Oh right!...not everyone is from Sacramento and paid attention to the real estate market for the last decade!

I received a call this week from a family thinking about making a home purchase in the Sacramento area. They had relocated here recently from another state in the Midwest and were currently renting a home in Carmichael. As we discussed price trends here, it occurred to me that they had no historical perspective regarding the rise, the fall, and rise again of our Sacramento real estate market.

The state these buyers were from, Indiana, definitely had it's own real estate peak -- but it came in 2007, and they described real estate values there to have declined less than 10% overall. They had no idea that Sacramento's market peaked much earlier in September 2005, it has been plagued with short sales and foreclosures, and that our median price in Sacramento County at that time was nearly $400,000...and now our Sacramento County median price is approximately HALF of that peak, just under $200,000 -- and had bumped along the bottom until about the last 12 months or so. In 2012 we had several consecutive months of rising prices, and 2013 appears to be off to a similar start.

Also this week I spoke to a recent college graduate who was from Sacramento, 22 years old, and looking to buy his first house. He was 14 years old in 2005, and not keenly aware of the real estate market at that time. It was only recently he started paying attention to home prices, and the media hoopla surrounding Sacramento real estate...and while he heard from what his parents, peers, and professors that now is a good time to buy, he did not know the history of Sacramento real estate for the last decade.

So in light of those conversations -- I thought I would post a statistical graph showing a little history.