Soquel Real Estate

Jun 3rd

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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.

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Houston real estate market

May 12th

Posted by in Real Estate

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Despite record foreclosure levels, the other indicators in the Houston real estate market remain resilient and generally strong. According to a March 25, 2010 article in the DS News, “Texas claimed the biggest increase in foreclosures during the month of February with a rise of 35.3 percent, according to new data published this week by ForeclosureListings.com…While their overall numbers were lower than the Sin City, in Phoenix, Arizona, foreclosures jumped 34.61 percent last month, and in Houston, Texas, they surged 37.80 percent.” The piece, composed by Carrie Bay, continued to state that “Today one in every 418 homes in the United States has been hit with a foreclosure filing, topping over 300,000 filings for the 12th straight month and brining the nationwide total to almost 1.4 million.”
The prices of Houston homes for sale has been holding steady, according to a March 19, 2010 article in the Houston Business Journal. The piece found that “For the past two years, economists have pointed out that Houston housing prices were immune to the worst of the real estate collapse. A report issued Friday by IHS Global Insight puts an exclamation point on that observation. Across the country, house prices in extremely overvalued U.S. metropolitan areas declined nearly 37 percent on average between 2005, the peak of the real estate bubble, and the end of 2009 when prices stabilized, according to IHS’s fourth quarter 2009 report.” According to James Diffley, director of IHS Global Insight’s Regional Services Group, “The high risk of a home price collapse that we reported in 2005 was borne out, and the subsequent price declines across metropolitan areas is very closely correlated with our valuation metric.”
A local trend for Houston real estate for sale was reflected in the larger Southern real estate market, according to a March 23, 2010 article in the New York Times. That piece, also published by the Associated Press, stated that “Last month, 113,000 homes were sold in the region, but the median sales price dipped 4 percent from a year ago to $139,600, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday.”

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