Home Front: Sacramento-area home sales reach 2009 high in July

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Home Front

A blog about the economy and the Sacramento-area real estate market.

August 21, 2009

Sacramento-area home sales reach 2009 high in July

Late Friday Update:

Here is the regional price/sales chart for Sacramento-area counties.

And here is the ZIP Code chart to drill deeper into price/sales in the neighborhoods.

Sacramento-area sales of new and existing homes combined reached another 2009 high in July as 3,815 buyers closed escrow in Amador, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties, researcher MDA DataQuick reported this morning.

That's up from 3,758 sales in June in the capital region - but down from 4,126 last year. It's the second month in a row that home sales have fallen below last year's levels. Analysts say it's because repos pushed up sales so dramatically last year. There are far fewer on the market now.

Median price rose to $180,000 in Sacramento County - the largest sector of the market with six in 10 sales. That's after two months at $175,000 - well above the low earlier this year of $160K.

Perhaps more significantly, the rate of decline in prices has slowed dramatically in the county. The July 2009 median is down just 14.3 percent from the same month last year after many months of 30 percent and higher year-over-year declines.

More Sacramento County stats:

38 percent of July sales were priced below $150,000.
6.6 percent were $400,000 and above.
43.2 percent of sales used FHA loans typically used by first-time buyers.
24.8 percent of sales by absentee buyers presumed to be investors.
58.7 percent of sales were foreclosed properties - lowest percentage since April 2008.

Here is an early online report in The Bee.

Meanwhile, here's the July reports for the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles region.

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