Marin County Real Estate

Some readers have asked lately about a recent jump in our Days on Market statistic. I thought it makes sense to explain it here. We recently did a methodology change where we increased the look-back window for watching properties.

By making this change, we more accurately reflect the actual total time on market, even for properties that have come on and off the market, especially including those that have been off the market for 30 days before being relisted.

In January 2007 we increased our look-back window. We'll now identify more properties as they've come on and off the market. Thus the big jump in our Days on Market statistic.

What we found was that in some markets, we can find a significant chunk of properties that have really been on the market for long periods and these properties were previously under-reported in our stats. We've seen a notable decline in the number of properties relisted (with the sole intention of "refreshing" a listing) in Silicon Valley since last fall when the local MLS changed its rules. In San Jose California we've observed a drop from nearly 25% of homes on the market having been relisted down to 9%. That's real progress.

Those rules however do not impact a property that for example was on the market all last summer, was pulled off over the holidays and put back on the market in January. A soon-to-be-announced Altos partner calls these properties "stale fish." We've adjusted our nets to catch more stale fish. We're still dolphin-safe though.

This change effected our the trend charts in most communities a little bit. In some areas, though, you might notice a big jump in the DoM stat that week in January 2007. This change is the reason for the jump. Inset is a snapshot of the current Days on Market trend for San Jose Homes.

Here's a look at 16 zip-codes showing mounting pressure from the slowing housing market. We looked at Northern California and Seattle area zip codes with greater than 40% of the properties with price reductions. We also filtered for decreasing demand trends (measured by our Market Action Index), sufficient inventory, and median days on market (at least 7 weeks).

The result is one way to identify some at-risk bubble markets:

Some patterns emerge. High-end markets, even those close in, like Los Altos, Saratoga, and Redmond are showing their weakness. Outlier communities like Bodega Bay start to filter in. Worst, of course, is the combination of high-end communities far from the economic center - Pebble Beach and Carmel.

Note 1: We filtered pretty aggressively, exclusion from this list does not mean everything is rosy in homeville. You can draw parallels with similar communities that aren't on this list for one reason or another.

Note 2: Inclusion on this list does not imply market rout. In fact prices for these markets are UP an average of 2% year-to-date.

Just some important warning signs for our housing bubble vigilance.

Have you checked out HomeThinking.com yet?

If you're a REALTOR you should. Homethinking could be a great marketing channel for you. The company has a ranking technology to help consumers find great agents in their local market. Agents are ranked
through a combination of customer feedback about the job they did,
their home sales history, and their current property listings.

If you're in the home buying or selling market and don't yet have an agent, you definitely should. Simply search for the town you're interested in and up pop the agents. You can easily see what they've sold and any customer reviews. Very useful stuff.

Homethinking is a great Web 2.0 version of lead the lead generation business that HomeGain, Housevalues, and others pioneered. For agents, you don't pay a dime until the lead contacts you. These leads will be a lot hotter than those that come in via most lead gen channels. These are the folks that want to make contact. In my opinion, this opt-in lead generation model is infinitely better than the old way. It means a lot fewer leads, but a better connection for everyone involved. I applaud Niki Scevak and his team at Homethinking for the great pioneering work.

OK- so why the glowing review? Well, as of today, they're a partner site for us. (And all our partners are rock stars, of course.) We're supplying real-time price charts on all their Northern California map search pages. Homethinking users now get better information than they can get anywhere else. Cool stuff. Check it out.

I've been meaning to post a roundup of some of my favorite blog reading. Here are some folks worth paying attention to:

Sellsius: The guys at Sellsius know a lot about real estate marketing. Here they give up the goods on writing for real estate marketing. I'll add my own pet peeve to the list: If, as a real estate agent, the first words on your web site are still "Welcome to my website!" it's time to step up and write some targeted copy!

Realty Thoughts: Digs on real estate conferences. See my thoughts on last month's Inman conference here:

Curbed SF: I'm particularly fond of mid-century modern architecture. The Eichler homes from the 50's and 60's are the working-man's Neutra and embody that great California indoor/outdoor thing that I so envied growing up in Chicago. Curbed always has great coverage.

Boulder Realty: great market analytics coverage in Colorado. I love the guys who leverage the stats! Here's Osman picking apart the Boulder real estate market for signs (or not) of housing bubble conditions there.

Ubertor: I've been consulting this post for leads on the real estate blog world all week.

Blue Roof: Just launched a very pretty online real estate site, based in Salt Lake. Greg posts a nice look at real estate price appreciation rates across the country. Even if it is, ahem, not real-time market information.

Marin Bubble: I always consult the Marin Real Estate Bubble for a laugh, a bit of schedenfreud, and frankly, good market perspective before I spout off about Marin County real estate conditions.

We've been discussing a lot about the weakening markets lately. Indeed, I've commented frequently that slack demand tends to be related to two factors here in the Bay Area: Proximity to the cities' economic engines, and prices over a certain threshold. I thought I'd map it out for you today. This chart plots this week's home prices vs. our Market Action index for 168 towns in the 12 or so counties around the Bay Area.

Note that anything to the right on the X-axis, the most expensive towns, are all in Buyer's Market territory. That means demand is slack and sales relative to the amount of available properties is low. The regression line crosses into Buyer's zone at about $1.5mil.

Other things to note:

1. The highest-demand markets are also the big cities. The top 10 markets on our index are (plotted in the upper third of the chart) - San Francisco, Fremont, San Jose, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, San Leandro, Santa Clara, Menlo Park, and San Mateo. Of those, only Palo Alto and Menlo have median prices over $1mil.
2. Slightly over half (53%) of the towns in the sample are in the Buyer's Market, another 14% are on the cusp (index < 40).
3. 54% of the towns have a negative trend in the Market Action Index (relative demand is declining for at least a month).
4. Of the 25 towns with the highest Market Action Index (i.e. the hottest markets) fully 72% are in a downward, cooling trend.

Today I'm taking a look at Marin County. Let's see how things are shaping up as we roll into the new year.

In San Rafael, the biggest town in Marin County, demand has been seasonably weak recently, with 108 homes on the market and and a handful of sales. We'll keep an eye on this as the spring rolls around.

In Corte Madera, while there was no sales action this week, there has been a reasonable amount of turnover in the past few weeks with out a lot of inventory, again given the season. The sales activity of the winter months don't seem to hold much negative prices pressures as we move into spring.

Just for fun, let's also check out tiny Stinson Beach (pop ~800). In terms of properties available per capita, this premium beach town has a lot of inventory. This could be a forecast of price declines or extended selling periods while buyers look for the best deals to happen.