Show: On The Town Station: KNCO File: 9:25.mp3 Air date: 2026-09-25 Source: OpenAI whisper-1 · shrunk from 29.6 MB to 5.9 MB --- transcript --- This is Bill Seegers with Nevada County Real Estate, and I want to hit you with some numbers this morning. These numbers are as of September 22nd, so they're pretty current and accurate. Alright, the first numbers we're going to start with are the homes for sale in Nevada County. Currently we have 355 homes for sale, which is down about 19.5% from last year, where we had 441. So significantly lower number of homes, almost 100 homes lower that are listed currently in Nevada County. The number of homes that have gone into contract versus the same month to date a year ago is 58 versus 74 last year, and so that's down 21.6%. So that's a little concerning. The number of homes going into contract is down 21.6% compared to a year ago, September. And the homes sold is 58, and that's down 34.8% over last year, same month. September to September is what we're comparing. And in terms of pricing, the average sold price is 669,000, which is up 5.9% compared to last year at the same time. Average active price, that's the average price for sale, is 790,000, and that is down by 0.1%. It's 790,000 versus 791 of last year. Average price per square foot is $322 per square foot, which is up almost 5%. It's up 4.9% versus last year, and so the average this year is 322 versus 307 last year. So the prices are up, and the median sold price is actually 613,000. So the median is 613, the average is 669. So they're not too far off. To have fewer going into contract, for sure, that says a lot about where the market's at. It's not an easy market. People ask me all the time, especially my sellers, like, hey, how's the price? Is this going to sell? How long is it going to take? And the answer is, I don't know, basically. I mean, if I had a crystal ball, I wouldn't be working, right? I'm not sure how many people would, but I don't predict the future. What I do tell my sellers is, look, we want to see activities. And what is an activity? An activity is a buyer's agent bringing their buyer over to see the house, but they're going to see a bunch of homes, and you want to be on that list of homes to see in your price range. That is absolutely how I track it, right? Everyone has a different method, I'm sure, but what I want to see for my sellers is, if we're priced right, we should be getting between two and five showings a week. If we're not priced right, we'll be getting, you know, if we're slightly not priced right, we'll be getting one or two. And if we're just not in the ballpark for what it is, we'll get zero, right? And so what do you do, right? Well, you really only have two options. You correct the negatives, which means you spend a bunch of money to correct what's wrong with it. Whatever the perception in the marketplace is, you know, challenging for it. I mean, if you're by a freeway, there's not a whole lot of correcting on that, right? A freeway is going to be there, can't move the house. I mean, you can, but it's just not worth it. And so, you know, what do I tell those people? You know, it's activities, that's what it is, and that comes from a sales background. You know, my background is in corporate sales for a number of years, and what we want to see is, are there people who are ready, willing, and able buyers looking at your home, physically going out and seeing your home? It doesn't matter if they're looking at it online, or if they come to an open house, or any of those things. You want buyers coming from agents showing your house. So if you don't have buyers looking at your house, what do you do? Well, like I said before, you can fix it up. You know, you can spend a lot of money to make corrections, and then, you know, it's a gamble. Are you making the right fixes to make it more desirable for buyers to go see it? You know, typically, the answer is you lower the price, right? It's either time or money. Those are the decision points in the listing of, in the sale of a house, right? When you list your house, if you can't sell it quickly, then you need to lower the price, and that's about all there is. And then what I tell my sellers is this. I say, hey, seller, pick a price at which you won't go below. In other words, if you have to sell the house, you probably don't have much of a choice. You're going to have to go down to a price point at which it's going to sell, and you're going to look at your holding costs, right? What's it cost you as a seller to, you know, hold that house, to continue to own that house every single month? And this comes from dealing with investors, right? So, the cost to own a house every month is your, if you have a mortgage, it's your principal and interest on the mortgage, and then it's also what you pay in taxes every year. And importantly, lately, at least the last seven years up here, is what you're paying for homeowner's insurance, right? So, what are you paying every month? I'll give you an example. I sold my sister's house a few months back, and that was actually out of town. It was a house in Paso Robles, and she definitely wanted to sell it quickly. And I said to her, I said, hey, calculate your holding costs. What's it cost you to hold that every month? And it was a fairly, you know, a home sold for, I think, close to 800,000. So, her holding costs every month to hold onto that house were in the $5,000 to $6,000 a month range, right? So, pretty extensive. And, you know, you have to