Sunday, April 22, 2007

One year

It's been one year since I began tracking Santa Monica statistics, inspired by OC Renter's LA County inventory, began posting them as comments there, and now on this blog for two months. I hope this continues to be useful (and entertaining) for those of you who visit regularly!

Where are we now? Santa Monica SFR inventory (<$3M) is up 29% YOY (35 to 45). LA County inventory is up 35% YOY (33,054 to 44,764). We'll see if last year's trend holds, that they both rose steadily through the summer to peak at the end of September.

It's also a good time to recap the houses featured here:

Disappointing for those of us looking for declines, prices have held so far. Houses with the right prices sold fast in this spring's Westside market. But I'm also seeing new unrealistic expectations. More to come on fantasyland prices.

6 comments:

Craig said...

Great site, thanks for your work. I went to some open houses today and Santa Monica (especially north of Montana) seems to be heavily in denial. There were tons of cars pulling up and a lot of foot traffic. However, there seems to have been a lot more inventory on the market and there were multiple flags and signs on many intersections.

One house that I wanted to mention was 363 18th...asking price is $3.3 and it is a single story house with 2 bedrooms plus a backhouse...its an old spanish house that had some work done to it about 8 years ago but still had original windows and was small (2100 square feet). Days on market was 1 but I just could not believe how much they were asking for this place. It is basically a tear down which should be valued at about $2.5-2.7

Other houses in this price range were 2 stories and had 4 bedrooms...shocking that they mispriced the place so bad. Anyways, keep up the good work on the blog.

Westside Bubble said...

Thanks for reporting on that one, Craig, I wondered about it. It looks like a huge reach in price.

A good comp for it is 241 24th. It's an original 1937 1-story Spanish, 3 bed 1.75 bath plus detached studio, as re-minted as a 1-story could be. Kitchen isn't huge but has all the latest. Bathrooms and bedrooms are top-end in a traditional style.

It was listed at $2,995K on 6/30/06, reduced to $2,795K in 9/06, and off the MLS 10/06. But neither Zillow nor the county has recorded a sale.

(I'm going to try turning off the word verification until there's a problem. It's a pain!)

Anonymous said...

THanks for the site. You might want to check out a house in Mar vista on 10809 Charnock Rd for $937,000. The bus drives down Charnock and this house is nearly to Overland, the worst part of Charnock. The house was for sale for something like $50,000 less! And then went off the market and came back higher? What gives here?

I know I'm one of those who believes the crash is eminent - or perhaps just hopes. I know that in San Clemente, between Jan and March I found 3 foreclosures 2500 sq feet houses for $699,000. How can Mar Vista be immune from that???

Anonymous said...

I meant imminent not eminent but lets hope its both!

Anonymous said...

369 22nd St. is listed on the LA county assessors web site as being sold 04/10/1987 with land at $128,084 and improvements at $54,346. Difficult to believe this home sold for $2.25 million. I wonder what the debt was on this property.

The greater fools really need to be educated in Santa Monica.

Westside Bubble said...

369 22nd St. is listed on the LA county assessors web site as being sold 04/10/1987 with land at $128,084 and improvements at $54,346.

I don't believe it was that low, because bottom-end houses north of Montana were over $300K in 1985, and 1987 was half-way to the peak of over $900K in 1989.