Thursday, May 04, 2006

Fresno Reaches the "Staging" Phase as Inventory Explodes

From ABC 30:

Housing sales are slowing down here in the Valley and sellers are doing all they can to get people to pay attention to their home. Currently, there are 2,600 homes for sale in the Fresno-Clovis area. Last year at this time, there were only 700 homes for sale...Dianna Burgess says selling a home is a lot tougher than it used to be. What used to take about two weeks is now taking about two months to sell. But Burgess has a secret weapon -- her name is Christine Grooms and she's a professional home stager...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh Come on..There are at least 3300 homes for sale..The local RE group has always depressed this #..This area is starting to see all the hidden inventory from out of town speculators..Several people in my office are having a hard time selling their houses..It is almost like musical chairs..I tell them that don't get greedy and obstinate if you have to lower the price since all the equity gain was effortless( i.e. toilet flush= $ 5 gain)...

Christophe said...

Fresno is not the only place where prices will go down...

In all economically depressed areas in California prices have lagged for too long behind the coastal powerhouses.

What happened in the 2Ks is pretty much like a Tsunami effect.

As prices were going up on the coast, middle income people were getting kicked out one after another. For instance, in Santa Barbara, a market I know, people who could not shell the 500K needed in 2000 would go for the 270K in Oxnard but not yet for the 170K in Bakersfield.

Then prices on the south coast soared again to 700K, 900K to reach the 2005 peak of 1250K. Bakersfield then became attractive for investors/house flippers who could not get in at these prices.

A friend of mine bought a couple of units in Kern County because he could not afford the financing on the coast and saw the opportunity these depressed markets were offering. He's sold most of them now...