Monday Morning Numbers 5/30/11

Good morning again. Every year on Memorial Day I have to say something about this - I think that we as a nation seem to have lost perspective on this holiday. We've turned it into some big "start of summer" three day weekend where we can get together with friends and have a few beers and grill up some steaks, or go out to the mall to take advantage of the great deals on their holiday weekend sales. And I have a problem with that. Not so much with enjoying the time off work, but with losing sight of what this holiday is actually commemorating. Over the years we've asked a lot of our military, and they've always answered the call. By all means, have a few beers and fire up the BBQ, but also take some time today to think about the young men and women that have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation.

OK, let's look at some numbers:

Active Listings: 139

Contingent Listings: 39

Pending Listings: 57 (24.3% of the inventory)

New listings: 11

Months of inventory: 5.9
Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

Inventory is down slightly from last week, and we're below the 6 month level for the first time since the beginning of this year. Aside from that, there's not much of note in the numbers this week. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to cover later this week, but when the muse comes to me I'll bang something out.

Focus on Mission Hills

This week the wheel turns again and lands on Mission Hills. For a little background on the area and a description of the homes here, you can take a look at my first post on it from way back in March 2009.

For a while there, Mission Hills was much like South Vandenberg Village in that there was almost no inventory and very little activity. Things have picked up a little bit, but it's still a pretty low activity area. We have 6 active listings up there this afternoon, with 3 REO's, 2 short sales and one non-distressed listing.

Sales activity has been stable and pretty much in line with the inventory. We have 2 contingent sales in the area (1 REO/1 SS) and only one pending sale, a non-distressed property. We've seen 6 sales over the past 3 months (2 REO/3 SS/1 ND). A look at those sales shows that for an area that has a pretty homogeneous house inventory, there is a very broad range of values. We had a couple of fairly nice units selling at or near the $200,000 level, and a couple of rougher ones selling in the $100-130K range. These are pretty much the same levels that we've seen up there for the past year or so.

Come on back next week and I'll come up with something new to say. Or maybe I'll just say the same old $#@&. You'll just have to check in to find out.

Focus on Foreclosure Activity

Since I didn't quite get to this last week, I'm going to try to double up this week on posts if I can find time. It's been a little while since I updated you on what's going on with foreclosure activity in our market, and since its such a key driver of this market, I probably should just do this once a month.

We've seen some fairly stable activity in foreclosures for the past several months by most of the metrics that I use. If you'll take a look at this chart, you'll see that we bounce around a little bit in most of these measures, but there's no real identifiable trend line. We've seen a bit of a drop in the number of new Notice of Trustee's Sale (NTS) filings, but Notice of Default (NOD) filings have been up a bit in recent months. If you look at it, you'll see that you can usually see that NTS trends follow NOD trends by a few months, so it wouldn't be a big shock if we saw an increase in NTS filings in the months ahead. In fact, we might be starting to see that already. I look at the notices in the paper and it looks to me like we're seeing more new filings so far this month.

The red line on that chart shows how many total unresolved sales we have at the end of each month. That dropped off pretty sharply over the past couple of months, but if we are seeing an increase in NTS filings, that should start to edge back up again.

We have about 65 unlisted properties that have gone back to the bank now, which is pretty much in line with what we've seen for the past couple of years. That's at a point where - for reasons unclear to me - we usually get a little bit of a run of REO listings. We'll see if that holds this time.

A preliminary look at the sales for the second quarter (mind you, we're about halfway through that) we appear to be seeing a lower level of REO's as a percentage of sales - around 35% vs. a little over half for the first quarter. That's probably going to be a good sign for prices in the quarter, but that could also shift between now and the end of the quarter if we do get an influx of REO listings.

When I look into my slightly cracked crystal ball, I really don't see any reason to expect any big change one way or the other with the level of foreclosure activity that we have now. Our employment picture locally is in what feels like some kind of permafunk, and we still have about 40% of the properties in our market in a negative equity situation. Short sales seem to be slow in making inroads and have been pretty stagnant in terms of success rates. So until some of these other factors improve, we're going to see foreclosures at about the same rate we're seeing now. Wish I had better news for you.

