I wrote yesterday about TMI (too much information), so this seems timely.
A fellow Scripps Ranch agent wrote that “Scripps Ranch is still not feeling the impact of the housing crisis, with only one short sale closing in November.” To the agent’s credit, I believe he performed a search of the Sandicor MLS using the mandatory remarks field, that place where agents are supposed to indicate whether a home is subject to lender approval of the sale. Alas, the data is only as good as the input, and not all agent input is stellar.
According to Sandicor this morning, only 24 homes closed escrow in Scripps Ranch in November (both attached and detached), so it wasn’t an enormous undertaking to plow through the listing remarks and tax records to get the real deal. Here is how November Scripps Ranch closings shook out:
And, by the numbers:
Short sales 3
Bank-owned 3
Flippers 3
Traditional 15
You can’t discuss the health of the market without taking into account the flippers, those folks who bought the home at the trustee sale, spruced it up, and put it back on the market. True, this is a small sample, but it doesn’t suggest that everything is coming up roses.
As for the active listings, again using the manual method of looking at each listing and tax record, here is how things look for our current offerings:
Big footnote: It looks to me like at least a few of the “traditional” offerings will eventually go short.
Finally, taking a look at the homes under contract, we can get an even better idea of the current state of the Ranch. Comparing the number of homes in pending status to the number of homes pending “contingent” on lender approval (short sales in purgatory), the picture is more dismal yet:
Granted, the contingent fellows hang around longer, so you can cry logjam, but keep in mind that many of the homes truly in escrow were distress sales. Case in point:
And what do you get when you add up all of the off-market properties, both contingent on lender approval and in escrow? (By the way, this sample includes 113 properties, so now we are getting somewhere.)
So as Paul Harvey liked to say, that is the rest of the story.
Does this mean that Armageddon is just around the corner? Not at all; prices have actually been hanging pretty tough. But, expect the distressed sales to remain with us, throwing an old wrench in our dreams of a normal market as we ring in this new year… and quite possible the next.