balance that against the price you're getting for the house, right? So, what are you going to net out of the sale of that house? And now you have to take your holding costs, and you have to reduce that by five or six, in her case, by five or 6,000 every month. So, if you're going to get 100,000 out of the sale of your house, let's just make it easy math, and your holding costs are $5,000 every month, and you end up holding it for six months, that means you're not getting 100,000, you're getting 70,000 because you just spent $30,000 in time on the market paying for that house. So, you need to take a look at all the costs that you have on that house and make a determination about how you get it sold. And, you know, a lot of sellers, in my experience, want me to, you know, give them a price, right? Most agents don't do that, right? I don't own the house. I can't determine what I want to get out of your house sale. You, the seller has, you have to determine that. And that's why I tell my sellers, hey, pick a price at which you won't go below. You know, we can start at any price point you want, but based on comparable sales information, we should start somewhere in that range. I don't mind if we start at the high end of the range. There's really only a few ways to go about it, right? You can start high, you can start sort of in the middle of the price range, or you can start low. And there's a strategy for every single way that you can do that, right? If you're going to start high, that means if you don't get any looks, you don't get any sales in a certain amount of time, well, then you lower the price, right? And then you're going to want to keep doing that consistently, which shows the market, right? The buyer pool, in other words, the available number of buyers in that price point with interest in buying your home, shows that buyer pool that you're motivated, that you want to sell this house, that you have other things to do beyond owning that particular property, right? And so those buyers, yeah, they'll look and they'll maybe sit on the side a little bit, but you know, you're looking for the one that really wants your house. And that's just how it works. If you start in the middle, then, you know, it's, you never know. Your goal is to sell the house as quickly as possible, ideally. And so hopefully that happens. And you have better odds if you're starting in the middle of the pack. And then if you start at the bottom of the pack, well, then you want to do something like say, hey, we're going to review all offers in a couple of weeks. That way, you give yourself time to develop interest in the house and to have hopefully multiple offers, which then drives the price up. So there's, you can do it anyway. My favorite is really to try and be in the middle somewhere because, you know, you have the better odds of getting it sold sooner. And then in my experience, if you're within $30,000 of asking, a buyer will typically write within that amount and a seller won't be upset about it, right? People get upset when they get a low ball offer, right? But $30,000 seems to be in the years that I've been doing this about a range at which people will accept an offer or at least negotiate with an offer without deciding just to ignore it. Because, you know, seller doesn't have to respond to an offer. They, you know, if it's a super low offer, they typically, you know, feel a little bit insulted, right? It's like, hey, we, you know, and what you have to understand is the selling agent has sat down with that seller and discussed price, right? They've done comparable sales analysis. If you've been doing real estate for any length of time, the first thing you really learn to do is how to comp out a house. In other words, how to look at comparable sales to understand what a particular house is worth. And I'm going to tell you in Nevada County, it's a bit more difficult than it is in urban or suburban areas because you can go down to Roseville and you can get into a development and every third house looks the same, right? So that's easy for me, right? It's like, oh, you're this model of home, similar models, almost the same house actually have sold for X price. And so you're going to be within 10 or 15 or $20,000 of the actual sales price, right? Now people could have modified the home and we won't go into that, but, you know, what is that top value of any home is what's called a turnkey home, right? Turnkey is defined by a home that a buyer could move into and not have to do anything to it at all. No modifications, no updates, no repairs for about 20 years. Discover the stories that shaped Nevada County on History Unfolded, hosted by Tom Fitzsimmons and myself, Mike Stewart, the special guests, the second and fourth Mondays at 9am, brought to you by Mowell Paint and Glass, serving Nevada County since 1949, and Smarter Broadband, local, reliable, high-speed internet. Don't miss the voices, the stories, and the history that make our community unique, right here on KNCO News Talk 830. And that turnkey really is the same definition of almost the same definition of a brand new home. And they typically in this market are doing pretty well as long as they're priced reasonably well within the market. And that's a hard thing to do, right? If you have a house and you've maintained the heck out of it, and it is beautiful and desirable for a good chunk of time in that condition. And so there's all kinds of factors that go into pricing and sales. And so I just wanted to talk to you