Monday Morning Numbers 5/23/11

Well, it looks like Saturday came and went, and no apocalypse. Good that I didn't liquidate everything I own and head off to a beach in Jamaica for the last few weeks of the year, which was the first thought I had when I heard that prediction. On the other hand, sometimes that sounds good even when the end isn't purported to be imminent. Let's take a look at this week's market stats:

Active Listings: 143

Contingent Listings: 35

Pending Listings: 59 (24.9% of the inventory)

New listings: 9

Months of inventory: 6.4
Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

Most weeks lately I've been remarking that there were no big changes from the past week in these numbers. But this week is kind of ridiculous - there were very small changes to three of those numbers from last week. It would appear that we've hit another plateau for the time being in our market activity.

I got bus last week and didn't get to that foreclosure activity update, so I'm going to try to crank that out this afternoon if I can and work in a post later in the week on Mission Hills activity.

Monday Morning Numbers 5/16/11

I've been doing a bunch of yard project stuff over the past few weeks, and boy is my back screaming at me this morning. Getting old sucks. So let's do something that requires just a little less physical strain. Let's run some market numbers:

Active Listings: 142

Contingent Listings: 35

Pending Listings: 59 (25.0% of the inventory)

New listings: 9

Months of inventory: 6.2
Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

Inventory is down slightly this week, and pending sales are up slightly. Aside from that, there really isn't anything noteworthy in these numbers this week. We might be trending very slowly to a lower inventory, higher activity market but it's too early to say for sure.

Later this week I'll have an update on foreclosure activity in our market.

Focus on South Vandenberg Village

This week we're taking a look at the market for houses in South Vandenberg Village. As a reminder, when I cover this neighborhood I'm not including condos or the newer homes in Providence Landing. I cover those separately. For a little background on the area, go back to my first post on the area from 2009.

For what seems like a very long time, I had almost nothing in this area to report. We had very little activity of any nature here for over a year. I'm not sure why that was, but there weren't a lot of listings here, which of course means not many sales. It appears that might be changing, and we have a little bit more activity there now.

We have 7 active listings on the market up there this morning. Only one of them is an REO, and there are 3 each short sales and non-distressed listings. That's still not a ton of inventory, but last year there were times when I reported on this area and only had one or two listings.

Sales activity has been pretty much what we would expect for the level of inventory based on our market norms. We have 2 contingent sales in the area (1 REO/1 SS) and 3 pending sales (2 SS/1 non-distressed). Over the past three months, we've had 4 sales in the area (3 REO/1 non-distressed). There really aren't enough data points here to identify a price trend, but since 3 of the four sales were REO's I would expect that the trend has been somewhat down.

Next week I'll update foreclosure activity in our market.

Monday Morning Numbers 5/9/11

Good morning again. I spent most of last week up in Sacramento at the California Association of REALTORS® spring meetings. I gotta tell you, we're getting to be a pretty frustrated bunch of people about short sales. If you read my little rant about them a couple of months ago, you might have some insight into why. So rather than go back into that again this morning, I'm just going to get into some numbers:

Active Listings: 147

Contingent Listings: 35

Pending Listings: 55 (23.3% of the inventory)

New listings: 13

Months of inventory: 6.5
Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

We had a little more normal number for new listings this week, and as a result our raw number of active listings moved up a little. But we saw a very small decrease in our months of inventory because we had a little bit of an increase in reported closings last week. But for the most part, there's not a lot of change from last week.

Later this week I'll get you that update on South Vandenberg Village.

Monday Morning Numbers 5/2/11

Seen the news yet this morning? If you haven't, stop reading this and go turn it on. You'll be glad you did... Just make sure to come back later. Let's take a look at this morning's market stats:

Active Listings: 142

Contingent Listings: 33

Pending Listings: 55 (23.9% of the inventory)

New listings: 6

Months of inventory: 6.6
Click here for the updated price per square foot chart.

Our inventory is down a little this week, partly because it was a slower than usual week for new listings, and partly because we continued to see a slow increase in pending sales. I'll probably do an REO update in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to share something with you this morning before that. One of the numbers that I track regarding foreclosure activity is the number of unresolved trustee's sales in our area. I look at it at the end of every month, and at the end of April we had 105. That's the lowest that number has been in over two years. If that trend holds, it could be a very positive thing for our market.

I may not have time to get to a mid-week post this week, but if I do it'll be an update on South Vandenberg Village.