Wachovia foreclosed April 1st on this 4,158 sf house with a full copper roof on a third-acre lot, and it’s already on the market. Chase foreclosed on a different one in Carlsbad last week that the owner had been trying to loan mod/short sell, so I guess the moratorium has been somewhat loose-knit.
Guess the list price as you take the video tour:
Mozart commented this morning:
“Like it or not, things are getting better. Home prices and incomes are balanced. Things are still tough but stability is great news. Extremely well qualified buyers are now the norm.”
“We’ll piddle along for the rest of the year. Substantial price gains are a ways out but this grind along the bottom is over.”
Demand has been steady enough that sales of bank-owned properties have been strong – additional REO listings should be welcomed by antsy buyers in all areas, unless supply overwhelms demand.
Buyers waiting for foreclosures can check this comparison for their specific area. The bolded areas below have had a significant increase in NODs and NOTSs over six months ago.
Here are the foreclosure counts from November 13th, and today:
| Town or Area | Zip Code | Nov. NOD/NOTS/REO | May NOD/NOTS/REO | diff |
| Cardiff | 92007 | 16/8/14 | 25/11/6 | +4 |
| Carlsbad NW | 92008 | 30/23/27 | 55/22/13 | +10 |
| Carlsbad SE | 92009 | 71/44/63 | 168/22/29 | +41 |
| Carlsbad NE | 92010 | 33/13/29 | 51/28/7 | +11 |
| Carlsbad SW | 92011 | 27/23/20 | 41/32/17 | +20 |
| Del Mar | 92014 | 15/8/12 | 21/6/4 | -4 |
| Encinitas | 92024 | 73/35/33 | 118/48/28 | +53 |
| La Jolla | 92037 | 49/36/28 | 95/53/14 | +49 |
| Oceanside | all | 659/326/980 | 852/539/295 | -279 |
| Poway | 92064 | 70/34/74 | 109/70/26 | +27 |
| RSF | 92067 | 10/4/6 | 20/6/1 | +7 |
| San Marcos N | 92069 | 152/93/184 | 232/137/68 | +7 |
| San Marcos S | 92078 | 122/71/135 | 188/107/45 | +109 |
| Solana Bch | 92075 | 14/6/16 | 37/15/5 | +21 |
| Vista | all | 340/189/410 | 486/308/146 | +1 |
| Sorrento | 92121 | 3/0/4 | 10/3/2 | +8 |
| West RB | 92127 | 90/46/58 | 152/78/24 | +60 |
| Rancho Pen | 92129 | 68/29/69 | 140/80/27 | +81 |
| Carmel Valley | 92130 | 39/20/30 | 93/63/15 | +82 |
| Total | above | 1,931/1,044/2,220 | 2,893/1,008/772 | -552 |
I didn’t bold Carmel Valley (and other areas) because I thought there are probably enough buyers to sop up the coming REOs there. In the bolded areas I’m not so sure.
From sddt.com
San Diego, like many metropolitan areas, has been slammed by the housing market’s decline.
But if reports are right, the area may have already bottomed out at a much more affordable levels.
This assessment was made during the UCLA Anderson Forecast conference at the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina Friday.
Peggy Johnson, a Qualcomm executive vice president, said while the decline in the housing market has been bad news for many, she likes the fact San Diego is now a much more affordable market.
“We couldn’t attract talent here due to the cost of housing,” Johnson related.
The California Association of Realtors (C.A.R.) reported that a starter single-family home was affordable to some 61 percent of San Diego region households in the first quarter of 2009.
The affordability rate was closer to 20 percent as recently as three years ago.
Jerry Nickelsburg, a UCLA Anderson senior economist, said the decline does seem to be leveling off. He added however, that it might be a while before housing construction picks up again.
A UCLA Anderson Forecast document projects permits for a total of 56,000 housing units of all types will be pulled between this year and 2013 in San Diego County. The Construction Industry Research Board reported permits for only 5,155 housing units were pulled in 2008. This was the lowest figure in at least a decade.
Nickelsburg said while there could be some modest rebound in residential construction by early next year, he doesn’t expect the building activity to build up a full head of steam before 2011.
