Mark Wisterman's Paradise & Lake Oroville Real Estate Blog

Here are your weekly home sales numbers for the Lake Oroville real estate market for the week ending 8/25/2011.

We had a significant drop in the numbers across the board this week when compared to the unusually strong numbers of the previous week. The home that sold for over $600,000 in the previous week helped set up the negative numbers this week. To me, the biggest disappointment in this week’s numbers is the number of Oroville area homes sales that closed escrow. Only 5 this week coming off a count of 16 the previous week is somewhat disheartening.  But, as I say: “One week does not make a market.”

Here are the latest foreclosure reports for the real estate markets of Lake Oroville, Ca, Chico CA, Paradise CA, Yuba City Ca and Marysville, CA.

These reports still show what has been true for the past couple of years- a very volatile market with not much in the way of any long term trend that could assist us all in anticipating where the market is going from here. This uncertainty, as well as rampant unemployment, is doing its best to keep many buyers on the sidelines, as they seem to be waiting to the bottoming in pricing.

If you are one of these buyers be sure that you are keeping a close eye on trends on prices and interest rates as you wait. Remember that the Federal Reserve has pulled out of the mortgage market and are no long artificially deflating interest rates. Rates are going to react much more quickly to changes in the economy than at anytime in the past 2 years without the government interference that has kept them low. Believe me when I say I understand the fence-sitting mentality as not much this economy has to offer feels very good right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, well. well, has it been a very long time since I posted Lake Oroville real estate stats, or what? 

Don’t ask me why I haven’t done this for so long. Except for the fact that the market for Oroville home sales has not changed much since we last discussed this, I really have no reason, or even a lame excuse.

But, with Spring  just around the corner (I think), there is no better time than the present to start again. First you will notice that I am again posting monthly and yearly comparison stats in the right columns of this blog.  Here you can see how the sales of Oroville homes compare to Butte County as a whole. Remember the old saying that all ”all real estate is local”. So ignore the national stats because they have nothing to do with our local markets.  Oh, one more thing…. MY intent is to also post these stats on my facebook business page at www.facebook/RealtyWorld.CA so if you haven’t been there please stop by and “LIKE” my page to be sure that you see my posts there.

  

 

 

Just a quick heads up to all of you in the Lake Oroville real estate market and beyond to let you know that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has, as of today, implemented newly revised flood area maps that may require some buyers of homes in the greater Oroville area to purchase flood insurance as a condition of their purchase.

As part of the loan process lenders will require that a flood certification be done on the property. If the property is located in a high risk flood area (generally the 100 year flood zone), the lender will require flood insurance as a condition of providing the loan. The relative high cost of this insurance, which is added to the monthly payment of the buyer’s loan payment, can keep a buyer from qualifying for the loan that they need in order to purchase the home of their dreams.

Something important to keep in mind here, for those of you who currently are in the middle of a purchase transaction, is that this map revision is NOT grandfathered in. Meaning that if the home you are purchasing is now in a high risk flood zone you are going to be required to have flood insurance even though the home may not have been in a flood zone when your purchase contract was put into place.

Based on what I can decipher by looking at these maps there are not a whole lot of additional Oroville area properties that are affected by the new maps, but there are enough that some current transaction may be impacted.

You can look at the maps yourself by visiting the FEMA website. You can get to the Oroville maps by CLICKING HERE or on the picture of the map.

Related articles

• Forced Flood Insurance (homeownersinsurance.org)
• Floods send insurance claims into millions (news.theage.com.au)
• Determining Flood Risk for Insurance (brighthub.com)
• Senators push to delay flood insurance requirement (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

 Another ho-hum week for Lake Oroville real estate market as sales activity continues to under perform. But once again we find that the inventory of Oroville homes for sale has dropped to another low. 

If the current activity in the office of our Oroville market is any indication we may soon be seeing a change in these sales numbers. Our Oroville agents have been very busy this week showing property and writing offers. It is good to see that maybe the spring-like weather is bringing buyers out.

If you are thinking of selling, now might be the time to get your home on the market.

 Sales for the Lake Oroville real estate market took a turn for the better this past week. The average sold price was the highest it has been in a very long time thanks to the sale of a couple homes that had been on the market for quite some time. The sale of these two particular homes was also the reason for the nearly doubling of the “days on the market” time. One of the homes had been on the market 928 days and the other had been for sale for 897 days.

Once again, though, the number of the week to lookout for is the number of Oroville homes currently on the market. This number has hit another new low for this blog site and is threatening to go under 300 for the first time in probably two years.

 It seems that this week’s Lake Oroville real estate market report reflects some ongoing reporting issues the local REALTORS are having with our new multiple listing service system.

It looks as though that the inventory of unsold homes is beginning to increase slightly. This may be an effect of some sellers trying to get a head start on what most people think is the peak selling season of Spring. Hopefully we can get the bugs worked out of our new MLS system soon. Watch for the weekly sales numbers for the Paradise real estate market later this week.

Ok, I’m back on schedule with my weekly Lake Oroville real estate market report.

Only nine Oroville area property sales this week, however I do expect the numbers to improve over the next two weeks as those escrows that were opened as the original tax credit window of November 30th was closing, should be completed toward the end of the month and into the first week in December.

Of particular note in these numbers is that the number of properties listed for sale continues to decline and has hit a new low since I began reporting Oroville sales to you.

On the foreclsoure and short sale front, we continue to these properties selling at a rate that is far larger than the percentage of these on the market, which will, if nothing changes, make them harder and harder to find.

Expanded Report