Today before going out with the family to have some fun and get some new tires put on the Honda so I can continue to drive buyers around in safety, I did some work on a spreadsheet covering the last three years of Amador County real estate prices. I’ve been wanting to do that for several different areas, since I knew that once I’d done it I could get a pretty good idea of when the market started to turn in Amador County. Also, lazy writer that I am, I knew I could probably mine such a spreadsheet for at least three to four articles immediately, and many more over the course of time.

The first thing I thought I’d publish that you might enjoy are the curves showing the average sold price and average sold price per square foot. Here they are:

To me, what stands out here is not that we have a curve upwards and a downward trend — it’s pretty much old news that Amador County like everywhere else is in something of a buyer’s market. Instead, what strikes me about the situation in Amador County is that the downtrend happened some six to twelve months later than it did in Sacramento County. I’ve done smaller charts of the same kind for Sacramento, and the market peak there can be dated to about July / August of 2005. In Amador County, in contrast, the market reached its zenith sometime between about January and May of 2006.

I have a couple of suspicions as to why that is, but I think I’ll keep them to myself since at this point they’re on the order of wild-eyed guesses.

Vicki Agregado just listed this beautiful three bedroom two bath home at 3253 Sandhurst Court, Cameron Park — if you follow that link you’ll see that if you lived in this well maintained home you’d be within an easy walking distance to Cameron Park Lake. (The lake itself has a really neat walking / running trail going around it). Also, you get the benefit of our small town feel and fantastic Cameron Park schools. Small town — what am I saying? — make that our small unincorporated area feel.
This three bedroom, two bath home is listed at $429,000. This listing has just been entered this morning so I can’t yet link to the listing, but it’s in the computer as MLS # 70017160, and here are some pictures for you.

In our last post we examined the huge downturn that took place in El Dorado County in January, allowing El Dorado County’s drop in prices to catch up with those in other areas. Today we turned our focus to Amador county, and we find relatively mild year on year depreciation.  At some point in the future we should be publishing price curve charts for the four main counties we cover, but for now, let’s look at Amador’s numbers for January.

Twenty-eight residential units sold in January, a mild downturn from last January’s unit volume of 33 units.  As always in winter, unit volume is down from the yearly average.  Throughout 2006, 493 units were sold in Amador County, for an average of 41.8 units per month.  Based on that average, our current stock of 467 homes works out to be an inventory of 11.4 months.

Both the average size of homes that sold and the average price dropped, making the real drop in prices less dramatic than it first appears.   Last January’s average price was $353,848 for an average sized home of 1,661 square feet, while this January the average home was 1507 square feet and fetched $310,385.  Thus, though the average price appeared to drop 12.3%, the average sold price per square foot really only dropped 3.3%.  The median price dropped most dramatically of all our indicators from $365,000 to $301,000.

Days on market were up to just under six months at 179 days, a 53% increase from last Janauary’s average days on market of 117 days.

In a future post we’ll take a look back at 2006 and see how the whole year did compared to 2005.  Since we’re dealing with relatively small numbers of home overall in Amador, a yearly view should give us a more statistically significant picture of what’s “really” happening to Amador County’s real estate prices.

Well, I’ve just taken a more comprehensive look into the numbers for El Dorado County residential real estate sales for January than I usually take, and I have two general conclusions:

1. El Dorado County is not immune to the price drops that have happened elsewhere, we’re just behind the times (but we tried to play catchup in January in a big way).
2. As for where we are now, my advice to El Dorado County sellers in general (based on average numbers) would be this: get over yourselves. It ain’t worth that much.

Prices dropped sharply from last year in January in El Dorado County. The median price fell some 8.2%, from $487,000 to $447,000. At the same time, the average price dropped a whopping 16.6%, from $570,391 to $475,767. To be sure, this year’s 121 sold units (coincidentally identical in unit volume to last year’s 121 sold units) were somewhat smaller, so some of that average price drop is based on smaller size. But there’s still a double-digit portion that we can blame on the market changing (or on prices being overvalued to begin with). Average price per square foot dropped from $265.79 last January to $237.64 this January, an 11.5% decrease.

As we noted above, unit volume is unchanged from year to year. However, the expired to sold ratio has risen from 83.5% to 110.7%, and average days on market have risen from 70 to 98 (a 40% increase).

The really interesting story in January is in the expireds and the actives. It’s here where we will find the answer to the question: Why is this Realtor®, who lives in El Dorado County and presumably has a stake in the property values, advising El Dorado County sellers to get over themselves?

OK, good question. Hold on to your statistical hats (average size, 7 1/4). The average home that sold in January sold for $237.64 per square foot. At the same time, the average price for a home expiring in January was $279.07, which if you work it out is 22.8% higher. But that’s not the fun part. The average home that’s on the market today, two days after January, is listed at a higher price than the average expired home, at $285.04!

There’s an old joke about a plane that loses one of its four engines at a time, and becomes progressively more late to its airport destination. When they’re down to the last engine, one of the passengers quips, “I hope we don’t lose that one — we’ll be up here all day!”

The situation in El Dorado County reminds me of a version of that joke — only it’s not so funny, because it’s happening now. Not only are El Dorado County homes priced too high to sell, they’re so high that we’re going to have to lower them before they can even expire.

I wonder if what lurks beneath this phenomenon is just raw pride or — more likely, I think — a large number of sellers who are significantly upside down. In any case, we could sell off that nearly eleven months of inventory with an average sticker price of $694,632 if sellers would be willing to drop that average down to $553,933. Listing agents, show your people comps for January — they aren’t the same as when you took the listing in November. Sellers, I know you like to look at that sign down the street and base your price on that, but your neighbor’s home is likely to be priced some 25.4% too high. That’s why the sign is still up.