Real Estate Report presented by Connie Landes

The average price for single-family, resale homes rose 17.8%, year-over-year, to go over $1,000,000 for the first time ever! $1,047,680.

The median price was up 8.7%, year-over-year, to $879,000, another all-time high. The previous high was $867,525 set last May.

Sales of single-family, re-sale homes in March were up by 16.5%, year-over-year.

There were 127 homes sold. The average number of homes sold in a month since January 2003 is 160.

The median price for condos was up 3.9% year-over-year. The average price was up 8.3% over last March.

Multiple offers continue to be the norm. The sales price to list price ratio, or what buyers are paying over what sellers are asking continues to hover around 100%: 100.7% for homes and 99.9% for condos.

Homes and condos are selling quickly. It is taking only thirty-three days from when a home is listed to when it goes into contract. The average since January 2003 is sixty-four days.

Condos are taking nineteen days. The average is sixty-five days.

All of this is due to an incredible lack of inventory. Since January 2003, Santa Cruz County has averaged 145 days of inventory. Last month it was forty-nine. The number of homes for sale as of the fifth of March was 206. The average is 720.

Condos have averaged 224 days of inventory since 2003. Last month it was forty-seven. The number of condos for sale as of the fifth of March was fifty-nine. The average is 147.

Big investment firms have stopped gobbling up California homes

By: Cal Matters

Astronomical prices are forcing a rising share of California families to postpone buying a house. As a result, the state’s record-low homeownership rate has been a boon to one growing segment of California’s housing market: single-family home rentals.

Between 2005 and 2015, the number of owner-occupied homes in California shrunk by nearly 64,000 units, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Meanwhile the number of renter-occupied homes increased dramatically.

California now has 450,000 more homes used as rentals than it did a decade ago. Compare that to the 1990s, when the number of rented homes grew by less than 120,000 while the state added 700,000 homes owned by the people who live in them.

The rising tide of single-family rentals has renewed attention on who actually receives the rent payments that nearly 2 million Californians make each month. Lawmakers and first-time homeowner advocates have been scrutinizing a relatively new form of landlord: private investment firms that snapped up thousands of homes during the foreclosure crisis and now rent them out.

With nearly one in four California homes now purchased in all-cash, these well-financed institutional investors have also been blamed as unfair competition against families bidding on starter homes. So how much are institutional investors impacting California’s housing prices? The data says not so much now.. 

The rest of the article is much too long for this space. You can access it here: https://tinyurl.com/y8ucd9fc

It is well worth the read as it also discusses the impact of foreign buyers on the local market.