"Holding Out For Deals"

From the Sacramento Bee:

[B]uyers are obviously holding out for deals and negotiating tough when they see them. A new edition of "House Prices in America" from Global Insight and National City Corp. offers the evidence. It says Sacramento leads the nation's large metro areas for sales price declines in the last year.

Local sales prices were down 8.2 percent in the first quarter of 2007 from the same time in 2006, the report says. In all, they're down 10 percent since 2005.

"The sharpest declines occurred in the nation's most overvalued markets in Southern California, Florida and, most dramatically, in the Central Valley of California," says the report, issued jointly by the economic research and financial services companies.

This comes just weeks after Forbes magazine jolted many area home sellers in calling Sacramento the third most overpriced metro in the United States, after San Diego and Miami. The Forbes tally was based partially on the percent of the local population that can afford a median-priced house -- about $350,000 or more in the case of Sacramento.

Interestingly, it wasn't that long ago that other Western metros like Denver, Seattle or Portland might have seemed too expensive for a capital resident to consider. Now, National Association of Realtors statistics show that Portland and Denver are bargains compared with Sacramento.

Also from The Bee:

Battered by the housing slump and changes in the newspaper industry, The McClatchy Co. on Wednesday reported a 10.4 percent drop in revenue for May. It said revenue will continue sliding the rest of the year. [Sacramento-based McClatchy owns The Bee.]
...
Driving McClatchy's results is the housing market. McClatchy gets one-third of its ad revenue from California and Florida, where real estate advertising is in a deep slump.

From the Stockton Record (hat tip Spacebar):

City Hall's one-time belief that a luxury condominium tower could be built downtown with little or no public financing is unrealistic, a consultant told the City Council on Thursday.

But the market could support the construction of shorter, less expensive flats and town homes, planning consultant Bruce Race said. At a minimum, he said, the north and south banks of the Stockton Deep Water Channel could support the construction of 1,000 homes, and 3,300 homes could be built across the city core.

"It's going to happen," Race said.

The city, which has sought with little success for several years to build homes in the downtown, announced in April that it likely would map as many as 60 acres of downtown for redevelopment. Thursday's hearing was an update, to be followed in August by a detailed plan.

"This is truly big stuff," city Redevelopment Agency Director Steve Pinkerton said. "This is like the (final episode) of 'The Sopranos.' "