We have been hearing how bad the real estate market is for quite some time now and I've certainly found the market to be slow and prices to be lower now than in recent years past. Out of curiosity, I decided to run some searches in the MLS to see how much things have changed in the past nine years. I broke the two searches down by supposed "good" years and the years since the beginning of our "Great Recession" - 2001-2006 and 2007-October 18, 2010.
From 2001 to 2006 there were a total of 164 land and residential sales in the Anderson Valley (I did not include commercial and other sales in my searches). Of these, 93 were residential and 71 were land. From 2007 to October 14, 2010 there have been a total of 81 sales, 47 residential and 34 land. So we've had half as many sales during the past two and three-quarter years.
So what about prices? What I found supports the drop in prices we've experienced, but not as much as I had anticipated. The average sales price - and this is very simplified: I took the total of the value of the sales and divided it by those sales, not accounting for size of property or any other factors (that is something for another day when I've got more time!) - the average sales price for land and residential properties from 2001-2006 was $507,882. From 2007 through October 18, 2010, the average sales price for those properties was $695,916 - but, there's two large sales that skew that a bit, one for $6,000,000 and one for $3,200,000; when I removed those two large sales and ran the average again, it was $431,106, showing a drop in prices of about $76,000. There were more higher priced properties sold during the first time period so those higher numbers along with the volume of sales didn't produce the same skewing of prices.
What I found supported the idea that things have cooled off in the real estate market and that prices have come down some. Of course, I was just looking at Anderson Valley, a small piece of the overall market. What is good news is that there have still been sales - and continue to be sales - and that our prices don't appear to have dropped as much as some surrounding areas.