Sales of residential real estate in Jackson put in a strong showing in November, with at least modest gains in most indicators and fairly modest inventory by recent standards.

This November’s sold homes were bigger than last year, averaging 1914 square feet as opposed to last year’s 1771 square feet. Even adjusted for square footage, however, homes achieved a modest 1.4% increase in price from last year. The average sold price rose more dramatically, of course, from $387,812 last November to $424,866 this November. Unit volume was also up this year, from eight units in November of 2005 to 9 units in November 2006. With 75 active listings, inventory is 8.3 months worth, which is fair to good given the overall market and time of year.

The only bad news in Jackson’s market data were a slight decline in median sale price, from $404,250 last year to $396,500 this year, a 1.9% drop, and a more marked increase in average days on market before a home was sold, up 64.8% from last year’s 88 days to an average this November of 145.

Won’t you please help?

I must admit, I always found Sally Struthers a little over the top in her Save the Children campaign.

But now that I’m running a blogathon for hunger and only at 10% of my goal of raising $400, I’m feeling a little bit like Sally myself, only without the wholesome TV cuteness and the squeaky high pitched voice.

It’s always easy not to help. I do it at least 99% of the time myself. So the victory rate is bound to be low on donations as well. It’s human nature, I suppose. Tivo was no doubt invented by PBS telethons.

But I’m having fun anyway.

Recently I posted a blogroll link to a Real Estate Blog directory — look there it is again, albeit with a penalty nofollow tag. It seems these industrious fellows are garnering page rank by encouraging reciprocal links back to their blog directory — sort of a Web 2.0 circa so-ten-minutes-ago approach.

Well, that was fine, I bit. Here’s a portion of the confirmation I received:

YOUR LISTING HAS BEEN ACTIVATED!
—————————————————–
Thursday 30th of November 2006 08:55:50 PM
Name: John Lockwood
URL: http://www.placerville-realestate.com
Title: Amador and El Dorado County Real Estate Blog
Description: Local Realtors® discuss homes, land, and the real estate market in Amador County and El Dorado County, California.
Reciprocal: http://www.placerville-realestate.com
Reciprocal Verified: Y

Well, so far so good, except today I was doing some surfing around, and lo, my incoming link was gone, as was the rest of my customer record. So either their MySQL DBA has been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard since getting out of rehab, or this site is deliberately scamming webmasters to grow their incoming link count.

Well, some good came out of it — it’s something to post about so these scammers just helped a hungry person. And now we’ve added a touch of caveat linktor to out blog. Sweet.

OK all you famous people, now’s your chance. Link to this post or post a comment here!

Please note the following important information: Posting a comment here or linking to this post constitutes the definition of fame in the real estate blogging community.

Failing to comment here or link to this post means you’re a relative unknown. Hey, don’t blame me, I just make up the rules, I don’t enforce them.

This evening it ocurred to me that most of the day was spent on real estate one way or another, and that, because I had to run more comps and meet a seller in Camino tomorrow, tomorrow would look like that as well.

Well, that’s fine by me, I enjoy being busy. But it also reminded me that I haven’t blogged since “way back yesterday”, which is an acceptable level of blogicity for any normal period of time. Of course, if you’re running a blogathon, a post a day looks a lot to outsiders like goofing off, and heaven forbid you should think that of me.

I came across a fun article recently about excuses not to blog, which canonically take the syntactical form, “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, but…”.

Sorry I haven’t found that URL in a while so I could link to it.

By now it’s clear that the dog who ate my homework is the same dog who is the bane of every kid’s homework, but as for a fine December: I’ve gotten to go to two parties so far with my wife, and it’s only December 2nd. My wife and I usually go to about two parties a year, so there you go, we’re all caught up. One of them was a bunko party, which is a woman-only gathering where they let the men in once a year near Christmas to see if we’re still alive. It turns out I am.

I considered that good news.

The other party was Micah’s birthday party! Hooray. We have some pictures you can enjoy over on my Folsom Site. You win a prize if you can find my wife. Meantime, here are the two I think came out the best, one of Micah getting to know Joey, and one of the happy mom and dad.

Oh yeah, and Uncle Bob is from Plymouth! So there you go, this has something to do with Amador county after all…

Hi, it’s John and Kathy.  Kathy’s learning the family business of real estate market updates, and so we’re starting with our own lovely home town of Cameron Park.

Cameron Park’s market slowed substantially from last year, with falling prices.  From November to November, the average sale price dropped 10.3%, from $524,663 to $470,800.  The median sale price dropped even more dramatically, down 12.1% from $475,000 to $417,500.  At the same time, the average sold price per square foot dropped 12.3%.  As we’ve seen in other markets, however, the ratio of list price to sold price has not changed much.  Last November homes that sold fetched 99% of their list price, whereas this year homes still brought 98% of list when they sold.  However, more than half the homes on the market in November expired.  With 16 units selling and 18 expiring, the expiired to sold ratio was 112.5% this year, compared to 65.2% last year.

So thanks, Kathy, for sitting through this MLS / Excel Extravaganza.  Once Kathy and Helen start blogging more, they may also be exploring some of the more non-technical aspects of the real estate around here.

Cheers!

Well, here it is 4:00 AM on Blogathon launch day — that seems an appropriate time to start! I may retreat for a few more winks before the official start of my day, but meantime I’m up and the coffee is hot, so I’d like to start out by thanking those folks who’ve encouraged me so far and the only person to make a pledge to date, Judy Onorato of Financial Title. Judy’s generous pledge has started us off, so now I have to come up with twenty posts. Oh darn, I’m a blogger and I have to write twenty posts.

This is almost as awful as having to eat some chocolate or something.

Thank you Judy, for helping out.

Being an early adopter means that someone in El Dorado County or Amador County who wouldn’t have enough to eat otherwise now will have, and how cool is that?

It also means that Judy’s donation is subject to some of our $ MATCHING FUNDS $ .

(I thought it would be nice to establish a typographical convention early and often for $ MATCHING FUNDS $ .)

The point of that is that there are two hundred dollars of John Lockwood Associates corporate bucks available to match the first two hundred dollars in contributions that you make. And depending on how many remote contributors chime in, and we already have four or five, there’s up to $100 in additional matching funds available.

So, thank you already on what’s barely the first four-AM day to those remote bloggers who’ve already chimed in briefly and agreed to participate, Dustin Luther, Fraser Beach, Hanan Levin, Jim Cronin (who’s checking us out — how we doing so far?), and the bloggers/teammates Maureen Francis and Dmitry Koublitsky.

Thanks finally to Cori Whalen at Placer Title, who’s handed out our fliers and talked us up quite a bit here locally.

Thanks as well to Bridget and Helen, my fellow bloggers who’ll be chiming in as we go along.

With that, I have thirty minutes left.  How many winks is that?