Sebastopol California bucks the market trends

Sometimes a graph is the best way to demonstrate a trend. I have been working with Altos Research to develop charts for Sonoma County. I love country property and small towns, so I generated some charts for Sonoma, Sebastopol, Healdsburg, and some of the other agriculture-surrounded towns in Sonoma County's wine country. One of the surprises that jumped out at me was that Sebastopol, alone among the Sonoma County towns, has continued strong median prices in the top quartile of the market.

This is a live chart, so the data will change over time, but as of the middle of April, 2008, the upper quartile of homes in Sebastopol is about 5% above a year ago. For Sonoma County, that increase in value during the past year isn't replicated anywhere else. The data set for charts like this is small. Not a lot of properties are changing hands, so one or two large sales can skew the market. Still, this is a good demonstration that real estate in Sebastopol is still strong.

Here's some more Sebastopol market data:

Once again, the data is live so these comments are for mid-April, 2008. The blue line represents median days on market for the top 25% of homes. There was the typical mid-winter doldrums period where the time increased, but the chart clearly shows that homes at the high end of the market are selling faster than any other market segment.

This final chart shows both the early spring uptick in people listing their homes for sale in Sebastopol, but also a healthy reduction in overall inventory back to levels from a year ago (as of mid-April, 2008) before the August meltdown in the sub-prime market.

If you are interested in the Sebastopol market, you can subscribe to a weekly report on many Sonoma County cities from my sonoma.net site.