2011 vs 2012

It’s always a good idea to look where you’ve been to figure out where you are going.  For Real Estate in Downtown San Diego, we hit bottom in late 2010 and it’s been a different market ever since.  2011 and 2012 have been dominated by investors trying to snatch up deals and flip properties, people looking for good deals to hold for vacation homes, first time buyers and empty Nestor’s downsizing from the burbs.

Color Key for bar Chart

• purple – short sale  |  green – traditional resale  |  red – bank owned foreclosure  |  blue – developer sale

New Condos Downtown San Diego

As you can see the 2011 and 2012 were very similar with regards to the total number of sales and the average sales price.  The biggest take-away from this chart is the the shrinking number of foreclosure sales and the diminishing number of new developer sales.  You can see that resales rose by 181 and this clearly shows us that we are exiting a distressed market and heading into a more traditional and healthy period of our real estate sales cycle.

In looking at further data regarding the new developer sales we had in 2012, most of those new sales occurred at Smart Corner, which had an average sales price of about $240,000.  This significantly brought down the average sales price for 2012 ($305,204 for developer sales in 2012 vs $541,810 in 2011) so we actually had a far more stellar year than what the numbers show on the surface.  In 2011 Downtown San Diego new condo sales were dominated by Bayside, The Mark and Sapphire Tower which are all luxury buildings.

Smart Corner single handedly brought new developer average sales price way down to $305,204 vs $541,810 in 2011

Despite popular belief, there are a lot of people with cash out there and even with mortgage financing being difficult to obtain, the market is hot and buyers will quickly purchase good properties at fair prices.  You can see below that 46% of the transactions in 2012 in Downtown were cash buyers. 

Moving forward, there are no new developments that have gone through the process of pulling permits so at this point, we would estimate it will be 3 years before we see any New Condos Downtown San Diego.  They will come, but for now, we expect to see all the investors that purchased over the past 5 years to sell and make a really good return on their investments.

For more information on buying or selling a property in Downtown San Diego, give us a call: 619-309-8011