April 2014 Sacramento Real Estate Statistics...up and up...

Spring home buying season in our area is definitely well under way. Again last month, we saw a slight uptick in the Sacramento County median home price to $266,000. It's nice to continue to see a healthy leveling-off of home prices with modest value appreciation. Large spikes are nice and all, but just not sustainable for the long term. There is also an uptick in pending sales and closed transactions. This is pretty typical for this time of year. While we have more inventory (homes on the market) right now than we saw in Sacramento this time last year, this level of available homes for sale is still really LOW. We have a little under 2 months of inventory in Sacramento County right now.

A market with about 6 months of available housing inventory is considered to have buyer and seller equilibrium. I think back to late 2007 and early 2008 when we had about a year of inventory on the market...there were more than 10,000 homes on the market and about under 1,000 selling per month. Here is a link to that blog post and graph -- notice then and now are remarkably different! That was a crazy time to work in real estate.

So while we have low housing inventory in Sacramento County right now, and I'd say the sellers generally have an advantage in the marketplace -- that does not mean buyers are dumb or desperate and will buy anything. Homes still need to be appropriately priced for the neighborhood, size, amenities, etc. in order to sell.