Are real estate agents that good in Sonoma County...or are the banks holding back.

Did Sonoma County agents really clear out almost all the available inventory of REO listings? 

Looking for listings for a new client this week I started to realize the pool of available listings was dramatically smaller than it was a few months ago. I pulled the numbers for Windsor, CA where I have been active recently and was astonished to see less than a dozen active listings. Anybody who reads my blog knows I like diving into the numbers when reality slaps me in the face, so I got busy with the MLS and Realist databases.

Two things are clearly going on based on the chart. First, REO property is selling like crazy. Look at the sold numbers. We're easily over 20 sales per month average for the first part of this year. Additionally, the combined contingent and pending bars show 30 properties likely to close in the near future. The contingent and pending listings clearly outnumber active listings which are down to 12 units.

A market that has absorbed over 105 homes in 14 weeks now has just 12 listings to choose from. For those keeping track at home, that's less than two weeks of inventory.

The final bar in the chart may help tell the story. There are 35 REO homes that aren't on the market yet. You can choose whether the banks are holding back to drive up prices or are too busy to get the listings ready to sell. Between evictions, clean-up, repairs, and setting value, it takes a while to bring an REO property to market. However, even if all 35 bank owned homes in Windsor were magically dumped into the market today, buyers for foreclosed property in Sonoma County would snap them up in about a month at current rates.

So, whether it's 12 homes available or 47, we're looking at less than two months of inventory. I think that's a hot market in anybody's book.