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NSDCC April Sales and Pricing, Preliminary

by Jim the Realtor | May 6, 2024 | North County Coastal, Sales and Price Check

This sales count is tremendous – and there will still be some late-reporters:

The median sales price is back to being higher than the median list price, and it is 10% higher than it was last April – wow!

Carmel Valley, SE Carlsbad, and Encinitas Pricing

by Jim the Realtor | May 2, 2024 | North County Coastal, Sales and Price Check

The interactive graphs updated with April stats for the three middle-of-the-road zip codes in San Diego County’s north coastal region. While there was some slumping after rates started rising in May, 2022, pricing has mostly recovered since:

Move your cursor over the graph to see the specific numbers.

Overly Optimistic

by Jim the Realtor | Apr 19, 2024 | 2024, Market Conditions, Market Surge, North County Coastal, Spring Kick

Pardon the casual presentation. I’m used to working with this same basic graph format but it’s limited to 50 datapoints – we’d really like to take these back a few years to see the long-term trends.

But in early 2023, the active listings in the $3M – $4M category were range bound between 1,170/sf and 1,342/sf, so there is some normal optimism in springtime. But not like this pop in 2024 (above). These two subsets are the meat of the market, and aren’t swayed by radical outliers that would tweak the averages.

Starting right after the Super Bowl, there was a huge swing from $1,252/sf to $1,515/sf in the $3M – $4M category, and it has stayed elevated until the last couple of weeks. The reason for pricing to relax a little?

The number of unsold listings are starting to stack up now:

There isn’t any reason for home buyers to think mortgage rates are going to drop significantly this year. If there were one or two Fed cuts, it would only cause mortgage rates to get back into the 6s which isn’t enough to compensate for the sky-high prices that buyers are seeing today.

Then we have the changes from the commission lawsuit, which will have a clunky start over the next few months as buyers grapple with hiring a buyer-agent in writing just to tour a house. All we need is the Padres to go on a run this summer and we will have all the excuses we need for a very sluggish rest of the year.

NSDCC First Quarter Comparisons

by Jim the Realtor | Apr 15, 2024 | 2024, Jim's Take on the Market, North County Coastal, Sales and Price Check, Why You Should List With Jim | 1 comment

The first quarter of 2024 is the only 1Q in recent history to have increases in BOTH the number of listings AND the median list price. Previously, increases in pricing had a corresponding dip in the number of listings available for buyers to consider.

If you are like me, you’ve seen a noticeable surge in seller optimism in 2024. It’s not just the median list price that is up 8%, doesn’t it seem like everything is $200,000 higher than last year?

Inventory Watch

by Jim the Realtor | Mar 11, 2024 | Inventory, North County Coastal

The NSDCC houses for sale have had a median list price over $4,000,000 all year.

How is the upper half of the market performing?

While the $2,000,000 to $4,000,000 market has seen continued upward pressure on pricing (click below on more…), the $4,000,000+ list pricing has been correcting – and it’s working!

The average LP/sf has dropped 10% since January, and the number of active (unsold) listings is trickling up. But the average days-on-market is settling down, and the number of pendings look great. There have already been 42 NSDCC sales closed this year over $4,000,000!

Fun fact:

NSDCC Active Listings Priced Over $10,000,000 Today: 46

NSDCC Listings Sold Over $10,000,000, Last 12 Months: 43

It is a very affluent marketplace!

(more…)

NSDCC SP:LP Ratio

by Jim the Realtor | Feb 21, 2024 | 2024, Frenzy, Market Conditions, North County Coastal

Another good way to anticipate the market trends is to check the direction of the SP:LP ratio:

