Home Sales Show Sharp Upswing

The long-awaited housing market upturn may finally have reached Ventura County. Sales at one Camarillo brokerage are running 25% ahead of last year. In Ventura and elsewhere, traffic at open houses is picking up noticeably.

Prices are still soft and inventories high, but, brokers say, the market appears to be turning.

Clarence Bales, sales manager of Century 21 Central Coast Realty in Camarillo, said multiple offers were received on several houses sold by his office recently.

“They were unusual situations, to be sure,” he conceded. “In one case, I had six offers on the same house. It was a beat-up, foreclosed cottage in the Pierpont area near the beach in Ventura.

“It was listed by the lender at just under $200,000. It sold at a little above $200,000.”

Barbara Hill of Buchalter-Hill & Co. in Ventura said low interest rates and bargain-basement prices are bringing more and more potential buyers into the marketplace in several of the county’s cities.

First-time buyers, especially, are being attracted to mid-town Ventura, she said. “I recently sold a two-bedroom, one-bath house there for only $159,000. It even had an ocean view.”

Bales believes that home sales in Camarillo will remain 25% above last year’s level for the rest of 1993. But prices will continue soft, he cautioned. “We’ve got a year’s inventory of unsold homes. Prices can’t take off until a lot of that is depleted.”

Real estate agents and prospective sellers alike agree that a turnaround is long overdue.

The California Assn. of Realtors reports that as recently as January, home sales in Ventura County were off 7% from the previous month and down 30% from a year earlier. January’s median sales price of $203,770 was 11% below the same month in 1992.