San Diego Coastal Real Estate Resource

Rancho Santa Fe – Real Estate Pinch or Punch?

by Jeffrey on June 15, 2009

in Breaking News, Rancho Santa Fe, Statistics

There was an article today in the Union Tribune captioned “High-end homeowners now feeling the pinch” written by Roger Showley. The article starts out with the following quote:

The real estate slump has arrived in La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe and other high-end San Diego County neighborhoods.

After holding their own in sales strength, sales of homes priced at $1 million or more started to fall a year after lower-priced homes hit the skids.

Let’s take a look at some facts regarding the market in Rancho Santa Fe. Over the next week or so I will be doing the same in the markets that I follow including Del Mar, La Jolla, Downtown San Diego, and Coronado.

First some history. According to the Sandicor MLS the numbers for sold in Rancho Santa Fe for 2006:

218 Single Family Residences Sold
Lowest Price Sold was $975,000 – Highest Price Sold was $22,500,000
Average Sold Price was $3,633,72
Average Price Per Square Foot Sold was $607.30
Days on Market (DOM) was 113 on average

Now lets take a look at the period of time from January 1, through June 15th for the following years which is the period of time we are covering for 2009:

A total of 84 single family homes in 2007 – 73 in 2008 – 50 in 2009 from January 1st through June 15th
Lowest price $1,499,000 in 2007 – $790,541 in 2008 – $670,000 in 2009
Highest price $18,500 in 2007 – $16,900,000 in 2008 – $7995,000 in 2009
Average Price sold – $3,264,803 in 2007 – $3,510,014 in 2008 – $3,026,840 in 2009
Average Price per square foot – $541.73 in 2007 – $551.01 in 2008 – $462.18 in 2009

Let’s look at the active inventory of single family homes for Rancho Santa Fe (92067-92091). Data is provided by Altos Research which is “real time” versus many other data sources. You may visit my Rancho Santa Fe community page for weekly updated statistics or take a photo tour.

Note that the chart above includes both inventory for 2009 and 2008. The rather substantial drop in inventory around January is when listings expire and are brought back on the market as a new listing, sometimes with a new listing agent, and sometimes those agents that want to refresh DOM (Days On The Market). As you can see inventory has risen 320 homes. Increased inventory is not a good sign in our current market conditions.

View current inventory in Rancho Santa Fe 92067 – 92091.

Median Prices (Half Higher-Half Lower) have been trending downward since November of 2008.

Average days on the market has trended up for all of 2009 and is now at over 180 days.

Looking at Foreclosure Radar in 92067 & 92091 (Search for yourself) there are 31 properties in Pre-foreclosure, 6 Auction, and 6 Bank Owned for a total of 43. While not all properties in pre-foreclosure go to auction – this amount has increased alarmingly in the past few months.

Back in January I wrote a blog post regarding market predictions. Pardon for quoting myself….

I have been reading a lot of posts on predictions for the 2009 real estate market in San Diego. As usual, there are many opinions out there, some of them are optimistic, some funny, some neutral, and some just doom and gloom. Everyone appears to be an expert with their own spin and logic to what clearly has been a huge reset of our markets.

The truth of the matter is no one really knows when the bottom will hit (or has hit) in San Diego. If they have this ability to see so clearly into the future, then I would suggest they might want to spend their time buying Lotto tickets – the payoff would be much better. Market bottoms can be clearly identified months after they have occurred by the reviewing of sales data and median prices by real estate experts.

Certainly Rancho Santa Fe and some other high end markets may have some rough times ahead. Unlike the lower priced markets that have seen price reductions up to 50% from the market peak, the Seller’s have more horse power to hold their homes longer or consider renting them. In this case it seems like a great deal of pressure is on prices from high inventory, potential foreclosures, and challenges in financing. I will be interesting to see how other “high end” markets pan out as we continue looking at them over the next week.

Download latest Rancho Santa Fe report here.

Now for the legal stuff. Not all sales are reported to Sandicor MLS and while I have tried to be as accurate as possible this information is not guaranteed.

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