I Am Anxiously Awaiting Aprils Numbers

I have been receiving a weekly update from CORT and through the 25th of April the numbers are looking pretty good.


Pretty good in comparison to some of the past months. The Santa Barbara area has 116 recorded sales as of that date.


There was a very nice one for over 26 million and a few around the 8 or 9 million dollar price point. I looked quickly, but they seemed to all be residential property.


If you do the math, the number of sales should be over 150 for April. That would mean the market is showing continued signs of doing better. March had 122 sales which was an improvement over the previous months.



It will be interesting to see the breakdown of sales and where they are. Montecito, Carpinteria, Santa Barbara and Goleta I would all expect to show a pick up. Stay Tuned!

ZeeMaps Showing November Sales

I am pretty excited about a new feature of my blog. I ran across ZeeMaps trying to figure out how to publish the CORT property sales to my blog. It did exactly what I wanted it to do for free. So, every month I will be updating the map at the bottom of the blog page to show all the property sales in the Santa Barbara area. I haven't quite figured out if I want to do the same with the North County properties, but I probably will. Here is what it looks like. I will keep this map permanently posted at the bottom of the blog. I am not sure exactly as to how I may tweak this in the future, but it is usable right now. Let me know your feedback. See You In Escrow!

September Appreciation Rates

I have just completed the appreciation rates for the South Santa Barbara County. This is a comparison of the median prices for homes and condos in the south county compared to the median price last year. Overall the south county saw a 6% increase in median prices in September of 2007 from September 2006. Santa Barbara was down 3% to $905,000 and Goleta was up 4% to $861,000. Montecito was up a whopping 31%. In Sept. 2006 the median price in Montecito was 2,247,500 and in Sept. 2007 it climbed to 2,950,000. Carpinteria did not see any change. It's median price stayed at $650,000. Hope Ranch only had 4 sales in Sept. 07 and saw a 169% increase in it's median price. Summerland saw a huge increase as well, but there was only 1 sale in Sept 07. It's increase was 142%. The entire South County had 110 sales in 2007 and 129 in 2006. It would appear that Santa Barbara is still a very desirable place to invest your real estate dollar. See You In Escrow!

Why Does Zillow.com Get So Much Attention?

I have to admit when Zillow www.zillow.com first caught every one's attention I was one of those people. I immediately logged on and looked up my house and had Zillow tell me what it was worth. Zillow didn't do a very good job! It still showed my home being a 3 bed 2 bath home with 1316 square feet. We remodeled about 5 years ago and my home is closer to 2300 square feet now and it is a 4 bed 4 bath. Right off the bat this website struck me as something that needed a lot of work. I have been reading recently and Zillow keeps coming up along with another site name Trulia www.trulia.com. I have not spent any time on Trulia, so I'll do that later. So, I thought I would check back in with Zillow. It has probably been over a year and nothing on my house has changed and there are many sales in my area that aren't represented. I'm still not impressed. I did start poking around and saw that I could go in and change the information they had on my home. O.K. that's a start, but if other people don't do it then how is the pricing piece of the site going to be accurate? I then poked around a little further to see what homes are for sale and landed on a small Goleta Tract home priced at $799,000. The Zillow estimate of it's value was between $1,060,000 and $1,500,000. This amount of inaccuracy drives me nuts and I decided to say good bye again to Zillow, even though there seemed to be many other cool features to check out. I just can't see how a website that got all this attention for being a site where someone could determine the valuation of their home is still getting a bunch of attention. I guess I'll check back in again in another 6 months or so to see what is happening. In the mean time if you want to know the value of your home I would call a trusted real estate agent, of which there are many. See You In Escrow!

Santa Barbara Real Estate Appreciation Rates

I was asked the other day about appreciation rates for each of the communities in the South County of Santa Barbara. I pulled out some data and began to figure them. I could only find good data through the end of June 07. Here is how they broke down comparing all of 06 to what I had for 07. For the entire South County prices had appreciated 9.48%. In the city of Santa Barbara prices had declined by 1.96%. Goleta showed a 3.53% decline while Carpinteria was up 1.15% and Montecito was up a whopping 12.50%. Needless to say after looking at this information most if not all the appreciation is in the Montecito area. Real Estate sales have been slow in all the areas mentioned but Montecito and it certainly affects the overall numbers significantly. One other thing that affects the numbers is that the data I had to work with does not separate out property types and so commercial property sales are also included in these numbers. The commercial agents I've spoken to are saying that property sales in that market have been busy in 07, but they were as well in 06.