Realtors have been insisting for many months that this is a terrific time to buy a house: Prices are way down, selection is tremendous, and interest rates are relatively low.

Now buyers finally seem to agree. Stanislaus County home sales surged in March, and there's a giant backlog of pending deals working their way through escrow.

Nearly twice as many Stanislaus County homes sold last month as in September, according to statistics from the Central Valley Association of Realtors. And there are more pending sales than at any time in the past five years.

"Sales activities have exploded. We're seeing it all the way from Lodi to Los Banos," said Mike Zagaris, president of PMZ Real Estate, based in Modesto. "Home prices have dropped substantially. As a result, there's a flood of buying interest by families and investors."

Zagaris estimated that

70 percent of buyers are people who plan to live in the homes, with the rest going to investors snapping up rental property.

The deals are great, at least compared with the wildly inflated prices that buyers paid for property during 2005. Stanislaus County homes peaked at a median price of $392,000 in December 2005, and they've been plummeting since. March's median sales price was $232,163. That's a 41 percent drop.

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