Some disclosures
- I chose to analyze condos in Riverside for a couple reasons
The dataset consists of condos so that will mostly limit the property attributes
The town is large enough and yields enough sales to get a decent sized dataset to analyze
The transaction amounts falls within the GSE pricing limitations
- I only analyzed the sales reported through the MLS so there are probably others which occurred but which were not marketed through the MLS.
- I manually checked their financing and where it was close I calculated the LTVs myself. Tedious and time consuming, but not difficult to do. Anyone can do it.
- I didn't look, but the low sales will commonly include some beaters being purchased to rehab/flip, so I wouldn't put too much focus on those prices. I usually look at the medians as being more indicative of the overall pricing trends.
- The are probably errors in the MLS data and in the public records data, including omissions in the reporting of the financing. Probably a few of the "no 1st reported" sales actually were financed but that element isn't being reported in public records. I can only parrot what the MLS and public records databases are reporting. "as reported" is not intended to imply that's all there is.
- The low-LTV group is also not intended to imply that those are all waivers. We can generally expect that some will have waivers and some will have appraisals. Some might not have a valuation of any kind if there was a seller carry or private money involved. However, if there are any waivers then those will be a subset of the low-LTV transactions because the GSEs weren't using them for high-LTV financing in 2024.
- The high sales for 2022, 2023 and 2024 have atypical attributes when compared to the others, the next highest sales being more typical in location or other features and having pricing that's more similar their respective comps.
- I'm sure there are other aspects of this analysis which bear closer scrutiny, will trigger additional questions and discussion.
- I dunno if anyone is interested in looking at these listings themselves, but I did print out the 1-liners for all of them. If you want me to post them I can, it'll just be cludgy because they don't all fit on a single page. I don't expect anyone to take my word for anything.
