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Did Somebody Change The Water In Vallejo? Check Out This Week’s Real Estate Report

January 11th, 2010 categories: Benicia, Buying, Fairfield-Gr Valley, Market Update, Selling, Solano, Suisun City, Vacaville

Water FaucetThe new year is barely a week and a half old and already we’ve come upon our first head-turning moment.

If you’ve been following our blog on a regular basis, you know that the inventory throughout Solano County dropped steadily last year — as Vallejo and Suisun City each shed over 70% of its inventory between January and December…with Fairfield and Vacaville not far behind that pace.

Well so far this year, Benicia, Fairfield, Suisun and Vacaville have all seen their inventories of available homes for sale remain pretty close to where they were when 2009 ended.

But Vallejo was a completely different story last week, as its inventory soared — yes that’s Soared with a capital “S”. With a gain of 39 active listings between Jan. 4 and Jan. 11, the increase was almost twice the highest single weekly gain (21) for all of last year.

So when I downloaded the data and saw such a huge one-week increase, I had to run the search a second time, just to make sure I hadn’t make an input error.  It was indeed correct — 205 single family homes and 37 condos/townhomes on the market a week ago and 241 & 40 this week.

That works out to a 16% increase in just one week .

Yet in 2009, Vallejo’s inventory climbed only 11 times all year…and never by more than 8%.

So with such a huge increase in Vallejo, I expected to see a similar rise at least in Fairfield and Suisun — two other Solano County communities that, like Vallejo, have had a very high number of distress-sale listings.

But Fairfield saw its inventory drop by 2 active listings last week and Suisun’s inventory stayed just where it was the week before. The other two cities in our Solano County market area were also about the same:  Vacaville was -1 and Benicia +2.

So why the sudden change in Vallejo? As today’s headline suggests, did somebody change the water there last week?

For the record, Vallejo had 61 new listings on the MLS last week, but when you take into account the number of homes that went pending last week, it had a net gain of 39 active listings compared to the week before. Of those 61 new listings, 25 were REOs, 17 were short sales, and 19 were regular fair-market sales.

Could it be that we’re on the cusp of the long-awaited influx of more bank-owned properties on the market? If that was the case, you wouldn’t expect the banks to release their REO properties in only one city. You’d expect to see the same thing happening in Fairfield, Suisun and even Vacaville.

So again, why the sudden increase in Vallejo? To be honest, it’s a real puzzlement right now. But you can be sure I’ll be anxiously waiting for next week to see if things even themselves out or if we’re really at the beginning of an increase in the housing supply.

I tend to think that it’s just a one-week aberration and that things will even out over the next few weeks. If you’re as curious to see what happens as I am, be sure to check back next week, when I’ll post the results for the coming week.

Our Solano County Weekly Real Estate Sales Report appears regularly at HomeSection.com. Be sure to download the current report, for week-by-week details on every city in our Solano County market area all year long. And, for the complete report for 2009, click here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Benicia, Buying, Fairfield-Gr Valley, Market Update, Selling, Solano, Suisun City, Vacaville. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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