Huge Surge in New Home Sales

Sales of new homes surged 27 percent last month! Check out this article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36735173

I get a lot of people asking how accurate Zillow is at their Zestimates. The answer for our county is “Not very”.

As of 3/10/10, only 18% of closings in SLO county were within 5% of the Zestimate; 34% within 10%, and 58% within 20%. That means that 42% of the Zestimates were over 20% off the actual value, and 66% were at least 10% off the true value as shown by an actual closing.

The median error is 16% in SLO County. The best accuracy in the state is Ventura with a median error of 10.5%.

This info is from Zillow itself. Please check out the following link.

http://www.zillow.com/howto/DataCoverageZestimateAccuracyCA.htm

Sales Stats for 2009 vs 2010

In comparing 2009 to 2010, let's look at sales statistics:
- In Feb, we had 137 sales in 2010 and 160 sales in 2009.
- In Jan, we had 157 sales in 2010 and 129 sales in 2009.

Median sales price in both months for both years was almost the same:
- Feb 2009 = $368,250 / Feb 2010 = $375,000.
- Jan 2009 = $380,000 / Jan 2010 = $390,000.

Overall, things have been pretty stable over the last year, as you can tell from these numbers. We aren't seeing a big drop in prices anymore, and the number of sales in a month is fairly consistent.