Today marks the launch of Chico Real Estate Trends, a blog featured on the local newspaper, Chico Enterprise Record's blog -NorCal Blogs! I will be posting information on our current real estate market.

Today marks the launch of Chico Real Estate Trends-To start I am looking at the Chico real estate market yearend review for 2011-specifically, the single family residence market. For added reference I will refer back to statistics that are taken during the peak of our market-second quarter of 2006, as well as the statistics from the prior year. 

As far as quantity of homes sold during the 2011 year-it wasn't all that bad. There was actually an increase over 2010's total units sold. In 2010, there were 760 homes sold with approximately 53% of that number sold as a "distressed property"-that is either foreclosed, in the process of foreclosure and/or being sold as a short sale. The average sales price for 2010 was $277,456 with a median sales price of $250,000. By 2011 year end, there were 860 homes sold-an increase of approximately 11%, with about 46% of the properties sold being in a distressed status. Both the median and average sales prices for Chico declined from the previous year. The median sales price in 2011 ended at $225,000-an approximately 10% drop; while the average sales price decreased to $252,558 or approximately 8%.

Chico's peak hit during the second quarter of 2006. During that quarter the average sales price was $376,308 with a median sales price of $345,000-a nearly 33% decrease on average and just under 35% decrease on median sales prices compared to 2011.

Currently Chico has 216 active single family residences for sale, with 56 or approximately 26% of those being distressed properties. At the current rate of sale, we are down to approximately 3 months of inventory!