I have a second home in the California Desert. Life here is much different than life in Orange County. The first thing you have to get used to is the quiet, then the heat!

The town where my home is located, (Johnson Valley) has a population of 250 people! My back yard is open, unimproved land for as far as I can see.

I am next to the country's largest off road vehicle riding area, yet there is seldom anyone there.

In Jan. they have the "King of the Hammers" race, where this little town grows from 250 people to 60,000! for one week. Then is back to 250 again.

Paul

Whether you are new to the business or have been a Realtor for 32 years like me, at some point you are going to ask yourself, "should I continue in this business"?

An easy question, but hard to answer. This is a tough business, and if you don't like it, you're probably not going to succeed.

In times like these more and more Realtors are asking themselves this question.

Many are in denial, just waiting for the market to turn around.

Others are educating themselves during the down turn, still waiting for easier, better days. 

Those that are to succeed in the business realize that the "turn around" may not come for several years (if ever). That we may already be in the middle of our "new normal" That if and when the number of sales begin to increase, so will the number of Realtors back in the business. I've seen it several times over the years.

So, what do you do?

Make a few decisions -

Are you staying in the business or not? If not, who would blame you?

If you do decided to stay, make the decision to put in the amount of effort to be successful in today's market. Don't wait for the future market reversal to save you.

Most importantly - do what you LIKE to do in Real Estate. If you like to knock on doors, knock on MORE doors. Make more expired calls, do more open houses. You are more likely to do it if you like it.

You all know what you need to do to be successful - so do it, or quit! It really isn't as hard a decision as you may have thought.

Paul McDuell

Here is the challange -

Widest gap between the lowest and highest priced Current Active listings is a given Zip Code.

You MUST live in the Zip code or you are cheating (hey, it's my challange - hehe)

In my zip code - 92679, the lowest priced listing is

$44,000

The highest is

$13,500,000 (yes, that's millions!)

The Spread to beat - $13,456,000

NO SHORT SALES EITHER.

I don't expect any posts, because NO ONE is going to beat this!!

Paul

I've probably done a 1000 open houses over the 31+ years that I've been a Realtor. Recently I've been holding MY house open.

Since it's my house, I'm able to hold it open longer than I would someone else's. This last weekend I held it open 8 hours each day.

Saturday I had one person through and Sunday no one came by.

I don't think I've ever held an open house where NO ONE came by.

I live in South Orange County, Southern California. The weather was beautiful both days.

I advertised in the MLS, on Craigslist, and on the personal website I made for the house.

I had 12 directional signs where I probably only needed 6.

So, other than the tragedy in Japan, I can't think of a good reason as to why it was so slow.

I feel that Open Houses are a good barometer of the health of the Real Estate market.

I don't think that a single poor weekend tells us much, but if this happens several weekends in a row, I'm going to be concerned.

That's why I am posting - I think it would be great to hear from other agents around the country about the traffic through YOUR OPEN HOUSES.

So, at a minimum, please state your city, the day you held open, the number of people through that you would consider normal, and the actual number through.

If we do this each week, we'll begin to see some trends.

I'll start

Rancho Santa Margarita - South Orange County, Southern California.

Normal would be 5 to 6 groups of people

Sat. 3-12-2011 - one

Sun. 3-13-2011- None

My heart goes out to the people of Japan.

Paul

As we all know, the Fed has been buying Treasuries at the rate of $75 Billion Dollars a month as part of the stimulus package. As we also know, once that stops in June, there will be less money available for Mortgage Loans. Less supply = more demand.

So, with April traditionally being the month for most home sales, and with the buying public knowing that interest rates will be buying in June, NOW is the time to buy before home prices jump up or at the least inventory dwindles due to more sales.

Buyers, now is the time to buy and if you are thinking about  a move up, get your house on the market ASAP - you don't want to be stuck with a higher interest rate mortgage.  

In the last 30 days 49 homes have closed escrow in all of Rancho Santa Margarita. There are currently 327 homes listed as Active. That works out to 200 days of inventory or roughly 6.5 months (which is good from both a seller and buyer perspective) I wondered what the sweet spot was size wise. Quickly I found that 1/2 were under 1400sqft and 1/2 were over. But that doesn't really tell the story. So, here is a breakdown of the closings within a 100 square foot range.

Average Square Footage of all closed sales - 1439sqft

Average Price per square foot - $245.72

Lowest Price per Square foot - $174

Highest Price per Square foot - $338

Largest Home in our Data Base to ever sell in Rancho Santa Margarita - 17,510 - but that has to be a typo because it's a condo and it doesn't look very big;-)  2nd largest - 5000 sqft.

Smallest - Good Question - there are 79 sales of homes on record that have zero square feet - talk about small! Note to agents - ALWAYS ENTER THE SQFT - at least in this part of the county

The smallest above zero? 410sqft.

Nothing smaller than 500sqft sold in the last 30 days.

500-600 1 closed

600-700 4 closed

701-800 0 closed

801-900 3 closed

901-1000 0 closed

1001-1100 5 closed

1101-1200 3 closed

1201-1300 5 closed

1301-1400 5 closed

1401-1500 7 closed

1501-1600 3 closed

1601-1700 2 closed

1701-1800 2 closed

1801-1900 1 closed

1901-2000 2 closed

2001-2100 0 closed

2100-2200 0 closed

2201-2300 1 closed

2301-2400 1 closed

2401-2500 1 closed

2501-2600 1 closed

2601-2700 1 closed

2701-2800 0 closed

2801-2900 1 closed

Ok, so this isn't very scientific but I got the results I expected. For zip 92679 (the southern tip of South Orange County, Calif). I looked up the number of closed escrows for Dec. of 2009, then each month for 2010, and finally for Jan. 2011. I wasn't going to figure out when each of these sold, but I did "guestimate" a 45 day average escrow period. I'm sure some were MUCH longer than that what with Short Sales, but I figured it would all average out.

I took my monthly results, subtracted 45 days for the escrow period, and the chart below is what I came up with.  

There are several problems with doing it this way, please don't point them out. I did it mainly just to get a feel for the most active months. As predicted, April is the winner, but surprisingly, Jan came in second, I would have guessed May, which came in 3rd.

This is a very small sample and only covered one year, but it is interesting that April had so many more sales than any other month.

Jan. 16th. 2011

Based on the number of closed sales over the last 30 days, it would take 7.8 months to sell all of the current listing in zip 92679 and only 5.26 months for 92688.

When looking at larger homes, the inventory would last a little longer. For homes over 2500 SqFt. we are looking 8.6 months for 92679 and 11.6 months for 92688.

Historically - that's not too bad.

Open house this weekend was a little slower than last weekend, possibly because it's a holiday weekend.

Paul

Home prices on homes between 3000 and 3300 sqft. in the 92679 zip have gone up. For the time period from Nov. 1st. through Dec. 6th. 2009 vs 2010.

The average price per square foot for homes in this size category was $231.38 in 2009.

In 2010 that price per square foot rose to $259.55!

That's a 12% increase!!

Now before we get too excited, keep in mind that there were only 6 homes that sold in that size category in 92679 in 09 and only 4 in 2010 - Still - I was surprised to see a rise at all.

Paul McDuell