Focus on North Vandenberg Village

In case you never noticed - and I'd be shocked if you did - I have a sequence that I use for the areas that I cover in this blog. And way back in the beginning when I started writing this blog, the very first area post was North Vandenberg Village. So we're starting the cycle over again. As I tell you every time I do one of these, if you'd like to go back and get some background on the area, go back and take a look at the first post I did on it back in 2009.

I was just looking at this area for a buyer client recently, and the first thing that popped off the screen at me was the inventory level. We have 16 active listings up there this morning. That's a pretty big number for that neighborhood. The good news is that it's not dominated by distressed sales. None of them are REO listings, and 5 of them are short sales leaving us with 11 traditional sellers. We only have two contingent sales at the moment, both short sales.

Sales activity is relatively low considering the inventory. We only have 3 pending sales in the area right now (1 each REO/SS/Trad). Over the past 3 months we've seen 7 sales, which have been a little heavier in distressed properties (3 REO/1 SS/3 Trad). The 3 REO's that sold were all considerably lower than price than the other sales - and from what I saw of them they were pretty beat up.

The small number of sales here makes it a little more difficult to nail down price trends, but from what I can see, it looks like these non-distressed sales are pretty close in value to what we had been seeing in the previous three months, but the increase in bank owned sales in the area were a drag on prices. It's very similar to what I reported last week about the first quarter of this year - price trends appear to be down at the moment driven by an increase in the percentage of REO sales. If there's encouraging news for North Village, it's that the current inventory isn't heavy in REO's, so when some of those wind up selling down the line, it should help shore things up.

I'm sure that I'll come up with something to write about next week. I'm just not sure yet what that is.