April brings good news and bad news for Sacramento County residential resale home buyers.

The good news is prices are down from a year ago and interest rates are attractive. The bad news is it's getting tougher to beat the competition to buy a home because multiple offers are the norm and not the exception.

I was poking around in MLS this morning to try to get a jump on the housing statistics soon to be released by DataQuick and Trendgraphix. Because our housing market has been quirky, turning to wild and wooly and well, just plain crazy. It seems every time I turn around, an REO listing has 16 to 20 offers on it. Even homes that aren't REOs but are located in desirable neighborhoods and priced right are flying out of inventory, often pushed off the shelf by multiple offers.

Now, using MLS data isn't the most accurate because it does not include non-MLS sales, but since numbers of non-MLS sales are small, I think it's safe to use MLS data as a trend. On a side note, pending sales at my company have more than doubled over a year ago and are now equal to the high of August 2005, which is astounding!

Here is my summary of residential resale market conditions for April in Sacramento County:

• Solds are up 46% over April of 2007.
• Solds are up 22% over March of 2008.
• Almost half of the homes are selling within 30 days.
• Those that sell within 30 days are priced right and sell at 99.21% of list price. This means sellers are more realistic about their sales prices than they were a year ago when those that sold within 30 days sold at 98.44% of list price.
• As time goes by and days on market grow longer, sellers are taking bigger discounts than they did a year ago, but only on homes listed longer than 30 days.
  
• We are selling more homes -- 46% more than a year ago -- but our dollar sales volume for April remains almost the same in year-over-year comparison, dropping by about 3%.
  
• The median sales price in Sacramento County has fallen 33% in year-over-year comparison. 

Here are the stats of sold MLS listings in Sacramento County:

• 1459 sold residential listings in April 2008
• 997 sold residential listings in April 2007
• 1193 sold residential listings in March 2008

In April 2008, 1459 sold:

• 48.80% sold under 30 DOM at 99.21% 
• 17.68% sold within 31-60 DOM at 95.38%
• 11.03% sold within 61-90 DOM at 94.99%
• 6.92% sold within 91-120 DOM at 94.82%
• 15.56% sold over 120 DOM at 94.46%
• Median price for solds in April 2008 is: $227,000
• Total sales volume: $360,470,789 

In April 2007, 997 sold:

• 47.14% sold under 30 DOM at 98.44%
• 20.96% sold within 31-60 DOM at 97.6%
• 11.03% sold within 61-90 DOM at 97.44%
• 8.22% sold within 91-120 DOM at 97.64%
• 12.64% sold over 120 DOM at 96.31%
• Median price for solds in April 2007 is: $340,000 
• Total sales volume: $374,588,694