In July, the average home in El Dorado County sold for $541,094, down 6.4% from last July’s average of $578,118.  As we’ve seen elsewhere, buyers have continued to opt for larger homes, so this year’s average home in El Dorado County was 2,289 square feet, up modestly from last year’s average of 2,224 square feet.  As a result, sold price per square foot showed a more dramatic drop from year to year.  This year the average was 236.39, down 9.1% from last year’s average of $259.95.

At the same time, the median price of a home this year dropped only modestly.  This July’s median home sale price was $490,000, compared to $499,475 last year, a 1.9% drop.

The expired to sold ratio for July was 91.7%, compared to last year’s value of 68.2%.

Inventory is just over 12 months worth.  Unit sales in July (157) were pretty close to the average for the last year (155), however, they’re down 10.8% from last July’s total of 176 units.

No really, quit it.

I just got done writing about El Dorado County’s real estate sales in June, and noticed in the course of that article that prices aren’t really falling much in El Dorado County.  Instead, for the same price, buyers are getting a bigger house.  (Another way to put that is to say prices really are falling — it’s just not obvious just by looking at the median price and the average price).

Well, it looks like I spoke too soon on that one, because the same thing is going on in Amador County — only more so!  In Amador County, this year’s average price and median prices actually rose from last year, or appeared to.  The average home sold in June for $392,504, up .6% from last year’s average of $390,052.  Meantime, the median sale price increased 3.4%, from $350,000 last year to $362,000 this year.

But while prices rose moderately, the average size rose dramatically, some 21%, from approximately 1,548 square feet on average to 1,869 square feet on average.

One of the things I don’t really track here is how much land people are getting with these such-and-such “average square feet” homes.  It’s not that it’s not an interesting question, it’s just that the MLS doesn’t provide aggregate statistical info for acreage.  I suspect people are getting bigger yards in many cases as well as bigger homes.

Meantime, in other indicators, Amador County’s market continues to show signs of stress.  Inventory is higher than in any local market we study, at 16.04 months — that’s also up almost one month past last month’s figure of 15.3 months

Here’s a quiz for you: 

What happens to El Dorado County real estate prices when prices everywhere around them are falling?

A) They fall.

B) The rise.

C) They stay the same.

D) They stay about the same — people just buy bigger houses.

I’ll give you a hint.  The answer is D.

(That’s a really good hint, isn’t it?)

In June, 161 lucky buyers got to be like me and live in El Dorado County, and they paid about $543,043, on average, for the privilege.  A year ago, there were 225 buyers, but they paid not much more — $547,701 on average.  So from last year to this year, the average sale price changed only .9%.  Similarly, the median sale price only changed 1%, from $515,000 last June to $510,000 this June.

At the same time, however, the average home size increased 7.1%, from 2168 square feet to 2322 square feet.  As a result, the sold price per square foot dropped 7.4% over this period.

In El Dorado County, the game is not, “How low can I go”, the game is “Here’s my half million — what can I get for it?”

Inventory in El Dorado County is fairly high at twelve months.

As we’ve seen over the last several months, El Dorado County’s real estate market continued to put in a strong showing, with only very small declines in price and slight changes in other market areas compared to Sacramento County to the west, Placer County to the North, or Amador County to the South.

The median price for all residential property sold through the local MLS (Metrolist), is an excellent indicator of this resilience, declining a mere eight tenths of one per cent from May of 2006 to May 2007, from $499,000 last year to $495,000.  The average sold price in May was $543,534, down only 1.2% from last year.  Even adjusted for square footage, the decline was only a moderate 4.4% from May to May.

In terms of average days on market for sold homes, this year actually fared better than last, at 67 days compared to last year’s 68 days.  Similarly the expired listing to sold listing ratio, which shows us how many sellers are having trouble getting a buyer for their homes, is relatively uncharged  as well, from 48.7% last year to 50.3% this year.

The only two indicators that do show significant signs of stress are inventory numbers.  El Dorado County has just over eleven months of unsold inventory.  Also, unlike other indicators, units sold have changed significantly.  197 units sold last May versus 147 this year, a drop in unit volume of 25.4%.

Real estate sales in May of 2007 remained slow compared to last year, with falling prices and rising inventory. Forty-five homes sold this May, down 18% from last year’s 55 units sold in May.

The average home listed for $395,029, and sold for $379,828, or 96% of list. This number is consistent with last year, and as we’ve noted elsewhere, tends to be resilient despite what else the market is doing.

In other indicators, we see a slowing market. This year’s average price was down 5.4% from last year’s average selling price of $401,560. This May’s median was down significantly more, 13.5%, with this year’s median coming in at $345,990 and last year’s being $399,900. The average selling price per square foot was down 5.8%, at $210 per square foot this year versus $223 per square foot last year.

This May a home took longer to sell in Amador County, with the average home being on the market six months (184 days), as opposed to just over four months (127 days) last year. As you might expect, inventory is also high at 15.3 months.

Amador County’s numbers for April are a study in contradiction.  Some of the numbers show us clearly in the midst of a clear buyer’s market, while others are little changed from last year.  Of course, maybe this is not that surprising, since we were in a buyer’s market last year as well.

Forty-three residential units sold in Amador County in April, down 10% from last year’s 48 units.  The average home sold for $347,489 in April, down less than 1 per cent from last year’s average of $349,883.  Sold price per square foot only dropped 3.7%, while the median price of $329,000 was only down 1.8% from last year’s median of $335,000.

So far so good, I suppose, but at the same time, the average time a home spent on the market before selling rose 41.7%, from 127 days last year, to 180 days on average this April.  Looking at average monthly sales of Amador County homes for the past year and comparing that to current inventory, we come up with a figure of 15.2 months of inventory.

Turning our attention to active listings, however, once again we do see some more encouraging signs.  First, the average home is listed at $205 per square foot, only about 2.5% over the average sold list price for April, and the average days on market for all active homes is only 116 days.

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.

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.

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.