Well, I’m just giving Live Writer a whirl. Live Writer is a free blog editing desktop software by those unknown developers at Microsoft®.
Oh wait, you’ve heard of those guys?
Free software from them violates a sort of law of nature or something.
Hey, that’s not half bad. I wonder if there’s a google maps plugin. No doubt there is.
What’d be really slick was if I dusted off my developer fingers and created a Metrolist plugin or a Paragon plugin, so we could drop a listing in there without further ado.
My nerdly powers are on the wane, however. Soon I won’t even be able to find my pen pocket protector or tape for my glasses.
A call for help is going out in El Dorado County for a Cameron Park baby who is in need of a bone marrow transplant in order to survive.
Trevor Austin Kott (a 6-month old Cameron Park baby) has been battling congenital acute myeloid leukemia or AML since his birth last October. The disease is rare and affects blood cells in the bone marrow. He is undergoing a fifth round of chemotherapy in his fight to beat a deadly disease.
Trevor is critically ill and needs a marrow transplant to survive. His life depends on finding a match immediately. Doctors say he has about 6-8 weeks to live unless a match can be found. So far there hasn’t been a match.
BloodSource is coordinating a number of bone marrow match drives over the next few weeks. Trevor’s family hopes that one of these drives will find the one match to save him. A list of days and times for the bone marrow drives to benefit Trevor can be found at this link: http://www.news10.net/display_story.aspx?storyid=26100.
There will be one in Cameron Park on Saturday, April 14 from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Blue Oak School, 2391 Merrychase Drive.
Potential bone marrow donors must be between the ages of 18 and 60, and in general good health. The test only requires a swab from the inside of your cheek with a Q-tip. The test costs $52 and is tax deductible. The fee goes to the National Marrow Donor Program. The program maintains a registry of bone marrow donors which doctors use to find possible donors for other patients.
El Dorado’s residential real estate market in March of 2007 showed a very slight drop from the same time a year ago for most indicators. To be sure, the median price was off by 10.3%, from $515,000 in March of 2006 to $462,000 for March of 2007. However, the average sale price decreased only 2.6% (from $541,910 to $527,944), and the average sold price per square foot declined only 3.2%.
Other indicators changed only slightly as well, with days on market increasing from an average of 69 days to 73 days. The expired to sold ratio rose from 42.2% to 54.7% during this period. Inventory, however, is fairly heavy at 9.3 months.
It’s generally accepted that the impact — perhaps even the intent — of El Dorado County’s Traffic Impact Mitigation Fees was to dramatically slow the development of undeveloped land. I’ve done some research recently that sheds some light onto how much of an impact these fees have had. Based on this research, we will see that the traffic impact fees have had an effect on the slowdown in sales of land that has been every bit as detrimental as the change in the general economy.
Since 2005, real estate sales have slowed in many areas of the country, including El Dorado County and Sacramento County. Unit volume and prices are down, and inventory is up. In the case of undeveloped land in El Dorado County, we currently have 727 units for sale listed in the MLS. Given that over the last year our average unit sales volume has been 23.2%, this works out to a figure of 31.4 months of inventory. The most common type of bare land available now is the two to five acre parcel (144 units), with parcels between one-half and one acre coming in second (124 units). The remainder of the 727 units are divided among the other categories, with the fewest in the 20 acre plus category (73 units).
In contrast to the 31.4 acres of land inventory we have in the county, our inventory of homes appears relatively meager at 9.3 months. However, current inventory is not the only indication we have that land sales have been dramatically slowed through the impact of the traffic mitigation fees. The changes in unit volume from year to year also give us an indication. For developed parcels (residential homes of one type or another), 1976 units were sold in the last year, down 23.7% from the year before (2005-2006). The volume in 2005-2006, in turn, was down 19.0% from the previous year.
