Three trends in the Sacramento real estate market

Let’s take a look at a few trends in the Sacramento real estate market. These are some of the things I’ve been seeing. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the market.

Taking longer to sell: There has been more and more talk in the real estate community and some in the media about the real estate market beginning to shift or possibly “normalize”. As inventory has been increasing and interest rates have gone up recently, properties are taking slightly longer to sell (generally speaking). The image above typifies what I am seeing in many neighborhoods. This bar graph represents all sales north of Highway 50 in Rancho Cordova as well as current listings. As you can see, current listings are definitely taking longer to sell when compared with sales over the past year (even though they are still selling VERY quickly). Take foreclosures and short sales with a grain of salt here since there are less of both right now than previously in the year.

By the way, check out “Home market settles a bit…” in the Sacramento Business Journal (some of my data was used for the article, which is always cool).

Less Distressed: Distressed sales hit a four-year low last quarter. The number of foreclosures and short sales has seen a rapid decrease over the past year. Think about it this way. There are roughly 20% less foreclosures right now than just one year ago. How does that strike you?

Unemployment in June 2013: The unemployment rate for Sacramento County for June 2013 was published on Friday by EDD. The jobless rate is now 8.7% after a few months of hanging out closer to 8.0%. As you can see, we are not out of the woods yet, but at least the trend in Sacramento and California has been closing in on the national unemployment rate after an exponential separation in 2009.

Question: How would you describe the Sacramento real estate market right now (or your home town market)?

If you liked this post, subscribe by email (or RSS). Thanks for being here.