Good News for Jamul...

Jamul is in a hot zone.  Not for temperatures, but for real estate prices:

A standout was Jamul, where the median price for a single-family resale home shot up 15.2 percent, rising from $375,000 last year to $432,000 this year, based on about the same number of sales during both time periods.

Sounds good to me!

Jamul and the Real Estate Crunch...

For months now, the news has been full of doom and gloom on the real estate front, and indeed in some areas the price declines have been dramatic. My informal reading of the price impacts leads to an undoubtedly simplistic conclusion: the areas with the worst impact appear to be the same areas that attracted the most questionable loan practices. If I'm right on that score, then areas like Eastlake, Temecula, and the other fast-growing “bedroom communities” would be hardest hit. On the other hand, backcountry areas like Jamul should be relatively immune; the folks out here trend strongly to the conservative and old-fashioned (at least when it comes to financial matters).

So I was very interested to see this study of the asking price (normalized to the price per square foot) of houses in various San Diego County neighborhoods over the past year. The east county year-over-year numbers are in the screen grab at right. Jamul fared very well, showing just a 3% decline in the past year – knowing the volume out here is low, I'd guess that's well within the statistical margin of error from a wash. In general, my theory seems to be a reasonably good fit for the data, with some notable exceptions (some of which the study authors caution on due to lack of data).

We've got no plans to sell our place, but it's still comforting somehow to see that the apparent market value of our property hasn't disappeared...