After a long dry Autumn, we have snow. It was a great thing to see it snowing right on the heals of a devastating mid-January wildfire in Reno that two of my sons were fighting.
Although the economy would have been better with snow before now, it was a banner year for ice skating as the photo of Lower Echo Lake testifies (I took the other photo on the trails behind our house today). I did enjoy the lack of snow by hiking and mountain biking as skiing on ribbons of man made snow began to feel a bit confining. Hope you can come up and enjoy Winter in Tahoe at your favorite snow sport area very soon.
Image by RenoTahoe via Flickr
On mostly man made snow Heavenly Valley Ski Area is scheduled to be open this week, November 18. Their hours and terrain are sure to be limited, but they will be open nonetheless. Sierra-at-Tahoe is waiting for natural snow to open their resort and Kirkwood, which has 35-39 inches, has no opening date scheduled. Here comes another winter, I wonder if it will be unending, bottomless powder skiing like last year. I’ll let you know in the Spring.
It has been a couple of months since I ran the numbers for the market activity in South Lake Tahoe, so I included the past three month’s activity in my calculations.
354 Active Listings, of those listings 66 are either REO or Short Sale listings comprising 19% of the total. As usual, these calculations are made on sales activity of single family homes in the City – County areas of the South Tahoe Area Realtors MLS data.
186 Sold listings in the past three months with distressed properties making up 37% of those homes closed. 55 – 30% REO Listings 14 – 7% Short Sale Listings
Pending listings are made up of 75% of either REO or Short Sales.
The trend in which distressed properties are a minority of the inventory and a majority of those homes that are selling seems to have shifted down a bit. I will venture to say that “real sellers” have realized that their homes will sell if priced competitively and buyers would rather deal with a “real seller” rather than a bank and certainly rather than a short sale, which is anything but “short’. It is all about the well priced property. Let’s see what happens in the next month with the pending listings being comprised of 75% distressed properties. We’ll see how many of the short sale buyers get tired of the wait and snatch up a well priced home that not a distress sale. More Later.
