Wednesday, December 2, 2009

California October 2009 Home Sales

Was looking for some context on how the Sacramento Metro Area housing market compares to the rest of California. Below are two charts, the first has data for all California cities, and the second, only data from cities in the four county metro area.

The horizontal axis is the Oct 2009 median home price, the vertical axis is the % change from Oct 2008, and the size of the bubble is the number of home sales in Oct 2009.

Charts were cut off at 1 million price tag and 50% increase/decrease to better show the majority of the data. The grey bubble in the first chart is data from the city of Sacramento.


4 comments:

Jacob said...

Well it shows what we have been observing for a while, the lower end got destroyed and there is a huge volume while the middle and upper ends are basically dead with very few sales.

Which makes sense. Who will buy the homes over $300k?

A) Investors - Can't likely rent for profit.

B) Move Up Buyers - Most of the sales in the lower end are from banks or flippers, neither of which intend to buy move up homes.

C) First Time Buyers - Can barely afford the lower end homes and need help with the measly 3.5% down payment. More expensive homes are out of the question.

D) Speculators - Except for the real gamblers, I think most would realize that they don't have a large pool or buyers to sell to.

Still have a lot of job losses, growing unemployment / underemployment to worry about.

Also there was too much supply created doing the boom. The median income in Roseville is around 50k but the median home is not even close to 150k. Though I do see some devopments advertising prices in the 200s it is still out of reach for many. And the 300+ homes just fewer and fewer buyers and more and more supply.

Stock market rally aside, I think we still have a ways to go before the end.

Anonymous said...

Looks like Sac is doing ok relative to the rest of CA. The mass of the bubbles are down and right of SAC. That's good - right?

Deflationary Jane said...

"The mass of the bubbles are down and right of SAC. That's good - right?"

That's not what my foreclosure.com subscription tells me >; )

husmanen said...

Jacob. I think your description, A through D, is spot on for the Sacto market. The upper end is getting pressured hard right now and it makes sense why.