A few days ago, I released the latest edition of my monthly newsletter, and as always, the headline story is the previous month’s sales data. So how did the Santa Cruz Real estate market do in the home stretch of 2008?
Fasten your seatbelts, because it’s going to be a gut-wrenching drop. The median price in Santa Cruz county for homes sold in December 2007 was $732,000. In December 2008, the median price crashed down to $452,500 – that is a year-over-year drop of a bit more than 38%. When you look at the entire year (2008 vs. 2007), you see that the median price drop was only 22% – however the fact that it was down 38% in December indicates that prices sank much faster in December than the year as a whole. From this, we can infer that the market is still clearly headed down.
The news isn’t all bad, though. In terms of sales volume, the number of homes sold was only 2% lower in 2008 compared to 2007. Of course, 2007 was not exactly a banner year for home sales, so that’s not saying much. However, in December particularly, sales surged compared to the figure from a year ago, up 47.4% – that is, 76 units were sold in December ’07 and a whopping 112 in December ’08.
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