Real Estate Trends April 2008
Real Estate Trends
April 2008
Bob Weurding, Broker Associate
Team Weurding Realty
If I have learned anything in the ten plus years that I have been researching and writing this article, it is to avoid using only the statistics that support what has become the popular opinion of today’s real estate market.
We all know that statistics can truly tell any story that the author wishes simply by selecting only the stats that support his/her viewpoint. We find that to be the case nearly every week in the media, and that could easily have been the case for this month’s article. When I started my research I fully expected a different outcome. As active Realtors we have been experiencing multiple offers on nearly every property on which we have been writing contracts for our clients. When I heard other agents were finding the same thing, I began to think that the real estate business was actually starting to pick up, unfortunately that did not prove to be true.
For example, when I compared the first three months of 2007 to the first three months of 2008 the total number of SFR sales in the county are off by more than 25% from last year. Poway’s sales numbers are down by 30%, RB 92127 is down 19.5%, the number of home sales in RB 92128 are off 44.5%, and PQ 92129 has only managed to sell 50% of last year’s total of 82, or 41 sales in the first three months of 2008.
Now we could stop right here and leave the reader with the impression that 2008 is off to a dismal start and that all is bad. However, the number of sales is only one factor when evaluating the real estate market. There is a little thing called sales price! Normally with a huge amount of available housing inventory, and the demonstrated lack of demand, you would expect sale prices to be in a free fall but that simply has not been the case, at least in our local marketplace.
Again, if we compare the first three months of 2007 with the same period in 2008, Poway’s average SFR sales price is actually 102% of last year’s $807,042. RB 92127 is off by 9.8%, RB 92128 is only down slightly to 98.1% of last year’s average. PQ 92129 rounds out our market with a 6.1% decrease in sales price.
Given all the other factors, these are certainly not all that bad. Let us not forget that home prices have been on a steady increase for several years and had to stop at some point to re-adjust to the economy.
Source: Sandicor, MLS, and Dataquick
