Hollister
– A still-sluggish housing market showed some signs of
improvement in May.
Hollister – A still-sluggish housing market showed some signs of improvement in May.
Although only 34 San Benito County home sales were finalized – an increase from the 22 sales in April but well behind the 50 sales in May 2006 – the total dollar value of the sales nearly doubled month-over-month, from $13.7 million in April to $24.7 million in May, according to data from the real estate tracking firm REInfoLink.
The median price for homes sold increased from $589,950 to $627,500, the highest it’s been since June 2006.
“I expected big things out of April and May,” said Dee Brown, a real estate agent with ReMax Platinum Properties. “And I can’t say I’m disappointed, because you can’t complain when you see an increase from 22 to 34. … But I would like to see more buyers come out this summer.”
Renee Kunz, general manager of Intero Real Estate in Hollister, spoke to the Free Lance from a California Association of Realtors conference in Sacramento, where she said the mood remains positive.
“(Realtors) know that if a property is priced right, it will sell,” she said.
Despite Kunz’s “glass half-full” approach, she acknowledged that San Benito’s real estate isn’t exactly booming. For one thing, the inventory of homes on the market remains high: 460 in May 2007, an increase of nearly 40 percent from May 2006. Sales are picking up, Kunz said, but it’s hard to know if they will outpace homes being offered for sale as homeowners try to sell a house they can’t afford or banks foreclose on a property.
Mortgage broker Karl Skow of the Pacific Company said San Benito County is still feeling the effects from a rash of “subprime” mortgages. Those mortgages started out with affordable payments but are being reset to higher rates, leading to a spike in foreclosures, and those foreclosures bring the whole market down, Skow said.
According to the company RealtyTrac, there were more than 100 foreclosure activities in San Benito County during the first three months of 2007.
“In my opinion, we haven’t finished weathering the storm of the subprimes,” Skow said.
Nowadays, two out of every three customers Skow meets with are looking to refinance an unaffordable loan, rather than take out a loan on a new home, he said.
Kunz and other local real estate agents have said the market is picking up in San Jose and Santa Clara County, which traditionally benefits to San Benito home sales as well.
“We usually see a trickle down,” Kunz said.
But Skow isn’t so sure locals will see the benefits right away. Areas with a strong job base, such as San Jose, aren’t being hit as hard by the foreclosure crunch, Skow said. Bedroom communities like Hollister, on the other hand, may take longer to recover.
The most expensive property sold in May was a four-bedroom, three-bathroom home on 82.37 acres in Hollister. The property also includes two large barns and was initially offered for $1.99 million, but the owner settled for a $1.7 million.
The least expensive home was sold for $395,000; it is a newly remodeled, two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in San Juan Bautista.
