It is Saturday May 3, 2008 and the weather is warm and beautiful here in Corte Madera. Marin County is marching to a slightly different drummer as it relates to the housing market. The market in Marin is still robust in certain areas and very slow in others. The areas of Novato, Petaluma and certain parts of San Rafael are feeling the effects of the mortgage debacle. Many more home owners are in default on their mortgage obligation, no doubt due to the easy lending of the past few years.

As always the Marin Report will be able to give you drill down details on the average and median price of a home in every city in Marin. In addition if you go to the home page of www.Westbayre.com you will be able to get all the details on the San Francisco and the Sonoma county markets. It is a great deal of work to keep these statistics up to date but it is one of the best ways to determine the state of the market and some indication of its direction.

I always look like at the percentage of homes in contract to give us some guidance. This percentage is calculated from the total number of homes listed and those that are in contract with buyers. Anything around 20% or less is a buyer’s market. Anything 30% or more is a seller’s market. A balance market would be somewhere around 25%.

Please don’t let some of these numbers fool you. When we have only a handful of home selling in a specific community during the month you cannot get a true indication of the health of that real estate market or its direction. I can tell you that from my empirical analysis as well as from the feedback I am getting from my clients, people are looking for fair prices. In no case have I seen average homes selling at inflated prices. In many cases I have seen those same home sell in 2005 and 2006 for up to 10% greater. Many homeowners here in Marin are seeing large gains if they have held their homes for a long period of time. Those that have purchased since 2005 are lucky to break even if they need to sell now. Also, there are many exceptions to this in Marin. I recently put a client into a house in Mill Valley that was not on the market. It sold at $150,000 more than the previous owners paid for it just 3 years ago, and they did no significant improvements on the house. This was due to the superb location of the home and its ambiance.

Novato is still showing signs of a very depressed market. There are winners and losers here and if you are a buyer and looking on a long term basis to hold some real estate you can get some good deals on homes. These numbers do not tell the whole story. Prices are down and days on market on up greatly. Please go to the Marin Report to see the details. Of course feel free to call or drop me a line at rparks@visionrealtors.com.

The percentage of listed homes in contract as of May 3, 2008 is as follows:

CITY	TOTAL LISTED	TOTAL IN CONTRACT	%
Belvedere	19	4	21%
Corte Madera	36	14	39%
Fairfax	28	6	21%
Greenbrae	14	4	29%
Kentfield	32	6	19%
Larkspur	29	5	17%
Mill Valley	138	33	24%
Novato	300	45	15%
Ross	20	4	20%
Sausalito	29	8	28%
San Anselmo	71	12	17%
San Rafael	243	58	24%
Tiburon	51	13	25%
TOTAL	1010	212	21%