Random Sonoma Scenes!

Sales Trends

Pump House at Emerald Ridge

Hot Real Estate in Sonoma County

Nobody wants to buy at the top of the market. On the other hand, trying to practice market timing in real estate has proven to be almost impossible. Prices nationally are drifting slightly lower, but some markets have already started to strengthen and prices may be rising. If you aren’t keeping track of what’s going [...]

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Sonoma County Home Affordability Index

Advice for Fence-Sitting Buyers in Sonoma County

If your cousin, brother,  or best friend’s dog was warning about the housing bubble in 2006, I would pay a lot of attention to them today. Unfortunately, almost everyone else missed the bubble  in spite of all sorts of warning signs that we were in an unsustainable market. It’s human nature to go with the [...]

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Sonoma County Home for Sale

Price per Square Foot in Sonoma County

Price per square foot is a useful tool for the real estate industry. Real estate agents use it for  informal appraisals and professional appraisers make use of it for formal valuations. For home buyers it’s one way to compare homes of different sizes but similar construction quality. Contractors and architects use it as a shorthand [...]

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Sonoma Roof on Broadway

Sonoma Residential Prices

Knowing residential pricing trends makes you a smarter buyer. Period. Whether you’re chasing an REO investment or competing against multiple offers for your personal dream house, you need to know what other people are doing. Real estate brokers and agents are very good at protecting the confidentiality of their current offers, so the only way [...]

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Florence St in Sebastopol

Sebastopol Residential Sales

Sebastopol recorded 24 residential sales in June which helped bring the first half of 2011 to a close with 102 homes sold.  That matches nearly exactly the figures from the first half of 2010, but without the First Time Home Buyers Tax Credit that drove many buyers into the market in 2010 in search of [...]

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Florence St in Sebastopol

Santa Rosa Dominates Real Estate Sales

Santa Rosa rules the real estate market in Sonoma County. No city is close in population or number of housing units, so any chart either has to have an extended scale or leave Santa Rosa out of the figures. I made two charts to illustrate just how tough Santa Rosa makes it for the rest [...]

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200 Austin Creek - Cazadero

Sonoma County Real Estate by City

Don’t  believe everything you read. Especially from me. I love looking at data to figure out trends, but using a six month snapshot of average residential sales prices runs the risk of skewed results from a few great sales…or a few lousy ones. Sonoma County has a huge variety of real estate available. We have [...]

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Sonoma Cork Oak Tree

Sonoma County Real Estate Stats Jan to Jun 2011

Sonoma County residential sales in April and May were down from what we would normally expect in the spring selling season. The residential sales trend over many decades is for strong sales beginning in March and continuing through the summer. The worrying decline after March had many real estate experts worried about a further dip [...]

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Sonoma County Residential Sales Trends

Sonoma Market Report

The S&P /Case-Shiller Home Price Indices for the first quarter of 2011 came out a few days ago and showed a decline below the previous low water mark from two years ago in almost all regions of the country. I called that 2009 market bottom in Sonoma County at the time and wanted to know [...]

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Healdsburg Land for Sale

Healdsburg Land Sales

Healdsburg lots and land are selling again.  Based on sales activity in the last six months, it appears that the inventory of lots and land is finally coming into a healthy balance with sales. Beginning in December 2010, and continuing the first five  months of 2011 the steady volume of sales have confirmed a strong [...]

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