Focus On Mission Hills

It's been a crazy week again, so here I am getting around to my focus post on Saturday. Hey, that happens sometimes. And I know that everyone has been waiting with eager anticipation to see what's happening in Mission Hills all week, so let's get to it.

A quick refresher on the area: We're looking at a pretty homogeneous area here in terms of age and style of houses. The whole development was built as workforce housing in the late 50's/early 60's boom period when Vandenberg was ramping up. These are pretty much entry level homes, with the bonus for some buyers of being in some of our more sought-after school districts. Some of the houses in this area are a little bedraggled, but there are also some very nicely maintained homes as well. It's a mixed bag.

Once again, the activity in this area is light enough that I'm incorporating some data from Central Coast MLS in with my usual Lompoc MLS data. For various reasons, this neighborhood seems to attract a bigger percentage of out of town agents than most of our areas.

We have 4 active listings in the area at the moment, 2 short sales and 2 REO's. That's pretty light, but it's up a bit from the last time I reported on the area. Contract activity has picked up a bit, with 4 contingent sales in the area (all short sales) and two pending units (interestingly, both traditional sellers).

We've only had two sales in the area in the past three months, but that was mostly due to a lack of inventory there earlier this year. One of the sales was a short sale, which sold for a pretty good price. The other was an REO, which went a bit below where I would have expected it to sell. It's hard to say what the price trend is in this little micro-market, but I suspect that it's probably tracking with the rest of the market - flat or very slightly appreciating.

Next week I'm going to try to dig into a trend that we've started to see in our market and other areas - the resurgence of property flipping.