Market Analysis – Feb 2008

I ran the numbers for downtown San Jose (including the Rose Garden & Naglee Park neighborhoods) for February and found some interesting info.

Let’s start with inventory numbers. Inventory is up 82% in Downtown San Jose. Quite a big jump really. Sales were down 56% over this time last year. What does all this mean? Well, seasonally we see an increase of inventory build up starting in spring and peak during the summer months. But the sales numbers are interesting, they’ve been pretty flat the last three months (16 in Feb., 19 in Jan, & 15 in Dec.) we’ll have to watch the numbers next month to see if trends start to appear. From a buyer’s perspective there are a lot of houses to choose from, and seller’s are willing to negotiate. We’ve finally seen some decent homes priced in the $400,000 for the first time in a couple of years.

Interestingly sales prices keep ticking up. Traditionally we see a pretty clear bell curve for sales price, with the peak hitting during the summer months. But with this much inventory we’ll have to wait and see how that effects home prices. Especially since we only had 16 sales in February and numbers may have been effected by the big sale of $2,486,000 on Hanchett Ave. Also of note, we had 6 houses sell below $500,000.

Days on Market went up significantly this month over last year as well. It’s showing the upward trend that we’ve been watching the last few years. Though the numbers could have been effected by the 3 houses that sold in February with over 200 days on market.

questions? comments?  want the full report? contact me at jamesf@remax.net