Ruxton Pacific and other news

Just a quick note to some of you who might remember the rainy Saturday I spent in September checking out the Ruxton Pacific development. The signage I photographed during my September trip says "starting in the high $700,000's", which I took to mean at least $790,000, but one unit has now been listed on the MLS at $749,000. I'm glad to see builders reducing prices, though I continue to hold the belief that everything here remains grossly overvalued, and $40,000 off the top still leaves an inflated price. (For many people, if a home is even $300,000, the asking price might as well be a trillion.) However, I anticipate that the price reduction on these new units will put some pressure on prices elsewhere in Redondo Beach.

I may try and swing by the grand opening that starts at noon on Saturday, but I just want to go get price information, and I don't know if they'll give me anything firm. If I go, I'd be just a looky-loo.

I haven't blogged the November sales report out of L.A. Business Journal but I hope to pick a print copy up Saturday morning and then hopefully this weekend I'll be able to update this blog.

Zillow continues to underreport sales and I am relying solely on The Manhattan Beach Reporter for any semi-real-time news of home sales. December overall is looking better than November, but November was REALLY bad in terms of home sale volume so any pickup will look good. For the 10 sales I've found so far for Redondo, median price is $722,500, and average is $717,400, min is $540,000 and max is $980,000. Median sqft is 1641 and average is 1670. Since this is such a small dataset the stats are highly suspect,

Inventory is drying up on ZipRealty, which I attribute more to listings expiring rather than a major surge in sales volume. It is now the 14th, and I show only 18 new property listings (not counting the remaining 26 units at Ruxton that aren't on the MLS). According to MelissaData, 14 properties have been sold so far in 90278 and 8 in 90277 (total 22). Compare that to December 2006: 43 in 90278 and 39 in 90277 (total 82). If I make a wild optimistic guess that final December sales will be 2.5X what they are now, that would put Redondo at 55 sales for December - another YOY decline.

The interesting thing is that sales volume has actually been pretty much on the decline for years. December sales volume actually peaked in 2002. For years, Redondo has been Mcmansionizing, Dotcondoizing, and Bloataminiumizing, leading to fewer sales but making up for it on the bigger bucks people pay for housing. Now what happens when the bucks to be borrowed are precious and few?

          2006     2005      2004     2003     2002     2001
90278       43       45        74       64       78       53       
90277       39       31        37       56       60       42
TOTAL       82       76       111      120      138       95