Periodically, our broker provides us with market data to share with our clients. The charts below show the number of homes sold in the first half of 2007. These sales are split according to various price bands. There are charts for the following areas: Incline Village, Carson Valley, East Shore (Lake Tahoe), South Lake Tahoe, Tahoe City, Truckee, and Reno / Sparks. The charts below are thumbnails that are clickable to bring up the full size chart.
Chase International has offices in Reno, Incline Village, South Lake Tahoe, Glenbrook, Zephyr Cove, Tahoe City, Truckee, and London.
smarten
Take a look at Incline Village [“IV”]/Crystal Bay. Although I don’t think the figures are accurate, the chart shows 87 sales during the first 6 months of this year [an average of almost 15/month]. I can tell you that last week there were about 475 residential properties for sale; that’s ratio of 1 sale for every 30 listings or roughly 1/3 the Reno/Sparks sales/listing ratio.
Of course according to IV RE sales person Don Kanare, no owner in Incline Village “needs” to sell nor does he/she have mortgage indebtedness against his/her property to contend with.
Perhaps for these reasons [although I think there are others], median prices continue to rise. Go figure, and aren’t we seeing something similar in Reno/Sparks?
MikeZ
Those charts are rather coarse!
Downloading the sales report from the Washoe County Assessor, and filtering on June sales of SFHs in Reno and Sparks, then plotting in a high-res chart, we get:
http://tinyurl.com/ype9jm
which clearly shows a non-Gaussian distribution, with sales at the high end skewing the median price upward.
And, by the way, if you don’t have Excel, Open Office works just fine on the .xls and the chart generation.
SteveJ
…if only 15 of 474 homes for sale in incline village are selling per month, that is about 30 months of supply. Conclusion, Incline village doesn’t have “homes for sale”, Incline village has “homeowners living in the past who need to come to Jesus”
SteveJ
I listened to a presentation this week for their institutional investors clients by Goldman Sachs Asset Management entitled “Subprime Meltdown – Crisis or Opportunity” Here are the key points: 1) It is a crisis. 2) Months of supply of homes in the U.S will rise from 9 months currently to 13 months by 2009. This is due to foreclosures related to resetting hybrid arm and negative am mortgages. The reset wave will peak in Sept 2008 and foreclosures will peak about 12 months later. 3) A zero percent change is home prices over the next several years nationally is “optimistic” If they are correct about the national housing market, then this implies (in my humble opinion) that the previous boom areas such as Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Reno will depreciation substantially from today’s prices.
Lindie
SteveJ it isn’t just Goldman with such predictions. Most of the major financial houses have released similar predictions.
But it is not going to matter here in Reno. Beacuse it’s different here. We are special and immune to the economic forces that impact all the rest of the country. That is because Reno is a hidden jewel (even though all the world can discover it on the internet), because the legendary Bay Area refugees will prop up our values into the sunset, and because everybody wants to live here. If you don’t believe me, I have some fliers from 2004 from 4 of the major realty offices in Reno testifying to the same. Surely these fine realty offices know what they are talking about.
smarten
Lindie wrote “it’s different here. We are special and immune to the economic forces that impact…the rest of the country. That is because Reno is a hidden jewel (even though all the world can discover it on the internet), because the legendary Bay Area refugees will prop up our values into the sunset, and because everybody wants to live here.”
This is the very propoganda that has been propogated by Incline Village [“IV”]/Crystal Bay [“CB”] realtors for the last several years. 7,700 single family homes/condos/PUDs, roughly 500 listed for sale with the MLS at any point in time [and presumably more FSBOs], and roughly 20 actually selling/month. Throw out the $450K-$550K junk condos; the $13.95M, $6.95M and $5.5M Lake front estates; and, the $1M tear downs; and basically nothing else is selling.
But with so few sales and such high prices, median priced sales continue to rise [the same thing that is happening in Reno/Sparks]. Realtors tell you the savvy buyers are plucking off the good properties as they come to market and you too should be “savvy” becauses prices are continuing to rise. But I’m not buying into the myth.
So what’s left over and when will these sellers wake up to reality? It’s still not happening in IV/CB and it appears it’s still not happening in Reno/Sparks. My guess is it may start to get interesting around October when sellers finally come face to face with reality – that their properties AREN’T going to sell for another 9-10 months, if at all, unless they do something drastic like price their properties to actually sell. But who knows?