El Dorado County Real Estate Market Update — February 2007
Posted by John Lockwood on March 18th, 2007
El Dorado County’s real estate market in February shows just how resilient and unusual El Dorado County is compared to whatever else you might want to compare it to.
My favorite barometer, sold price per square foot, is down slightly (2.9%), but given that this year’s crop of homes is 14.8% bigger (2349 square feet versus last year’s 2046 square feet), I’m not so sure this drop is significant. Larger homes in general sell at a lower price per square foot as a rule, as one would expect with land being the fixed cost that needs to be “amortized” over the size.
However, the more I wrestle with El Dorado County’s numbers, the more I get a sense that it’s quite possible we’ve turned a corner. This February’s average sold price of $557,749 bested last year’s average price of $500,207 by 11.5%. Over the same February 2006 to February 2007, the median price rose by 14.3%.
Unit volume is down slightly (9.4%) from 127 sold units in February of 2006 to 115 units sold in February 2007. Expireds are practically the same (96 last year, 97 this year, a 1% increase). The expired to sold ratio is up (75.6% last year versus 86.3% this year). Inventory is moderately into the buyers’ market side of the ledger at seven months.
But what about Land?
You had to ask. Vacant land in El Dorado County are moving less well than homes are, with 27.4 months of inventory currently available. We talked about traffic impact fees in an earlier post. These fees haven’t gone away, and as one of my colleagues pointed out the other day, having homes at $500,000 and land at $350,000 doesn’t help.
Incidentally, if you’re curious about exactly how much those El Dorado Traffic Impact Mitigation (”TIM”) Fees are running, here it is from the horse’s mouth.
On the positive side, inventory does seem to be down from the last time I looked at it, even though the raw number’s still pretty alarming. We’ll keep an eye on it.