We can consider these reductions as a sort of “baseline” for the decrease in volume we’d expect as the general real estate market cooled in the last few years. In the case of land, however, we can also see how the Traffic Impact Mitigation (TIM) fees factor in. This year’s unit volume of land sold in El Dorado County, 278 units, was a decrease of 55.7% from the 2005-2006 period (as compared to the 23.7% figure we quoted above for homes). The year before, 2005-2006, El Dorado County land sales were off by 43.1% from the prior year (2004-2005), as compared to a 19% drop in unit volume for homes during the same period.
As we can see, the slow down in land sales has taken place at roughly double the pace of the slowdown in the sale of homes. Perhaps in a later article I will take a look at how prices have changed in each category over the period. I predict that in addition to the TIM fees, there’s a different psychology that’s often at work in the sale of a home versus land, as a result of which we’ll find that the prices of land have tended to retreat more slowly. But we’ll leave most of that discussion for a future article.
This weekend, April 7th-8th (right now in fact), the Amador Flower Farm (22001 Shenandoah School Road, Plymouth) is holding its annual Spring Fling, featuring demonstrations by gardeners and the industry. Sunday there’ll be a visit from the Easter Bunny and an Easter Egg Hunt. For more information, contact the Flower Farm at 209-245-6660.
On Saturday, April 14th, The Fiddletown Preservation Society will celebrate Fiddletown’s gold rush legacy with Fiddletown Heritage Day. To learn more about the Fiddletown Preservation Society’s work and especially their preservation of the legacy of Chinese pioneers in the area, see the recent article the Ledger Dispatach. Events will include a gold panning workshop and demonstrations of other gold mining techniques, so if you’ve been looking to quit your day job, now’s your chance!
Amador County’s real estate market for March showed a good recovery from February’s dramatic, but apparently temporary, downturn in prices. This year’s average home in Amador County sold for $344,655, only 1.5% behind last year’s $350,008. During the same time, the sold price per square foot dropped somewhat more dramatically, from $208 to $198, or 4.8%.
On the other hand, from March 2006 to March 2007, the median selling price for residential property in Amador County rose some 9.6%.
Average days on market for sold homes were up substantially (60.5%), from 114 in March of 2006 to 183 in March of 2007.
We welcome comments, especially those that relate to the purposes of this blog, which is to educate consumers about the benefits of living and owning real estate in Amador or El Dorado County.
All comments are moderated.
Although we try to exercise a fairly wide latitude as far as what sort of things may inform or educate our readers, we reserve the right to remove any comments, any time, for any reason.
Jackson California’s real estate market in the first quarter of 2007 was off compared to a year ago. The average sold price per square foot was down 4.2%, from $190 to $182. The price of the average home that sold in Jackson dropped 3.5% during the period, from $309,714 in the first quarter of 2006 to $299,000. The median dropped from $299,000 to $289,000, a 3.3% decline.
Unit volume was down as well, from twenty-one units sold in the first quarter of 2006 to nineteen in the first quarter of 2007. Inventory is currently quite high at some 14.9 months.
April 2, 2007, “Two Counties — No Waiting”
March 6, 2007, “Voted Amador County’s best real estate blog by people who know it’s the only one.”
January 27, 2007, finally gave in to the underlying urge to blatant self-promotion with “Goll danged great agents”
December 3rd, 2006, began the fine tradition that is this post, changing our motto in keeping with our hunger blogathon theme to “Practice Random Acts of Residential Sales”.
November 9th, 2006, launched the blog with “We can’t quit now, we still have gas money”.
We’ve updated our charts showing the price curve for Amador County real estate from 2003 to the present. These charts have grown somewhat large over time, so rather than try to cram it all in, the thumbnails below will take you to the larger image.
Amador County Average Sold Price Per Square Foot
Residential Real Estate
2003 to the Present
Amador County Average Sold Price Per Square Foot
Residential Real Estate
2003 to the Present
There was a pretty sharp decrease from January to February, but we recovered most of that in March. Right now prices stand at roughly where they were in April / May of 2005.
