Real Estate Trends - February 2008
Bob Weurding, Broker Associate
Team Weurding Realty
When researching for my year end summary, I discovered just how much our real estate market has been affected by the downward shifting prices. If you are currently a buyer, the news will sound good, and on the other hand, high-end sellers may not be as pleased.
Rather than lump all real estate properties into one basket, I divide the housing inventory into price ranges: under $300K, $300 — 400K, $400 — 500K, $500 — 600K, and over $600K. Dating back to 2006, you could not even find a SFR home in our local marketplace under $300,000. In fact, throughout San Diego County less than 1% of the SFR homes were in this price range. In 2007 that number rose to 1.6% and today it is nearly 10% of the San Diego County SFR housing market.
The percentage of homes in the $300 — 400K price range has increased from only 4.5% in 2006 to 22.3% today. With all the turmoil in housing prices, the percentage of homes priced for sale between $400 — 500K has remained somewhat stable during the past three years. In 2006 they made up 20.8% of the available inventory and today that number is 21.3%.
We start to see the more dramatic downward shifts when prices go over the $500K mark. The percentage of homes in the entire county that are priced between $500 - 600K has dropped from 23.5% in 2006, down to 21.3% in 2007, and is currently sitting at 14.3% today. That same trend occurred when the homes were priced over $600K. In 2006 over 50% of all the SFR listings were priced more than $600K. That number went down to 44.9% in 2007 and is currently at 32.6%.
Obviously with some exceptions, these numbers are telling me that the higher priced homes are starting to sell for less, causing the number of homes selling for less money to increase. The equilibrium point for the county seems to be the $400 — 500K price range. There is no single point of balance in our local 1-15 market as you can see from the attached chart. The only price range that is consistent with the County’s trend are the homes that are priced over $600K.
After reading the article in last Wednesday’s UT, I decided to also see exactly how much the short sale market was impacting on the I-15 communities. To do this, I pulled all 656 active SFR listings and discovered the following: 26.3% of Poway’s active listings were in some form of short sale distress. 23.1% of RB92127’s listings faced the same problem, proving that the issue doesn’t seem to have any economic boundary. RB92128 had the fewest short sale listings with 14.4%, while PQ92129 was high with 30.8%. Hopefully the program awaiting President Bush’s signature will help to ease this growing problem.
Source: Sandicor, MLS, and Dataquick
