Thursday, April 12th, 2012
Housing prices are mixed — up in the city, down in the county. The number of sales is up, but the number of properties for sale is down.

That’s according to the latest figures from the Santa Fe Association of Realtors.

During a presentation Wednesday, association officers said the statistics from the first quarter of 2012 show:

• That Santa Fe housing prices remain low, compared to their high point in the second quarter of 2008.

• That the upswing in the number of sales is due to low prices, low interest rates and buyer concerns that both prices and rates could soon go up.

• That fewer properties on the market are due to sellers holding off in hopes that sales prices will improve.

“There’s a substantial uptick in the number of people looking for houses and some increase in the number of sales,” said association President Dan H. Wright of Santa Fe Properties. “So there must be something going on in the market.”

Association President-elect Victoria Murphy, also of Santa Fe Properties, said a number of people from out of state who had been looking in Santa Fe recently have decided to go ahead with purchasing because they think both prices and interest rates soon will rise.

The most closely watched statistic — the median sales price of a single-family dwelling in both the city and county — was $352,000. That’s down less than 1 percent from $355,000 in the first quarter of 2011.

Within the city limits, the median price was $290,000 — up 4.5 percent from $277,500. The biggest jump — 51.7 percent to $442,500 — was in the northwest part of the city. The only decrease — 4.5 percent to $195,700 — was in the southwest.

Outside the city limits, it was $385,000 — down 8.8 percent from $422,000. But in the moderately priced community of Eldorado, the median price fell nearly 13 percent — to $298,000 from $342,000.

Overall — including single-family homes, condominiums and townhouses, duplexes and larger multiple-unit complexes, mobile homes and manufactured housing, and raw land, both in and outside of the city limits — the median sales price for real-estate sales was $98,000 — down 42.2 percent from $169,500 a year earlier.

During the first three months of 2012, there were 249 sales of single-family homes — up 16.4 percent from a year earlier. But the inventory of all available properties for sale during the last quarter was 1,413 — down 17.1 percent from the first quarter of 2011, which was down 17.2 percent from the first quarter of 2010.

Santa Fe Realtors Association officers say if the inventory of available housing continues to fall, that will push the median prices up. But they say fewer homes for sale may be due to some sellers pulling their properties off the market — so they can refinance them at a lower interest rate or lease them until the real-estate market improves.

The recent figures also show a slight decrease in the number of days properties remain on the market — 247 days, compared to an all-time high of 270 days a year earlier.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.