Report: Q3 Home Sellers See Big Price Gains

Third-quarter housing statistics show people who sold their homes in the Sacramento area realized bigger gains, on average, than most other U.S. metro areas.

The data show Sacramento area homeowners who sold between July and September saw an average price gain of 23 percent from the purchase price of their property. The national average was 17 percent.

"The sellers that we're seeing now actually do have a fair amount of equity in their homes," says Daren Blomquist with RealtyTrac, the research firm that released the data.

He says that growing number of homeowners with equity is good news for a market like Sacramento with a relatively low inventory of homes for sale.

"More homeowners, who maybe have been locked into their homes because they didn't have enough equity, now are going to be listing their homes for sale," says Blomquist.

The Sacramento region's median sales price in the third-quarter was $289,485, up nearly four percent from the same period last year.

Blomquist says that of the more than 5,700 Sacramento area homes that sold in the third-quarter, 326 were owned by banks.

"Overall we're down to very low numbers," says Blomquist. "Under five percent of all sales that are bank-owned homes in the Sacramento market."

He says Sacramento saw one of the country's biggest declines in the share of bank-owned sales; a drop of 44-percent from a year ago.

The Q3 data also suggest first-time home buyers are flocking to Modesto; 40 percent of the homes that sold were purchased with FHA loans. That's one of the highest percentages in the country - nearly double the national average.

"The FHA buyers are putting usually about three percent down," explains Blomquist. "These are low down payment, typically first-time home buyers coming into the market. And so a market like Modesto is very appealing to those types of buyers who don't have a lot to put down."

The third-quarter median sales price in Modesto was $248,000.