Sacramento Land(ing) will experience a short hiatus as I travel over the next week and a half. Please help your fellow readers by posting links to news articles about the Sacramento real estate market in the comments below. Please read the comment policy before posting.

You can also follow the Sacramento real estate market on The Housing Bubble blog's California thread. For commentary and statistics on Sacramento's real estate market, try the Sacramento Real Estate Statistics blog and the Average Buyer blog. To be notified when posting resumes, subscribe to Sacramento Land(ing)'s site feed here.

I wanted to thank you all for the numerous links, tips, and photos that I regularly receive. Although I don't always get the chance to respond, I do appreciate your contributions. Speaking of which, here's a photo sent in by reader LL. Thanks!

From the Sacramento Bee: Three months after it filed for bankruptcy protection from its thousands of creditors, Granite Bay homebuilder Dunmore Homes says it has begun shutting down its operation and going out of business. In a bankruptcy court filing, the firm's lawyers say Dunmore..."is currently winding down its business and liquidating its assets."

The statement stands in sharp contrast to others in recent months that the builder hoped to emerge intact from its financial struggle and resume building when the real estate market improved.
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State officials say if Dunmore goes out of business recent home buyers may find no one to honor warranty obligations.From Roseville & Rocklin Today: The question, "If they think my home is overpriced, why don’t they offer me something lower?" may be one of the most common heard by real estate agents around the Sacramento area. This seems like a logical seller response to learning that the potential buyer who looked at their home yesterday said, "We liked the house but it was overpriced."

From the Sacramento Bee:Up until 2007, the good ship Sacramento appeared to be sailing along smoothly, propelled by a pair of seemingly steady winds – state government spending and real estate appreciation.

From Business Week:Houston, you have a problem—with housing inventory. And as the number of homes for sale in the country continues to creep upward thanks to waning demand, many other major U.S. cities are dealing with the same issue...The housing supply is particularly bloated in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami—the top three on our list of the cities with the biggest housing inventories based on data from San Francisco brokerage ZipRealty (ZIPR).

From the Sacramento Bee:That economic downturn bug that's going around? Local tire sellers have caught it. "My sales are off 20 percent," said Ahad Parvez, owner of A&A Tires on Watt Avenue in Sacramento. "Business is terrible. This is the worst it's ever been – and I've been selling tires for 20 years."

Local tire retailers are in a jam. Construction firms that used to wear out tires running between jobs during the home building boom haven't been driving as much since the bubble collapsed. Meanwhile, wary consumers are tapping the brakes on spending, especially higher-end tire and wheel purchases that give shop owners the most profit.
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From the Wall Street Journal (hat tip Calculated Risk):If you own a home in a former bubble region like California or southern Florida, there's bad news… and really bad news. And they suggest that it is still way too early to go bargain hunting in these markets, although -- of course -- there is always the occasional deal around.

The bad news is fresh market data published Monday night by real-estate Web site Zillow.com. They show prices, as expected, kept slumping through the end of last year.

From CBS 13:This is how it works. Bob paid $420,000 for his home. Then he notices the house across the street, with more upgrades, and is selling for $315,000. So Bob, who has pretty good credit, decides to buy the cheaper house. He can't afford both, so then he walks away from his original home, letting it fall into foreclosure. That will hurt his credit, but he's willing to take the hit for a more affordable home.

From CBS News (video) (hat tip Tyrone):It sounds complicated, but it's really fairly simple. Banks lent hundreds of billions of dollars to homebuyers who can't pay them back. Wall Street took the risky debt, dressed it up as fancy securities, and sold it around the world as safe investments. It sounds like a shell game or Ponzi scheme; in some ways, it was a house of cards rife with corruption, greed, and negligence.

The Sacramento Real Estate blog reports that Sacramento County's price per square foot was $149.84 in April, a 33.9% drop from last year. That translates into a 41% decline in 31 months. Of note, this is the first resale home metric to cross the 40% off peak mark.

With regards to asking prices, Housing Tracker shows a median price decline of 28.9% year-over-year. The median has dropped 37.7% since August 2005.

More Sacramento real estate market figures for April at the Sacramento Real Estate Statistics blog.

From the Central Valley Business Times:Home values in the first quarter of 2008 fell 1.6 percent from the fourth quarter and 7.7 percent from the year-ago quarter, marking the most significant year-over-year decline in the past 12 years, Zillow says.

A look at Sacramento real estate market numbers for November:

• Sacramento Real Estate Statistics Blog
• Sacramento Real Estate Blog
  

HOPE: [California Association of Realtors Chief Economist Leslie] Appleton-Young agreed that foreclosures will continue to rise. But she predicted foreclosure rates will not reach the high levels of the early 1980s or mid-1990s when slumping economies and job losses roiled the state.
-Sonoma Press Democrat, Feb 2, 2007 REALITY:

Median asking price year-over-year change: -24.8% ($89,000)

Median asking price change since August 2005: -32.5% ($129,900)

For more Sacramento price statistics go here.

