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.