Coastal Real Estate and Lifestyles

Pacifica sellers were rewarded with lots of buyer activity last month.  Do we call it the spring bump?  pent up demand? first time home buyer tax credits?  feeling that we’ve hit a bottom here? or all of the above…

Accepted offers jumped 41% in March from the prior month.

Of ALL pending listings, not just new March pendings:

• 6 are Pending Release - average list price $417,000 - 83% are short sale or REO

• 14 are Pending Show - average list price $615,000 - 28% are short sale or REO

• 20 are Pending - average list price $497,000 - 70% are short sale or REO

I’ve noticed that short sale listings will change status immediately to any of the 3 statuses.  Therefore, I wouldn’t call this a turn-around in the market, even a short term one, with over 50% (23 out of 40) pendings identified here as either short sale or bank-owned (REO).

Market activity does appear to be increasing in Pacifica, even if it is too soon to call it a “trend” this spring season.  However…we are quite pleased to notice that March 2009 had the most accepted offers within in the last year.  March had 29 accepted offers with an inventory of 73 single family homes.  A year ago in March 2008, there were 20 accepted offers with an inventory of 97 single family homes.

One reason for continued uncertainty is the short sale process.  An accepted offer (accepted by the homeowner/seller) is usually needed to open a file at the bank in the loss mitigation department.  The listing agent may list the property for a low price in order to generate an offer; then while it sits in one of the pending statuses in the MLS, the listing agent is working to keep that offer viable.

We’ll be watching to see if most of these accepted offers close escrow during their scheduled dates of mostly April and May.