Focus on Condos

This week we're taking a look at our condo market. I use "condo" as a general term to indicate a unit that shares a wall with a neighbor. If you want to nitpick about it, a lot of what I'm including here aren't, technically speaking, condos. That's OK, nitpick away. It's my blog and I've got a thick skin... Oh, and I also don't include Country Club "cluster homes". Those are kind of a unique animal, and they'd significantly skew the numbers.

We have a lot of condo inventory available today - 21 active listings. These are heavy in distressed sales, with 8 REO's, 5 short sales, and 8 non-distressed. The 8 non-distressed are kind of interesting, though. Of those, at least 4 are owned by investors who picked them up at a foreclosure sale to flip. So in reality, we could very easily have as many as 12 REO condos on the market if we didn't have the flip investors.

Sales activity has been pretty steady in recent months for these units, despite some challenges with getting financing on them. We have 8 contingent sales, dominated as per usual by short sales (1 REO/7 SS). There are 5 pending sales as well, and these are almost all REO's (4, with one investor flip property as well). We've had 9 sales over the past three months (5 REO, 1 SS, and 3 non-distressed). Again, it appears that all 3 of the non-distressed sales here were investor flips.

Until I took a look at these numbers, I really hadn't picked up on just how heavy our condo market is with investor flips. It kind of makes sense if you think about it. These are typically lower price points than houses, ergo they come with less risk. Mind you, they come with less of a payoff at the end as well, but a lot of these investors aren't trying to hit a home run with every investment property that they pick up.

Values on condos appear to be holding pretty steady over the past few months, with a slightly lower median sale price but a slightly higher average price per square foot. I don't think that any segment of our market fell harder than this one, so it's good to see things settling down. We still have a lot of challenges in the segment, especially financing problems, but we found a price level that seems to work well for this market.