El Dorado Hills is a census-desginated place in the Sacramento region that is home to some exclusive and high-priced real estate communities. The El Dorado Hills real estate has, unsurprisingly, suffered in recent years as the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble dampened the appetite and mood for real estate transactions in the area as buyers hesitated or were unable to secure financing and sellers saw the values of their homes plummet.

From November of 2009 through January of this year, there were 149 homes, two condos and 10 land properties up for sale in El Dorado Hills, according to RE/Max, a local realtor agency. Of those properties, 48 that sold were bank-owned properties and 39 were short sales. The range of prices of properties sold stretched from as little as $150,000 for a condo to $1.2 million for a more than 5,000-square-foot home in Serrano, a short sale, as it was listed at more than $1.5 million.

In the middle of February of this year, there were 294 El Dorado Hills homes for sale listed, a decline of more than 20% from September 2009. The average asking price was around $665,500, down more than 8% from six months ago, while the median price was $522,500, down around 4.9% from six months ago. Of those 294 homes for sale, 21 are bank-owned, 45 are active short sales and  86 are short sales with accepted offers awaiting bank approval.

From the three-month period of November 2009 through January 2010, there were 149 homes sold in the community, an improvement of almost 10% from the previous three-month period. The average sale price during the November-January period was just over $482,300, down only 0.02% from the previous period. Likewise, the median price was $432,000, down only 0.35% from the previous period. Homes spent longer on the market during the most recent period, at 113 days versus just 100 days from August through October. The market, however, ended up with just a 5.9 months’ worth of inventory, an improvement of the last period’s 8.1 months, as some of the excess inventory was cleared out of the market.