NSDCC Monthly Sales and SP:LP Ratio

Month	# of Sales	Median LP	Median SP	SP:LP
Jan 2022	149	$2,099,999	$2,200,000	105%
Feb	169	$2,099,999	$2,300,000	110%
Mar	219	$2,384,000	$2,500,000	105%
Apr	239	$2,299,000	$2,450,000	107%
May	230	$2,300,000	$2,432,500	106%
Jun	203	$2,200,000	$2,330,000	105%
Jul	165	$2,199,000	$2,249,000	102%
Aug	177	$2,100,000	$2,100,000	100%
Sep	146	$2,037,499	$1,940,000	96%
Oct	124	$2,225,000	$2,125,000	96%
Nov	123	$1,925,000	$1,860,000	97%
Dec	110	$2,091,500	$1,892,500	90%
Jan 2023	105	$1,995,000	$2,000,000	100%
Feb	112	$2,150,000	$2,040,000	95%
Mar	191	$2,199,888	$2,200,000	100%
Apr	165	$2,199,000	$2,180,000	99%
May	178	$2,300,000	$2,362,500	103%
Jun	160	$2,199,500	$2,257,500	103%
Jul	170	$1,998,750	$1,961,250	99%
Aug	198	$2,224,500	$2,217,500	100%
Sep	154	$2,272,500	$2,201,250	97%
Oct	140	$2,250,000	$2,182,500	97%
Nov	117	$2,325,000	$2,200,000	95%
Dec	87	$2,100,000	$2,050,000	98%
Jan 2024	108	$2,200,000	$2,267,500	103%
Feb	97	$2,395,000	$2,500,000	104%

Pricing looks strong – similar to the March-May, 2022 era, which was the hottest frenzy ever!

Over List, January

by Jim the Realtor | Feb 13, 2024 | North County Coastal, Over List | 6 comments

There were 23 buyers who paid over the list price last month. There were 29 in the previous month, but because there were 20 fewer sales in December, the percentage looks much larger.

Cash buyers purchased 41 of the 107 sales, or 38%.

Fifteen of the sales were round-tripped (buyer and seller represented by the same agent). Thirteen of the sales had zero days on market. Of those, six were round-tripped.

With all the desperation among realtors due to the lower volume, you’d think the shenanigans would be rising faster, but those numbers are fairly normal. Last January, there were nine of the 105 sales that had zero days-on-market.

Our lousy pricing metrics stayed towards the higher end of the 10% range:

NSDCC Monthly Sales and Pricing

With the hot CPI report today, mortgage rates should be heading higher and take some of the buzz out of the marketplace. Get an FHA or VA mortgage and save 3/4%!

NSDCC Picking Up Steam

by Jim the Realtor | Feb 8, 2024 | 2024, Frenzy, North County Coastal | 2 comments

On Monday morning, these were the counts of active and pending listings between La Jolla and Carlsbad:

Actives: 312

Pendings: 149

This morning, the counts are:

Actives: 286 (-26)

Pendings: 164 (+15)

These are pre-Super Bowl numbers and it’s been pouring rain for a week!

What’s going to happen once we get into the more-traditional selling season of March, April, and May?

These blog posts are uploaded onto my LinkedIn page, and it was there yesterday that Carl asked what my crystal ball said about pricing this year.

It’s going to keep going up!

The houses that aren’t well presented and are sloppy on price are going to sit. But those that have something special about them, and/or are presented well and have an attractive price are going to find a buyer in the first week or two.

NSDCC Supporting Data:

2023 Median List Price: $2,199,000

2023 Median Sales Price: $2,157,500

January, 2024 Median List Price: $2,200,000

January, 2024 Median Sales Price: $2,275,000

The median list price of today’s 164 pendings: $2,499,950

Some buyers are getting deals, mostly on the scratch-and-dent homes where sellers and listing agents didn’t do much, if anything, to prepare the home for sale. But look at the January median sales price – it’s higher than the median list price!

Here we go again!

We are already on our way to a +10% increase in pricing – and it’s only the first week of February!

Carlsbad, Encinitas, and Carmel Valley

by Jim the Realtor | Feb 7, 2024 | North County Coastal

While it would appear that there was a big jump in new listings last month, the January count wasn’t unusual – it’s just inching its way back to a more-normal pace:

January New Listings – Totals of Three Areas Above

2019: 234

2020: 186

2021: 157

2022: 113

2023: 101

2024: 106

The pricing leveled off when rates jumped in 2Q22, with more volatility lately:

Some buyers are getting discounts too:

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