“There are a lot of lost construction jobs. You might have a plumber who was working for a homebuilder who got laid off, tried going out on his own, but was unable to make it and is now among the unemployed. It has been difficult out there,” Nickelsburg said. “Home prices have fallen way back and they have remained soft.”
Mark Schniepp, a Santa Barbara-based consulting economist to UCLA Anderson, added that following a 45 percent drop within the past two years or so, he believes prices have bottomed out.
Nickelsburg did say that with few homes being constructed and population continuing to grow, a “huge pent-up demand for housing” is in the process of developing. Schniepp sees this as well.
“Unsold housing is starting to diminish. The existing inventory is getting depleted and it may already be too late to get the best deal,” Schniepp said.
Schniepp, who believes that housing is poised to recover now, nevertheless expressed some concerns about a recent spike in notices of default.
Both Schniepp and Nickelsburg said they believe the defaults shouldn’t return in waves the way they did during the past year, however. “We’re starting to get these defaults behind us,” Nickelsburg said.
Schniepp said the good news for San Diego County is the housing meltdown started earlier here than it did in most other parts of the country and should thus rebound sooner.
“Housing is poised to recover pretty early,” Schniepp said.
Schniepp said we are far from out of the woods yet noting that while home resales increased by 134 percent between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, most of these were bank owned sales or short sales of properties that were in trouble.
“Homeowner distress was moderating, but it recently rebounded in February and March of this year,” said a UCLA Anderson Forecast document. “Defaults are rising but foreclosures have not followed. The recent (federal) Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, which is targeted to prevent foreclosures by modifying loans or postponing mortgage payments for delinquent homeowners is now just gaining traction. It may help to prevent a sizable portion of defaults from evolving into foreclosure.”
The report said if the number of foreclosures does decline, housing values will stabilize and bank-owned transactions at fire sale prices will no longer impact the market.
“We need to turn these into non-distressed sales so we can turn things around,” Schniepp said.
If that happens, Schniepp said the San Diego region could see the beginning of a housing recovery by mid-summer.
For home buyers who don’t mind paying retail, I have good news for you. There is no shortage of retail-priced listings, there are plenty of choices!
With anticipation of a foreclosure cascade to begin next month, most buyers are reluctant to buy anything today, unless it’s an obvious deal. Won’t there be better deals, later?
There should be, and the rest of the year is fairly predictable.
To help our buyers, we’ve compiled the ‘Most Likely to be a Deal’ list for the remainder of 2009.
For Carmel Valley buyers looking to spend less than $1,200,000:
127 detached homes for sale under $1.2 million on MLS.
58 of those have been on the market sixty days or longer.
33 of those have at least 10% equity.
Because the newly-listed sellers are too optimistic, and those with no equity don’t have any choice but to hold out for retail, we can set aside those for now. We’ll keep a close eye out for listings that might get their price right, but the chances of that are remote. Most CV agents are in complete denial of current market conditions, and continue to push retail, or retail-plus listings onto the market.
Instead of having to sort through all 127, we can work the list of 33, and add to it the 66 SFRs on the foreclosure list, including NODs, NOTs, and REOs.
For the buyers who’d like to find a deal this year under $1,200,000 in Carmel Valley, there are 99 properties that could fit the bill.
We split them further into two lists; 46 that are over 2,800sf, and 53 that are under 2,800sf.
Any new NODs coming on this year will have 6-8 months of processing, so they’ll be lining up for next year’s inventory, and so will those with little or no equity.
It is very frustrating for buyers to have to be patient, but at least we’re likely to be at the peak of the selling season right about now. In the next few weeks there should be some sellers starting to inch closer to the exits, nervous that their confident list price might be wrong after all.
If we can help manage and organize the homes for sale into those that are ‘most likely to be a deal’, it should help make the search more tolerable, and hopefully fruitful.
Let me know if you’d like a copy – Carmel Valley is done, and Carlsbad and Encinitas are next.
