Is real estate ready to fly, emerging like some sleep sick cicada from a 5 year nap? All over the country a story is taking shape. Inventories are down and sales are up. Even Miami's condo market, one of the most tortured in the United States, is rising. Camp out vigils at pre-construction sales launches are back.
Conventional wisdom pegs Mammoth market moves at 6 to as many as 12 months behind larger markets like L.A.. As they say, past performance is no guarantee of future results but sometime last summer real estate here began to stir.
In Mammoth 96 condos changed hands in the fourth quarter compared with 84 condos sold in the last 3 months of 2011. The number of REO's and short sales remained fairly constant. In all of 2012, 299 condos were sold, just 10 condos short of 2011's total. The median price inched up a statistically insignificant $2,000 to $244,000.
Single family home sales were more dramatic with the number of homes sold jumping nearly 23% in 2012 and 31.5% in the final quarter over the same periods in 2011. Meanwhile the median price of a home sold in Mammoth climbed nearly 9% last year. More dramatically, in the past 12 months 18 homes over one million dollars found new owners exactly doubling the number of million dollar homes sold in the previous 12 months.
Coupled with declining listing inventories—114 condos, 42 homes—and the fewest sales of homes related to foreclosure nationwide since 2007, the bottom seems to be in the rear view mirror.
