January 2007 Redondo Beach sales statistics preview

I still find it very odd that Melissa Data has been showing sales numbers over twice as high as the actual numbers of sales I can scrape out of Zillow or Domania. C'est la vie. So take these charts with a grain of salt. But it'll be interesting to see what numbers I come up with, because these sales include both new construction and resale homes. The numbers coming out of DataQuick are only for resale homes.

This first chart is my calculation of days on market (DOM) for all sales in my record collection for which I had supply (original listing) records. If you are new to this blog you may not know that I calculate DOM from a property's original listing date in Zip Realty, not the date it was last relisted. If my calculation of Redondo Beach is representative of the beach cities collectively, I'm probably coming up with an extra 30-40 days in DOM that the official statistics won't show.

The maximum DOM was 390 days (and was probably even more than that); the minimum DOM was 19 days. I got the impression the property at minimum DOM was actually sold at auction, rather than sold in a traditional way.

The second chart is the distribution of sales by sale price. It is pretty obvious where most of this market operates.

This third chart is the January sales by square feet.

The fourth chart is a plot of square feet versus sale price. If you are determined to buy a home this spring, bubble talk be damned, may I at least insert my 2 cents and suggest that you buy at a point well below the red line. I don't really believe it will matter in the long run but at least you'll temporarily feel like you got a good deal.

Finally, here is a chart of January sales versus inventory through January. I like to look at this and check for the disconnects between the asking prices in the inventory and the actual sales prices.

For the record, here are the statistics for the January inventory:

ASK     SQFT
807000  1840    MED
950064  1895    AVG
379000   410    MIN
4990000 4700    MAX

And here are the statistics for January sales. I list the square footage, original asking price, the final sale price, the DOM, and the percent reduction from the original asking price:

        SQFT   ORIG ASK  SALEPR   DOM  PCTRED
MEDIAN  1691    770000   687360   106    5.4
AVERAGE 1733    829314   755148   129    8.9
MIN      619    435000   389000    19    0.0
MAX     4236   2199000  2100000   390   44.0

It looks like a number of higher end properties are on the market, despite little in the way of sale activity there. Conversely, see that large proportion of sales down in the $600K-$650K range, along with the corresponding relatively paltry inventory? I get the sense that there is steady demand for properties in that range. The median sale price in January was $687K but the median asking price in January inventory is $807K. To close that gap on the median sale price and median asking price, either buyers are going to have pay an extra 17.5%, or sellers or going to have to lower prices by another 14.9%. What's it gonna be?