Redondo Beach 2007 sales and unresolved inventory statistics snapshot

I thought I should snapshot things and see where Redondo Beach is at the moment in terms of sales and unresolved inventory by SQFT and by DOM.

The first chart shows the square footage of Redondo Beach 2007 SALES. The second chart shows the approximate days on market (DOM) it took for those properties to sell. I've been calculating DOM by when a property is FIRST listed (as in ZipRealty) or otherwise advertised (as in Craigslist). As it turns out, median time on market comes out to about 3.3 months, and average time on market is just a sliver over 4 months, not far at all from what I've been calculating on a monthly basis.

These next two charts are for UNRESOLVED INVENTORY. By "unresolved inventory", I mean, property that has been listed for sale, for which I cannot find a sale record on a public website. It is quite possible that the owners of some of these properties genuinely changed their minds about selling, or decided to rent out their homes instead. I have no easy way of differentiating these properties from those really "on the market." So DOM appears quite high, perhaps misleadingly so, and there is a big lump of properties at 240 days or more.

The final chart is the square footage of SALES versus UNRESOLVED INVENTORY. For sold properties, median SQFT is 1754 but for the unsold properties, median SQFT is 1873. Average SQFT is 1822 versus 1931. There are differences of over 100 square feet in the medians and the averages.

Since I am covering a timespan of roughly seven months I don't think it would be a good idea to talk about prices, since prices can shift substantially in such a timeframe, i.e., a $700,000 home today might have been a $750,000 home in January. However, the percentage difference between the original asking price and either the sale price or current asking price (PCTRED) may be interesting. For unresolved inventory, the median change between original and current asking prices is 0%, and the average change is a reduction of 2.6%. For sold properties, the median change is a reduction of 3.1% and the average change is a reduction of nearly 4.6%.

It doesn't take a PhD in business to surmise that perhaps the successful homesellers are those who have been more flexible on sales price - hence, the greater percent reductions in the sold homes.

I don't know what state of mind lending institutions are in right now in terms of allowing their clients to conduct short sales. In the early stages of the last downturn, they adamantly refused to allow their clients to sell short and forced many directly into foreclosure. Let's hope they're being more charitable this time around.