Placerville Real Estate Blog

Over on my Sacramento Blog, I’ve been discussing how Sacramento County real estate sales are starting to heat up in a big way, fueled by high foreclosure rates and huge year-on-year price reductions.  I believe that we’ll see prices start to improve in Sacramento County as early as next year, as fewer option ARM resets hit the books (though depending on how you slice and dice those numbers, that may be an overly optimistic assessment). 

In El Dorado County, the story is a different one in several respects:

• The overall cost of homes is higher.
• There are fewer foreclosures and short sales available, though still many more in this market than in previous years.
• The Year on Year price reductions have been large enough to hurt, but still not as dramatic as Sacramento County.
• Because of the factors above, fewer first time buyers are entering the market and competing for homes.

The upshot is that while Sacramento County’s unit volume has soared 64.2% from May to May, in El Dorado County unit volume went down slightly, from 151 units in May of 2007 to 146 units in May of 2006.

This May’s average home sold for $429,434 in El Dorado County, down 20.3% from last May’s average of $538,590.  The median price has fallen 20% during the same period, from $488,000 to $390,500.  Sold price per square foot dropped 21.4%, from $242.61 in May of 2007 to $190.77 in May of 2008.

This year short sales and bank foreclosures made up 35.6% of the total sales, compared to 13.2% last year.  Short sales accounted for 7.5% of the total, and REOs made up 28.1%.  There are currently 12.4 months of inventory in El Dorado County.  The expired to sold ratio is up slightly this year — at 54.1% compared to 48% last year.  The average discount from list price for a sold home was 3.6%, compared to 4% last year.