Short Sales are still selling in Sacramento, but they are a significantly smaller piece of the puzzle than before...

I met with a new buyer client last week, and during the course of our appointment, she asked me my thoughts about the possibility of  purchasing a short sale home. I explained that short sales, foreclosures, and "distressed properties" generally were far less prevalent in the Sacramento real estate market today than they were a few years ago.

Just the pure ratio of short sales to other types of listings in the market is low, so I suppose statistically buyers these days are less likely to purchase a short sale. Last quarter (November, December, January) there were 381 short sales in Sacramento County out of 5597 total homes for sale. That's less than 7% of all inventory.

This graph above portrays the market for short sale listings only in Sacramento County over the last 6 years. I remember there was a time about 5-6 years ago when ALL of my listings were short sales. All of them. 100% of them. That was a chaotic time in the market. An a chaotic time to be a short sale listing agent. I had many active listings, all of them short sales at varying stages of negotiation, and had to wake at 5am to start calling banks with loss mitigation departments on the east coast to negotiate payoffs. And most of my listings had both a first loan, and a second loan or home equity line of credit (HELOC), not to mention a few that had 3rd loans, or maybe IRS or FTB tax liens. Eh, I've done it all.

In 2015, only 20% of my listings were short sales. That is significantly fewer than 5-6 years ago, though proportionately more than double of the market in general. Considering I cultivated a deep skill set in negotiating short sales, it makes sense that while they are a tiny piece of the overall Sacramento real estate market right now, that I am still closing a fair number of them.