today about some of those, and I'll have some more in a minute. All right, I want to talk a little bit about inspections for sellers. Typically in the Nevada County area, what sellers pay for for inspections are well inspections and septic inspections. And then the buyers pay for all the other inspections. And those really start off for the buyer side with a home inspection and a pest inspection. And then once those inspections are done, if we need further inspections, the buyer's on the hook to inspect it. What I want to talk about though, is the sellers paying for a home inspection and a pest inspection. So typically the cost, let's, well, first of all, let's cover the well inspections about $500 to get a well inspected. And then a septic inspection is about a thousand dollars. And so that's $1,500 for those two inspections. And, but typically the buyers pay for home inspection and pest inspection. And I'm going to discuss why a seller should do that, or at least why I think a seller should do that. And now it's negotiable. It doesn't matter. Can we sell a house without you doing those inspections? Absolutely. The reason, the primary reason I want, I would like my sellers to do those inspections. And I've had clients say, Hey, I don't want to do them. And that's fine. It's, it is what it is. But, um, the reason I like it is it makes the transaction smoother. And if you have a bunch of third party reports on the condition of the house, and this is the primary reason I want most of my sellers to do them is it makes the transaction smoother. And typically there are buyers out there. Let's talk about the psychology of the purchase for the buyer. Let's back up for a second. When a buyer writes a check on a house for, let's talk about the average price in the County of 650,000, let's say they expect that house is in good shape, right? They don't expect that the roof needs to be replaced or that the house needs a paint job or the deck needs to be replaced because those three items are probably in the 70 to a hundred thousand dollar range. And they're writing a check for 650,000 expecting that they're not really going to have to put out a whole lot more money unless the house is priced appropriately. You better be getting a lot of house. If you have to put, you know, it needs to be a good price point. If you, if it needs a lot of repairs like that, those are, you know, buyers expect the roof to be good, the deck to be good, that generally the house is in pretty good shape. It may be dated and that's fine. It may, you know, but generally they, the expectation from a buyer standpoint is that the house is in good shape. And then what happens is the buyer gets the home inspection and the pest inspection and the home inspections read like horror stories, right? They just, everything's wrong with this house. And typically that's how they read, right? It doesn't, you know, it could, the house could be in actually pretty good shape, but it still reads sort of like, Oh, this is wrong. And that's wrong. And typically they're very small items and easily repaired, but they're wrong or there are issues because the person living in it isn't aware. And that's all it is, right? Most people are living in their house and they repair things when they fail. And that's super common, right? That's how I do it. That's how most people live in their house. They're not home inspectors or pest inspectors looking at their house every other month and inspecting it that way. It's just not how it is. It's not realistic. And so the idea here is that if the seller does the inspections, buyers typically accept issues on the house, especially if they're small without much of an issue because they were disclosed up front before they wrote the offer, right? It's like, Oh, here's the condition of the house done by third party individuals, right? You had a home inspector, pest inspector, well and a septic if you need it, maybe even some other inspections, right? Maybe you had the HVAC checked out or a plumber come by after, you know, for, to fix a few things, that kind of thing. And here's the main piece of this example is that if a buyer goes and gets those inspections, they are usually going to demand that almost all that stuff gets fixed because they've already written a $650,000 check to buy that house. And they weren't aware that all these things were a problem and now they want them fixed. And most people are going to feel that way. And that's been my experience. But the clients who did the inspections and presented them up front, those buyers are already aware that all those issues exist. And they still wrote that $650,000 check, maybe a little lower, maybe they wrote it for $645,000, you know, because it needed $10,000 worth of work. And they're like, yeah, we can absorb some of that. But guess what you don't have on the seller side? You don't have a buyer who's a little upset now that the property isn't as nice as they thought it was. And they want somebody to fix it. And rightfully so. And so that's where the issue comes in, right? So if sellers do a couple, if they get the inspections up front, they have an opportunity to show the buyer exactly what condition the home is in. So there's not a real big surprise after getting those inspections. I mean, it can be a surprise because pest reports tend to come in at between $2,000 and $8,000 for most homes. I've seen them in the $200,000 range for a home to add to, you know, 1,800 square feet of decking, right? I mean, decks are ridiculously