SLO Victorian Tour
You can tour 5 San Luis Obispo Victorian homes on Sunday (4/26). The cost is $20 and the tour starts at 1 pm at the Monday Club on Monterey Blvd. You park there and they provide free shuttles for the tour.
Sounds like a great opportunity to see the inside the Victorians you drive by and wondered what the inside looked like.
Foreclosure areas = higher price drops
The San Jose Mercury News has an article today titled “In Silicon Valley, home-price drops are bigger in communities with higher foreclosure rates” read it here
I don’t think this is a revelation as this is what has been happening here on the Central Coast. You can see it with the median home prices I blogged about a few days ago. A city like San Luis Obispo which has had very few foreclosures is not seeing the price declines as in other cities with foreclosures. I’ll take that one step further and say that neighborhoods with foreclosures are seeing higher price drops than neighborhoods without foreclosures. When a foreclosure happens in a neighborhood (or is a comparable used in a home price valuation), it’s going to take a couple of higher-priced recent comps to show this isn’t the true market value for the area.
So the crystal ball questions are:
1) When will the foreclosures stop?
2) Will neighborhoods that don’t have foreclosures hold their prices or are they just taking longer to decrease?
Cal Poly Class Project
An alert just went out to Realtors about Cal Poly students looking for homes. Seems like a professor has assigned a project where the students have to contact a Realtor and say they are interested in buying a home, go look for homes with the Realtor, and pursue a purchase in order to write a report. I wonder if the professor instructed them on the best way to finally tell the Realtor that they’ve wasted their time and never intended to purchase.
I thought Cal Poly was a “learn by doing” school, not “learn by deceiving”.
Facebook Shell Beach Party
According to the Trib, there’s a Shell Beach party scheduled on May 2nd that is being arranged on Facebook. It looks like it was initiated by a Cal Poly student.
There was a similar Facebook party in Santa Barbara in 2007. 1200 confirmed they’d be there on Facebook and 300 showed up. In 2008, 4000 showed up and just a few weeks ago, there were 12,000 in attendance. According to the Trib, over 4600 have confirmed for the Shell Beach party. Sounds like a local radio station is providing the music.
So, if all these people show up and trash the neighborhood, is the Cal Poly student responsible for the costs of clean up and any extra police to patrol this “party”? Or maybe the radio station pays part of it.
Top Foreclosure Areas
Realty Trac released the areas with the top foreclosure rates in Q1 2009.
Here are the top 10:
1. Las Vegas
2. Merced, CA
3. Cape Coral, FL
4. Stockton, CA
5. Riverside, CA
6. Modesto, CA
7. Bakersfield, CA
8. Vallejo, CA
9. Phoenix, AZ
10. Port St. Lucie, FL
Santa Barbara-Santa Maria was 38th and SLO-Paso Robles was number 45 on the list.
Median Home Prices
The Trib had an article today reporting that County median home prices were down (from last year). I don’t think that’s a surprise since it’s going to be lower every month when compared to last year until the prices bottom out and start to rebound.
Below are median home price comparisons from data on my SloWatch.com site. While I have the median home prices listed on that site, the following calculates the difference between Q1 2009 and last quarter (Q4 2008) and against Q1 2008.
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Waiting for the Foreclosure Tidal Wave
Talk for a few months now has been on how lenders are holding back REOs from the market and that we are supposed to see the flood gates open soon, with many hitting the market. So far, we haven’t seen that happen. If you look at our New Listings report, the amount of listings in Blue (the REOs) aren’t showing up that much.
Here’s an article that talks about this subject
A New, New Listings Report
I’ve created another type of listings report that I’m calling “Listings at a Glance”. They’ll display a listing photo, address, and price for select listings. The first 2 reports I created are…
Yesterday’s New Listings in SLO County
New Listings in SLO County the past 3 days
Registering for MLS Search
If you’ve visited my site for awhile, you’re probably aware that I try new things to with the goal of improving the services we offer. Recently, I enabled registration for the MLS search that required you to sign up after viewing 10 property detail pages. I did this to see if we were able to provide a better service by having one of my team provide assistance earlier on in the search process.
After enabling registration for a few weeks, I’ve decided that there really wasn’t enough benefits to my visitors so I’ve now disabled registration. You can still sign up for a user account if you’d like to save listings or have new listing notifications sent to you but you will no longer be required to register to see more than 10 property details.
Photo of Vandenburg Rocket Launch
Check out this time lapse photo of a Vandenburg rocket launch taken from Port San Luis last year.
