'm going to update the activity in the central part of town. That's typically one of our highest volume areas, and it's one of the big indicators in what's going on in our market. So make sure you check back in late in the week for that.

Focus on South Side Lompoc

This week we're back around to a look at the activity on the south side of town. For a little background on the area and a definition of what we're covering here, go back to the first post I did on the area last year.

Activity in this area as been pretty steady - not anemic, but not exactly on fire. Our active listings in the area are down a little right now, with only 5 houses on the market. Interestingly enough, all 5 of these listings are traditional sellers. That might be the first time I've reported that on any area since I started this blog, but I'm not going to bother to go back and check it.

We have 4 contingent sales in the area (2 REO's and 2 short sales), and 9 pending sales (1 REO/4 SS/4 Trad). Sales activity has been on par with what we'd expect from the market as a whole, with 10 sold units over the past three months (6 REO/1 SS/3 Trad).

When I last reported on this area back in December, I had noted that when I compared sales of 1960's vintage homes, we appeared to be seeing a bit of appreciation in values. That appears again to be the case this time around. Median prices are up on those units about 5% from the previous three month period, and price per square foot appears to be up about 10%. Again, keep in mind that we are dealing with a very small set of data here, so don't put too much stock in these numbers. But still, that appears to be a positive trend.

Next week, I'll move up to the central part of town and see what's been going on there.