Sacramento Median Home Prices Rise Over $5,000
April 22nd, 2009 Categories: Real Estate News
A fast-paced home sales market makes Sacramento the envy of real estate agents across the nation. In the month of March, for the first time in more than a year, the median prices for new and existing home sales combined rose to $165,000 in Sacramento County – a $5,000 hike from February. The county’s median sales price has risen only a handful of times from one month to the next since prices peaked in 2005 at $387,000.
Some days it seems the worse may be over, ie; inventory is definitely tightening, buyers are ‘off the fence’, the fear and uncertainty seem to be subsiding, Short sales are getting approved… Yet there still looms perhaps, another tsunami of foreclosures coming over the next several months, as California imposed moratoriums begin to lift… Listing agents across the Sacramento region are reporting many more assignments; BPO (Broker Price Opinions) orders are way up (we are doing three times as many as we’ve EVER done) and foreclosureradar.com reports many more trustee sales are taking place again…
So analysts remain stubbornly cautious. They say there are still too many conflicting signals to accurately forecast a bottoming out of the real estate cycle. The year’s worth of increases, after all, follow 37 straight months of year-over-year declines,
“Usually, after 12 months, you start looking for prices to stabilize,” said Andrew LePage, an analyst with researcher MDA DataQuick. DataQuick announced Thursday that March saw 3,419 homes close escrow in the region, an increase of about 31.5 percent from March 2008.
“But we’ve never been down this road before,” he said, “and historical road maps haven’t done a good job of showing where we’re headed…
According to DS News; The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) reported on Wednesday that U.S. home prices rose 0.7 percent from January to February, based on the purchase prices of homes owned or guaranteed by the GSEs. It’s the second month in a row that FHFA has recorded a national gain in residential real estate values. From December to January, the agency said, prices rose a full percentage point at the national level.
Although the recent gains are a welcome departure from months of steady declines, property values still have a ways to go to recover from the hole that’s been dug by the housing crisis. Based on FHFA’s market data, for the 12 months ending in February, the national House Price Index (HPI) is down 6.5 percent. The U.S. index is 9.5 percent below its April 2007 peak. February’s numbers are currently sitting at about the same level as home prices in April 2005, the agency said.
