A small census-designated place in Santa Cruz County, the town of Soquel, California, is home to just over 5,000 residents in the northern part of the state, in the San Francisco Bay region. The community is just minutes from the Pacific shores and just east of Santa Cruz. It is a small, close-knit community and Soquel real estate tends to be more affordable than properties in many of the surrounding communities.

Even though the market is not as high-priced as many in this region, it has nonetheless felt the aftershocks of the crashing of the national real estate market in the U.S. Prices today are still off by about $10,000 from where they were a year ago, in contrast to the usual trend of home prices going up year by year. At the end of 2009, in December, the community saw four new listings of Soquel homes for sale, bringing the month’s total inventory to 31, down from the level of 45 one year ago and down from 50 three months ago in September.

There were eight homes sold in Soquel in December, double the figure of September and up from just three at the same time one year ago. Homes spent an average of 96 days in the market before selling, an average the has risen since September, when it was just 19, and from a year ago, when it was just 52, according to statistics compiled by the Santa Cruz Association of Realtors.

Prices are still continuing to struggle to reach pre-crisis levels. In December, the average price of homes sold was $523,300 and the median price was $537,450. These figures have both fallen since September, when they were $556,500 and $553,000, respectively, but they are up from figures from December 2008, when they were $502,333 and $525,000, respectively.