Monday, August 27, 2007

The Weekly Screen Scrape - Inventory is the Story

Wow, inventory jumped during last week's screen scrape. As of last week, the number of homes in Folsom and El Dorado Hills that meet my market criteria has basically doubled since I started keeping track of overall statistics in early March!

I am really curious to see if this year the listing cycle will hold. The way I see it, with a lot of bank and short sale properties out there, I don't imagine as much of the "wait till spring" listing dip will occur.

I love that I can be picky now. With our last house, if we didn't put in a contract within hours of it hitting the MLS, we were out of luck. We barely even got to see a place, let alone give it a full evaluation before multiple offers were in. Now I find a whole host of things wrong with every place we see....too close to the main road, bad layout, too hilly, too close to the prison, way overpriced.......

In some ways its good we bought in the previous frenzied market (2002), as it taught us many important lessons. That said, buying in VA is very different than CA. In VA, its all buyer beware, no disclosure etc. which is really tough to navigate for first time buyers and people new to the state in general.

2 comments:

Buying Time said...

Anyone know if there has ever been a prison escape from Folsom? There is a property I really like but it is one of the first houses you would reach if you escaped....so we crossed it off our list....but I am still curious nonetheless.

Cmyst said...

In 1920, one of three inmates who attempted to escape by hijacking a delivery train actually did escape.
In 1932, a guy tried to escape by using a home-made diving suit, but he drowned and they had to drain the mill pond to recover the body.
It's now a medium-security prison -- the really bad boys go to Pelican Bay, I believe.