Focus On Southside Lompoc

Greetings from beautiful & sunny San Diego. At least I'm assuming that it's sunny - I've spent almost all of the past couple of days holed up in meeting rooms at our California Association of REALTOR® business meetings. At least I get to go out and wander around the Gaslamp Quarter a bit at night.

Before I head out and get a bite to eat tonight, I thought I'd take a little time out for you, my loyal readers (hey, there might be more than one), and give you a neighborhood update on the Southside. For some background on the area and a , you can refer back to my first post on it from a couple of years ago.

We actually have a fair bit of inventory here at the moment, and here's something I don't get to report every day: None of our active listings are REO's. We have 15 active listings, and 5 of them are short sales, and the rest are non-distressed sales. That changes a bit when we look at the sales activity, however.

We have 6 contingent sales in the area (1 REO/5 SS) and 4 pending sales (2 REO/2 Trad). Sales over the past three months have been a little light, with 9 sold units (4 REO/2 SS/3 Trad). It's kind of interesting to look at that - at least for now, it seems that we've eaten through a fair bit of our distressed inventory here. I'm sure we'll see more REO's in the active listings, and it probably won't be all that long before a few come on. I can identify 7 properties fitting the criteria I'm using here that have gone back to the bank but are not yet listed.

Looking at values, it appears that despite an increase in REO's in the sold units, prices have remained fairly flat overall in the area. No big surprise - the market as a whole seems to have stabilized at a pretty good, affordable level over the past 12-18 months.

I think I'm going to get on my soapbox next week and rail about some short sale issues. I haven't had a good rant in a while... You don't want to miss that.