Sacramento Real Estate Statistics - September 2014

As the summer home buying season in our area winds down and we get ready for autumn, it's nice to see that the median home price is holding firm. Again last month, we saw the Sacramento County median home price increase ever so slightly to $275,000. As I have said this year, It's nice to continue to see a healthy leveling-off of home prices with modest value appreciation. In the last 12 months, Sacramento home values have increased just about 9.4%, If you look at this graph, during the same time period as last year the market dynamic looked much the same -- just bumping along with slight increases. You'll notice as winter approached, the prices decreased a little but bounced back in the spring...I anticipate a similar trend as we go through autumn and winter. These are seasonal norms -- based on many buyers suspending their home searches, going into hibernation mode during the holidays and then reinvigorating their home searches again in the spring. All good stuff...no crazy spikes, just nice, normal, and mellow. It's been nice not to have a frenzied market for one reason or another. I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts!

Many of my transactions lately have involved folks selling their home and purchasing another. With the mellow tenor to the Sacramento real estate market right now, this has proven to be an opportune time to upsize, downsize, move to a different neighborhood, etc.

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 LOW. We have about 2.8 months of inventory in Sacramento County in September. This is not a lot. A market with buyer/seller equilibrium is 5-6 months of inventory. Homes are taking an average of 40 days to sell as of September. I'm seeing more price reductions in the market...it seems that some sellers still want to test the market and they are trying to get a lot more for their home than the last comparable sale. BUT, as you can see, statistically that's just not happening in our Sacramento home market right now. With prices holding steady, sellers need to price homes realistically.