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.