From the Sacramento Business Journal:
The average price per square foot of homes sold in the Sacramento metropolitan area fell nearly 15 percent in a year, the biggest drop among 25 major national markets tracked by Radar Logic Inc., the New York-based real estate analyst reported Friday.The Sacramento real estate market has ended up in last place for three consecutive months, beating out markets such as San Diego, Las Vegas, and Tampa. Sacramento also claimed the bottom spot for condo price appreciation for the third month running, with prices plunging 21.5% compared with the prior year.

From the Sacramento Bee: It's only one month's data, and it came from a winter month that's considered unreliable for trend spotting. But February sales of new and existing homes in Sacramento County -- the largest sector of the region's real estate market -- were just 7.7 percent fewer than in February 2007.
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From the Sacramento Bee: "We keep seeing more and more horror stories about the economy," said Michael McGee of Winchester McGee Financial, a Rancho Cordova mortgage brokerage firm. McGee said higher mortgage rates aren't helping a housing market that he believes is the worst of his 36-year career. "It's never been as bad as it is today," he said.
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Consultant Steve Dutra said higher rates will blunt the impact of falling housing prices, which analysts had hoped would kick-start a new round of buying. "With prices coming down, we were hoping interest rates would stay low as well," said Dutra, a vice president in the Sacramento office of Irvine-based John Burns Real Estate Consulting. Higher rates means "a certain amount of people will be taken out of the market," he said.
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Alan Wagner, president of the Sacramento Association of Realtors, said he's trying to persuade potential homebuyers to jump in now before rates get any higher. "Now's the time to buy your property," he said.

From the Modesto Bee:

Alliance Title Co. went out of business, laid off all its employees and closed its doors Thursday. At least 30 employees in Stanislaus County, plus hundreds more elsewhere in the state, lost their jobs with less than one day's notice.
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Terry Harwell, division president for Alliance in Stanislaus County...said he was shocked to hear his four offices -- three in Modesto and one in Turlock -- were being closed and that he and everyone else was being let go. "We're the market-share leader in Stanislaus County, so it didn't seem viable that they would close us down," Harwell said. "We were on pace to break even this month."
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Change in median asking price (year-over-year): -27.9%

Change in median asking price (since August 2005): -35.2%
Source: Housing Tracker

AgentBubble has posted some numbers for February over at the Sacramento Real Estate Statistics blog. Year-over-year change:

From CNN Money:Mortgage delinquencies will continue to rise over the next six to 12 months as home prices decline and economic conditions remain difficult, according to one forecast released Monday. The Core Mortgage Risk Monitor (CMRM), an index of foreclosure risk compiled by real estate data analyzer First American CoreLogic, increased 16% compared with the same period last year.
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The index is now at 17.2%. More on the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index here.

From the Sacramento Bee: Calling the bottom of a real estate cycle is more than difficult these days. It's perilous, an invitation for news sources who answer the question to be ripped by critics. There are so many points of view and so much passion. And there are so many who have offered false sightings in the past two years.
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From the Sacramento Bee:Dean Wehrli, vice president of the Sullivan Group Real Estate Advisors in Elk Grove: Foreclosures soar; buyers wait; credit tightens. The picture for Sacramento's residential market in 2008 doesn't look good...[P]rices are still too high for potential buyers.

From the Sacramento Business Journal:The meltdown of subprime mortgage lending has changed the banking landscape for more than just individual high-risk borrowers. Even homebuyers with high credit scores have encountered tighter lending criteria. It's natural to wonder whether the ripples will extend into business lending as well.

Technically, they haven't yet -- banks say they have not tightened up their criteria for business borrowers. But while the standards might not have changed, the economy has. It's getting tougher for some businesses to meet the old thresholds. For many small-business owners, especially, the shockwaves from the tighter mortgage market have wiped out a longstanding source of cash: the entrepreneur's own home equity.
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From the Lodi News-Sentinel:The housing boom was good for Ben Juarez, like so many other Lodi residents. It meant steady work and extra cash from overtime jobs, installing air conditioners and gutters at tract homes across the region.
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Now, with the housing bust, life is full of worry for Juarez — who's been jobless since November — and for thousands like him in the area. The EDD estimates that Lodi's jobless rate reached 7.3 percent in December, the latest figures available. That's up from 5.5 percent in December 2006 and 5.6 percent in December 2005....It adds to up to more than 1,000 extra residents without work compared to the past couple years. Because of the epic housing meltdown, many of those unemployed are local carpenters, plumbers, landscapers, real estate and finance workers.

It's been a while since I last posted charts based on data from the Sacramento Association of Realtors (SAR). Here's a look at January's price and sales trends for single-family homes in Sacramento County and West Sacramento. Click the charts to enlarge. To compare to other price indexes, click here.

Sacramento's median home price declined an astounding 28.2% over a 12-month period, the sharpest drop on record. That compares to a 24.1% decline over the 6-year 1990s housing bust. January marked the 19th consecutive month of year-over-year percentage declines and the 6th month of double-digit declines.

The total decline since peak breached the 30% barrier for the first time, falling 35.1%.

From CBS 13: If you're looking to buy a home in the down market you may think you're getting a deal on a foreclosure. But beware, the bank may be one step ahead of you. Banks could be in a bidding war to sell you short...Banks find the fair market value on a foreclosed home then list the home for less -- sometimes tens of thousand of dollars less. What looks like a good deal to a potential buyer can spark a bidding war which drives the price back up for the banks and buyers.
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