Placerville Real Estate Blog

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.