expensive. Roofs, ridiculously expensive. You know what? It is what it is. They all need to be repaired or replaced at some point in their life cycle. So for sellers, it can make the transaction, you know, as a realtor, my job is to make the transaction as smooth as possible, right? Because it's the biggest purchase a buyer will make in their lives is a house. You know, not too many people are writing a $600,000 check. And you may not write a check. You may take out a loan, but you're going to take out a loan. You're going to be paying off that house for 30 years. And so people who are paying off that house for 30 years, like myself, I have a 30-year loan. They want it to be in good shape. They don't want to have to put a ton of money into it if they don't have to. Now, if they buy it at the right price, that's fine. But everything sells at the right price. And for sellers, it really has made a difference for my sellers who have done the inspections upfront. And that goes in part to how many negotiate, you know, people don't often realize this, but there are three negotiations in a purchase contract for a home. There's the upfront price, right? You negotiate with buyer and seller negotiates with each other, and then they decide on a price point that they're both willing to accept. And then it goes into contract. And then there's a 17-day, you know, the standard timeframe is a 17-day inspection period in which the buyer gets to investigate everything. So if they don't have a home in a pest inspection that they've reviewed already, they're ordering those up. Maybe they're going to get the chimney inspected. If you live up here and you heat your home with firewood like I do, it's pretty important that the chimney is functioning. Or if you have a fireplace or an insert or a freestanding stove, those things all need to be looked at to make sure they're safe and healthy to use, right? So typically, yeah, you get the roof looked at, you get the HVAC looked at, anything that could be a big ticket item you want looked at. And so if that's already done, then guess what? You probably don't have that step. So the first step is just getting in the contract, agreeing on the purchase price. Second step is when the buyer investigations are over, they've gotten all their inspections, and now they have a price point, right? So the pest report typically gives you some pricing to correct all the items in the pest report. And those are wood damaging things, termites, fungus, that kind of thing. Home inspection doesn't have pricing. So the agent then has to go get a contractor or a handy person or whoever is appropriate trades person to correct the item and get bids on it. And so now let's just say we have a $15,000 issue to correct some of the things, and then the house is in good shape. Well, then the question is who pays for that? Does the buyer pay for that? Or does the seller pay for that? Well, that's negotiable. That's the second negotiating item. And a lot of times it doesn't work out. In fact, 10 to 20% of the time on average, and it may be higher now, it doesn't work out. And it doesn't work out because sometimes the buyer wants everything fixed because it was in the reports and it looks like a horror show. And so they want it corrected. And now if that doesn't come into agreement, the buyer can cancel and get their deposit back within 17 days, right? And then the third negotiating item, which is something I haven't seen in a long time, but it happens, is the appraisal. If the home doesn't appraise, who makes up the difference? So first of all, the lender is now only, if there's a loan on it, the lender's only going to allow, if you're getting a 80-20 loan, right? You're putting 20% down and financing 80% of it, and it doesn't appraise, that 80-20 now goes off what it appraised for. So if you were doing a $650,000 house, it appraised for $600,000. They are now only going to finance 80% of the $600,000, not 80% of the $650,000. So where's that extra money going to come from? Either the price is going to get reduced or the buyer has to come up with more money to buy that house. Hey, this is Bill Seegers with Seegers Home Services Group, and this is the Nevada County Real Estate Show. You can check me out on my website, and it's seegershomeservicesgroup.com, or you can always give me a call on my cell phone. It's 530-615-7900. If you have any questions, I can certainly help you out and make it a great week. For over 20 years, when Nevada County pipes have gurgled, dripped, rattled, or flat-out rebelled, Craig Johnson Plumbing has come to the rescue. They're the honest, reliable pros who've seen every plumbing surprise. Yes, even that one, and still show up with a smile. From homes to businesses, big jobs to, please fix this before company arrives, they do it all. So when your plumbing misbehaves, call Craig Johnson Plumbing at 274-7275, or visit them online at craigjohnsonplumbing.com. This from the KNCO-BNC ACE Home and Garden Center Weather Center. ACE is the place. Here is your forecast on KNCO News Talk 830. Sunny with a high in the mid to upper 70s today, a very light southwesterly wind. It'll be clear tonight and cooler are low in the low to mid 50s. Sunny and dry on Saturday with a high in the mid to upper 70s. Clouding up Saturday night till 054, then dry weather and cooler Sunday with a high in the upper 60s. For weather anytime, click on the weather center at knco.com. I'm meteorologist Dan Holiday on KNCO News Talk 830. --- end of transcript ---