Tag Archives: southern california median home prices

Real Estate

More Signs of Housing Recovery

california-map-increase-dec

While there may be another storm of foreclosures on the horizon, at least for now there are some signs of recovery for our housing market. California is the bell weather of the economy for the nation. Any sign that the housing market in California is recovering is a sign that the economy is recovering.

It’s the first back-to-back increase in the state’s housing prices in two years, following an increase in the median price of homes in March from February. The median price of $256,700 for single-family homes in April is up from a median price of $253,040 in March, according to estimates by the California Association of Realtors. (In Nevada County for the month of May the median has ranged from $295,000 to $280,000)

Overall the housing values in California increased 1.4% statewide.

The April prices were still off 36.5% from the same month a year ago, but the sales of 540,360 homes on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis represented a 49.2% rise over the same time, the Realtors group reported Thursday.

April also marked the eighth consecutive month of single-family-home sales above 500,000 units. The inventory of unsold homes continued to shrink, to 4.6 months’ supply from 9.8 months a year ago. “It appears that the median price is now at or near the bottom,” said Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist for the Realtors’ association, who has previously made more subdued comments.
“At best, some markets have at least temporarily leveled off in price,” said Andrew LePage, analyst at MDA Dataquick Information Services, a market-research firm in La Jolla, Calif. “I don’t see any markets that have clearly bottomed out.”

In general, the best-performing markets across the state in terms of sales volume were in lower-priced, inland areas that had seen some of the steepest declines in prices. Sales in the high-desert region outside Los Angeles, for example, more than doubled in April from the same month a year ago, after price declines of 49.5% over the same time. Median prices, even month to month, continued to fall there amid a glut of foreclosures.

But in several more densely populated areas, the median price was stronger. Los Angeles County’s median rose 1.9% in April from March, after falling 31% over the past year. In Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County, the median price rose 3.6% after a year-over-year fall of 38.2%, the Realtor’s group said. Boosting sales are some of the best affordability rates in almost a decade, say economists.
Realtors’ officials said sales remain weaker for more-expensive homes. Inventories of unsold homes in the under-$500,000 segment, for example, shrank to nearly three months’ supply in April from about 10 months a year ago. But the inventory of homes priced at more than $1 million rose to about 17 months from 10 months a year earlier.

The problem for the higher end of the market is that lending has tightened greatly for the jumbo mortgages that are often needed to buy a home costing more than $500,000, say economists. Some lenders now require down payments of as much as 30% to 40%. As a result, sales have remained anemic in pricey markets like San Francisco

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Nevada County Home & Land Statistics, Real Estate

Nevada County’s Median Home Prices, Better Then Southern California’s

Scotts Flat Lake, picture taken from my deck. May 24,2009
Scotts Flat Lake, picture taken from my deck. May 24,2009

 Compared to the six-county region of Southern California, we’re not doing too bad here in Nevada County. Our median price in April was $279,500, compared to Southern California’s $247,000. In addition, their market dropped from $250,000 in March and 35.8 percent from $385,000 a year ago.  

Southern California’s median last month was the lowest since 2002, and was 51.1 percent below the peak of $505,000, which was hit in spring and summer of 2007.

 “The dip in median prices ran counter to recent reported buying frenzies that have had economists, analysts and Realtors saying the market was recovering. What could be skewing the median down is the lack of high-end coastal sales, which means higher sale prices are missing from the data, DataQuick officials said.”

“Last month’s Southland sales were the highest for that month since April 2006, when 27,114 homes sold, but were 18.2 percent below the average April sales total since 1988, when DataQuick’s statistics begin. Foreclosure resales made up a lot of those sales. In April, they accounted for 53.6 percent of all Southland resale’s last month. It was the seventh consecutive month in which post-foreclosure properties made up more than half of all resales.”

“John Walsh, MDA DataQuick president offered a word of caution for the market. Foreclosures could keep coming. The effect of mounting job losses could trigger more defaults, and a new wave of foreclosures on ‘option ARM’ loans and ’stated income’ loans used in mid- to high-end markets could also come, Walsh said.”

“‘If job cuts remain deep and foreclosures spike, then the past few months might later be viewed as nothing more than a brief calm before the next foreclosure storm,’ Walsh said.”

However, I have noticed a large increase in sales in Nevada County in May and I will have a full report on May’s sales in the first week of June. Our median price in Nevada County has risen to $299,000 in May.