A Look at Danville & Alamo Real Estate as Summer Ends

Winter was wet, our glorious summer was all too brief and now families across Alamo and Danville are back to school.

With the final third of the year and the holidays still to come, it's interesting to see how the real estate year measures up against past years.

So far this year in Alamo, Blackhawk, and Danville, 651 homes have sold. That compares with 688 for the same time of the year in 2010, and only 442 for 2009.

Median sales prices were $850,000 for this year, $875,000 for last year and $824,000 for 2009.

Of the 651 homes that have sold this year, 85 were bank owned and 96 were short sales. In 2010, 67 were bank owned and 99 were short sales. In 2009, 57 were bank owned and 40 were short sales.

In other words, 72 percent of the sales so far this year have been regular (not distressed) sales, compared to 76 percent in 2010 and 78 percent in 2009 (January - August).

A few years ago, when foreclosures began to be a big part of the real estate market, I found it interesting to look at the Antioch real estate market.

I compared the activity in Alamo to Antioch, week after week, for more than  three years.

When I started the comparison (September 2007), it was because I kept hearing statistics about the "Contra Costa real estate market" and I knew that lumping together two towns as different as Antioch and Alamo made no sense, even if they share a county seat.

In fact, the Alamo inventory has been steady: high in the summer, low in the winter.

Antioch, on the other hand, had about 1,300 active listings when I started logging the statistics -- and gradually leveled out over three years to between 200 and 300 (about 295 today).

Antioch, as one of the towns with a lot of new construction, was hard hit by the foreclosure problems and went through a recovery process. 

Alamo and Danville, where there isn't a lot of new construction, did not suffer as much -- and consequently the prices remain relatively steady.

However, there is definitely a rise is distressed sales as we compared the statistics over the past three years, so it will be interesting to watch the remaining third of the year unfold.

Statistics quoted are based on information from the Contra Costa Association of REALTOR’S® MLS. Display of MLS data is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed accurate by the MLS.