Market Snapshot: Chatsworth. A look at what it takes to buy a home in todays market.

I took a look at two points in time (January, 2007 and April 2008) for Chatsworth, Ca to see how much financing a home has changed since last year.

I chose Chatsworth because it is small and so the data sets are easy to manage. And I have lived their before so I have local knowledge. I chose those two points in time because January 2007 was right before the subprime blowup and April 2008 was the last full month of public record data I had.

Chatsworth January 2007
100% financing - 17
95% - x - 100% - 3
90% - x - 95% - 6
85% - x - 90% - 1
80% - x - 85% - 3
75% - x - 80% - 0
0% - x - 75% - 5
All Cash - 1

Chatsworth April 2008
100% financing - 0
95% - x - 100% - 1
90% - x - 95% - 11
85% - x - 90% - 1
80% - x - 85% - 4
75% - x - 80% - 3
0% - x - 75% - 3
All Cash - 0

Note: There was one house in April which didn't have a listed sales price because it was new construction. I put it in the 90% bucket based on the tax data. Excuse the formatting, blogger doesn't like tables for some reason.

Small data set, but it appears if you want to buy in todays market you need to come in with a good sized down payment. Based on the lowered sales in April it is likely that many people are simply not qualifying either because of lack of down payment or lack of income relative to the purchase price of the home. The one high LTV loan in April was a FHA loan. The 90% to 95% bucket in April consisted of eight 10% down, two 8% down and the one unknown. The median for January '07 was $564,000 for April 2008 was $430,000.

It will be interesting to see how many buyers are on the sidelines with significant down payments if it isn't a lot then prices will have much further to fall.

The other thing I thought was interesting in looking at Chatsworth and surrounding closed sales was the "deals". The REOs and Short Sales were in general sold from 90% to 106% of list price (not Original List Price). So the banks were willing to deal somewhat on list price on inventory listed on the MLS but when they priced aggressive they got overbids. There were a couple of non-MLS transactions which looked to be significant discounts to list price but they were not the norm. The banks have a process to find market price and it appears to be working.