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.

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.

     It looks as though spring is in the air! Along with Spring comes the fury of home buyers and sellers looking for the best deal in town. I have the totals for the number of homes and properties sold in Pymouth, Fiddletown, River Pines, Sutter Creek, Ione, and Jackson during the month of February, I am anxiously waiting  to compare these numbers to March in a few weeks. According to the Amador MLS none of the homes in Plymouth or Fiddletown sold, however one property sold in River Pines, and the little (growing) town of Ione sold 7 homes with an average price of $245,285.00! A total of 6 homes sold in Jackson with an average price of $264,666.00 and in Sutter Creek 4 homes sold with an average price above all of $490,250.00.

Remember Ross Perot? Reform party presidential candidate whose voice sounded a lot like Frank Perdue’s.

Now there was a little short guy with big ears who loved his charts.

Lately I’m starting to feel like Ross Perot, because I’ve become enamored of charts. (Fortunately I’m still tall, and my ears are pretty average, and I have a nice baritone).

Anyway, this chart frenzy is probably a passing thing, a result of having created the mother of all Amador County real estate statistics spreadsheets.

But until the fever lifts, here’s the latest one — and I must say I really like this one because I’ve been able to draw an hourglass, using only Excel and MLS and some Polynomial Trend Lines.

Don’t feel bad, I had no idea what a Polynomial Trend Line was until I started falling under the influence of Ross Perot-ism. Fortunately for us, Microsoft’s Excel support tells us:

A polynomial trendline is a curved line that is used when data fluctuates. It is useful, for example, for analyzing gains and losses over a large data set.

The chart is below, and shows units sold and average days on market.  As you can see, as the seller’s market reached its peak in late 2004 and early 2005, as we would expect, unit volume was up and the value for average days on market was down.  Of course, as the market cooled, homes took longer to sell, and less of them sold.

As always, the real data is a jumbled mess, but by golly you get a pretty nifty picture when you throw in your polynomial trend lines.

I don’t know why Maureen Francis thinks statistics are dull.

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.

Looking at our local Amador MLS, it appears that Amador City and Drytown currently have six beautiful homes active on the market. Amador City is a quiet little town located just south of Highway 16 on Highway 49. This little town includes an abundance of history, great food and shopping.

    Plymouth, currently has eighteen homes active on the market in the local Amador MLS. Plymouth is a slightly larger town than Amador City and Drytown. Amador County holds their annual fair in Plymouth. Plymouth leads the way to our gorgeous Shenandoah Valley, where there are currently a couple vineyard and winery properties available.

It’s been a few days since I published the Sacramento County Year In Review on my Sacramento site, so I thought I’d follow that up with a brief Year in Review for El Dorado County Real Estate.

El Dorado County followed a much different pattern from what we saw in Sacramento. The raw data is below so you can make up your own mind, but let me try to summarize it. I would say that El Dorado’s prices continued to rise, and at a faster rate, throughout 2005, and fell in 2006 at a slower rate, than Sacramento County. Also, the shift in the market from increasing prices to decreasing happened later in the year.

As a result of these differences, the year on year appreciation numbers are positive for most quarters of 2006, and positive overall. It’s only in the third quarter that we start to see the numbers go down, as shown below. I expect we’ll continue to see declines in 2007, though whether those declines will turn out to be “hard” or “soft” I leave to the good pundits at Sacramento Landing (presumably, since we don’t have an El Dorado Landing).

Meanwhile, if you want to see the world through rose colored glasses, tell your friends that the average sale price for home in El Dorado County appreciated 4.2% in 2006, while the median sale price appreciated 5.3%. (Just don’t tell them that unit volume is off 30.6% — that’ll ruin it!)

Here are the numbers. As always, information is based on MLS data and is believed accurate but has not been verified.

For average prices:

For median prices: