The month of January has historically been the slowest month for existing home sales in the Greater Sacramento area but last month is sunk to the lowest level in the past six years.

In Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado and Yolo counties January sales fell 29% to just over 1,600 sales. This volume level has not been seen since January 2000 according to DataQuick reports.

Sales volume was not all that went down, the median sales price also dropped. In Sacramento County it was the fifth straight month of declines to $352,000 or a 5.2 percent drop from the August 2005 peak of $372,000 but it is still 10 percent higher than it was in January 2005. In other counties we experienced slower price appreciation and clearly off the 20 plus percent gains over the past few years. The median price of a home in the counties that make up the Greater Sacramento area ranged from 5 to 13 percent increases from last January.

A closer look at some of the communities, by zip code, revealed lower volume and mixed changes in median price for resale homes. Overall Lincoln (95648) performed best with 47 homes sold, up over 20% from a year earlier and 7.2 percent growth in median price to $418,000. Here is the detail of some of the more active communities:
January 2006 Sales Volume and Median Price Changes
Community Zip Code Sales Volume % chg. Median Price % chg.
El Dorado Hills 95672 23 -44.0% 630.0 3.2%
Granite Bay 95746 14 -46.2% 710.0 -2.7%
Lincoln 95648 47 20.5% 418.0 7.2%
Rocklin 95677 18 -25.0% 397.5 3.5%
Rocklin 95765 26 -29.7% 455.0 3.5%
Roseville 95661 19 -42.4% 440.0 -4.3%
Roseville 95678 40 -21.6% 375.5 12.1%
Roseville 95747 37 -39.3% 434.0 9.7%

There remain a number of experts who believe what we saw in January is the market changing back to normal after a number of years of double digit price run-up. A Sacramento Bee article about January activity included a quote from an economist from the University of Pacific who said,