The Lowdown and Gritty Story of the Sacramento Housing Market

Sacramento housing market trends from Nov. 2015 through Jan. 2017 continue to reflect low inventory

Where is the Sacramento housing market headed? You might very well sing the answer. Where have all the houses gone, long time passing. Damn, if we couldn’t use a peace-loving force like Pete Seeger right now. I find it disturbing to read pieces by our trusted journalists because all of the articles are loaded with, well, news: Trump did this atrocious thing and Trump did this horrible thing and Trump did this other completely outrageous thing, and it’s disheartening, sad to the point of sobbing, miserable news. Lots of kudos, though, to those who are fighting the right fight, standing up, asking questions, demanding coherent answers, leading the way with progressive values.

But back to the Sacramento housing market. You didn’t come to my blog to listen to me rant, even though with our current state of affairs, it’s almost impossible not to. Our housing market is in big trouble with a capital T. I can’t get away from music today. At least it doesn’t stand for Trump. It’s a capital T that rhymes with C and stands for curtailed. Our housing inventory in Sacramento has been curtailed, diminished, reduced, cut, slashed and fallen off to the extent our pending sales are about to exceed the number of houses for sale.

You can see it clearly in the image above, copyrighted and used by permission from Trendgraphix. Our total number of houses for sale last month was 2,586. Not only is it the lowest number of homes for sale in Sacramento over the past 15 months, to give you a better comparison, it’s fallen about 80% from of our all-time high from August of 2005. Without any new listings, we could sell every house in Sacramento over the next 45 days. A month and a half. That’s tight inventory. So tight it squeaks. It’s a seller’s market.

Almost across the board, everything else is up. Pending sales (those homes that are in escrow but not yet closed) are up over last month by 17.6%; pending sales have increased over the same quarter a year ago, and same month a year ago. More homes closed in December than in January, but that’s because December’s closings were pending sales from October and November. December itself is seasonally a slow month. It’s why I take my annual wor-cation in Hawaii in December.

The second biggest story about the Sacramento housing market, apart from low inventory, is the whopping increased number of pending sales in the first two weeks of February. We are up 44.8% in pending sales over the first two weeks of January. That means demand is extremely high. Buyers are off the fences and ready to buy. Multiple offers are more the norm than not. Our inventory dropped another 8.5% since January 1. And prices are relatively stable at $208 per square foot, as it has been for the past half year.

If you’re looking to buy or sell a home in Sacramento, call the Elizabeth Weintraub Team at 916.233.6759. We can make sense of what’s going on and guide you.