Hello Kris,

I AM a member of the exclusive Ojai Valley Multiple Listing Service. You will begin to notice the number of people who try to bluff their way around this designation.

The Ojai Valley is as diverse an area to identify with regard to price as you will ever find. There remains no normal “lot and block” track upon track normally found in a suburban California location. One may find a tear-down shack or mobile home located in Shangri-La. One may find a one-of-a-kind marvelous mansion built by a famous turn-of-the-century architect in the middle of the most undesirable part of the territory possible.

Average price per square foot must first be qualified by what type of property you seek. The more specific you can get, the more I can help you. It is also helpful if I know whether you are a buyer or seller. As strange as that may seem, it matters, as Ojai Valley property has diverse advertising strategy.

Anyone who tries to lead you to believe that they can give you an average price per square foot for Ojai property is to be considered suspect, at best. If these computations not longer work in the “burbs”, they certainly don’t work in the “specialized markets” now.

Thu May 22 2008, 21:11

Kris,

Barry and I are only pulling the numbers from Ventura County. Ojai has a separate MLS. If I lived in Ojai I would want my house on both systems if I was selling. Barry or myself cannot be positive how many Ojai sales are missing from our reports.

First going back 6 months really does not help. The market has shifted too much to rely on 6 month old pricing. Second there are several 4000+ square foot homes that are over a million dollars and incuding those homes will skew the price per sq ft. If you leave them in the average is $397 and if you take them out it is $367 for the last 90 days.

When you take those 4000 footers out of the line up the average house is 1,450 sq ft. leave them in and it makes the average home look to be over 1,700 sq ft.

You're looking at approx. $446 on the larger homes. There were two smaller homes that closed over 1 million. 902 signal and 134 layton. Location?

I am really surpirsed at poor media used for marketing on most of the upper end listings in your area. A home in an area that is more tucked away should have high quality photos and at minimum a virtual tour (slideshow). I have better media on small starter condos I've listed.

It sure would be nice if a member of the Ojai MLS was on Voices.

-Ted

Thu May 15 2008, 23:29

Over the past 6 months, the AVERAGE numbers look like this in Ojai, from the VC-MLS:
Listing Pr/SqFt $432,000 - Selling Pr/SqFt $410,000
Residential (55 total SOLDs) $822,069 Average LP, 1871 sf, $778,207 Average SP

Thank you for your interest!

Thu May 15 2008, 20:44