Yesterday we were discussing those high-end buyers – here’s a tour of the Del Mar beach area where the highest sale in county history ($48,150,000) happened in May, 2007. Buyers of the first and third houses shown paid all-cash, and house #2 had a $10,000,000 down payment:
Here’s how T’s looks from above – it runs from the 120 feet of sand frontage back to the tennis court, and includes every building with a tan roof:
Save the columns!
The “Train-Tracks” contest concluded yesterday.
Four tickets to a Padres game go out to ‘Bella’, for guessing the exact selling price of $599,000!
Here were the guesses:
$349,000 Paid off homeowner
$362,000 Freedom CM
$385,000 shoppingaround
$399,000 chrisg
$405,000 Tyrone
$417,000 BAM
$420,000 Kook1315
$435,000 Eeek
$440,000 Trisha
$449,000 CalPolyMom
$450,000 Geopf
$450,500 Anonymous
$455,000 JE
$465,000 Toad B.
$469,000 K. Hoffman
$470,000 Genius
$476,000 MAB
$479,500 Rob Dawg
$489,501 JAP
$490,990 jpricevincenz
$495,000 jbirdfunk
$496,500 DKO
$497,000 CA renter
$497,500 SD Andy
$499,000 Chuck Ponzi
$499,000 Ward00
$500,000 Simone
$503,940 Just A Broker
$505,000 KC
$509,000 Eric Chang
$510,000 gywright
$512,989 sdmamma22
$517,500 john john
$525,000 mtb
$529,000 greenlander
$529,000 Dwalla
$529,500 sky
$529,888 no_techie
$532,635 no bubble here
$533,333 James Dean
$535,000 NaClH2Ogal
$539,000 UCGal
$542,000 Neil Diamond
$542,000 T. Hoffman
$544,000 Blissful Ignoramus
$546,500 M Santoro
$549,000 SD_Coastal
$549,900 bobfather99
$550,000 dimahot
$552,000 Kris Kertzman
$555,000 Erica Douglass
$555,000 jfooj
$555,555 DCRogers
$557,000 JCW
$569,000 brian
$569,000 george8
$570,000 OCVulture
$574,425 akabillya
$575,000 Westparker
$579,000 MikeC
$580,000 Ikilled007
$582,000 Angela
$591,000 The Blur
$599,000 Bella – Sales price!
$599,900 List Price
$605,000 REB
$607,000 Mozart
$612,000 3clicks from the beach
$615,000 Mogonus
$619,000 Stephen Waits
$620,000 newbie
$626,000 smithers
$628,000 Blucore
$629,000 GameAgent
$639,000 Bar Leucadian
$666,000 Chris
A hearty THANK YOU goes out to Rob Dawg for minding the store this week. A spirited discussion throughout, with 185 comments left!
The most intriguing was the last post, where he noted – like Rich did – the divergence between average list and sold pricing on a $-per-sf basis.
A few commentors suggested that the upper-end market was the likely culprit. Here’s a check:
Carlsbad to La Jolla New Listings over $1,500,000 entered between April 1 – May 15:
| Year | # of listings | LP Avg. $/sf | % closed | SP Avg. $/sf |
| 2003 | ||||
| 2004 | ||||
| 2005 | ||||
| 2006 | ||||
| 2007 | ||||
| 2008 | ||||
| 2009 |
Because only one of the 2009 listings has closed so far, I used the overall number closed, 42, between April 1 – May 15 of this year.
The ‘percentage closed’ helps show the struggle this market is having. At the peak about half of these listings were closing, but now there are 5-6 new listings coming on the market every day, and only about one closing per day.
The backlog of high-end listings doesn’t seem to phase the sellers/agents either.
Currently there are 883 ACTIVE listings over $1,500,000 between Carlsbad and La Jolla. The list prices on average are $887/sf, and average market time is 118 days.
But check this – in April there were 30 closings, the same one-a-day pace, but their list prices averaged $568/sf, and closed at an average of $510/sf. So the 12 properties that have closed in May that averaged $959/sf have skewed the chart’s 2009 number quite a bit higher.
This is the Redfin graph of sold $/sf vs list $/sf for San Diego. For some reason the two lines are no longer tracking. Can anyone help me figure this out? [Click for a clearer picture.]
Are you looking for an experienced agent to help you buy or sell a home?
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