Friday, April 16, 2010

California Real Estate Market Past the Bottom?


DQNews -- "An estimated 37,295 new and resale houses and condos were sold statewide last month. That was up 32.7 percent from 28,111 in February, and up 3.0 percent from 36,215 in March 2009. The median price paid for a home last month was $255,000, up 2.4 percent from $249,000 in February, and up 14.3 percent from $223,000 in March a year ago. The year-over-year increase was the fifth in a row, following 27 months of year-over-year declines. The median peaked at $484,000 in early 2007 and hit a post-boom low of $221,000 last April."

MP: The five monthly increases in year-over-year median home prices in California starting last November, along with continued increases in year-over-year home sales, would suggest that a bottom could have been reached last year for the California real estate market.

7 Comments:

At 4/16/2010 10:04 AM, Anonymous morganovich said...

another way to look at it is this:

despite a decline in price of 47% from peak levels, sales of homes remained 16% below their average since 1988...

An estimated 37,295 new and resale houses and condos were sold statewide last month. That was up 32.7 percent from 28,111 in February, and up 3.0 percent from 36,215 in March 2009. California sales for the month of March have varied from a low of 24,565 in 2008 to a peak of 68,848 in 2005, while the average is 44,486. MDA DataQuick's statistics go back to 1988.

The median price paid for a home last month was $255,000, up 2.4 percent from $249,000 in February, and up 14.3 percent from $223,000 in March a year ago. The year-over-year increase was the fifth in a row, following 27 months of year-over-year declines. The median peaked at $484,000 in early 2007 and hit a post-boom low of $221,000 last April.

 
At 4/16/2010 12:11 PM, Anonymous geoih said...

Fun with aggregates (that still mean nothing).

 
At 4/16/2010 12:29 PM, Blogger Benjamin Cole said...

Morganovich-Dude, the recovery has started already. I live in LA. People are starting to buy houses again. Interest rates are low, and will stay low for a long time. Already, the buy-it-fix-it flip crowd is making money again.

I have lived several of the housing boom-buts cycles. This was deep, but fast. It is cheap to buy a house in LA now. How long is that going to last? Maybe six more months. It never stays cheap to buy a hosue on the coasts.

 
At 4/16/2010 1:38 PM, Anonymous morganovich said...

benny-

i live in SF. things are still tough, prices are way down, stuff sits on the market and the increase in mortgage rates as the QE ends will provide a headwind for april.

prices are still way, way down. the easy comp from the worst month of the crisis makes things look good on a % basis, but in absolute dollars and numbers, things are still really bad.

prices are still 47% off the peak from 2007. volumes are light despite this enormous price change.

that shows weakness, not strength.

have things stopped getting worse? looks that way for the moment, but this is an incredibly tepid recovery.

(ps - people buy houses every spring. they even did it last year)

 
At 4/16/2010 4:01 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Foreclosure activity in the first quarter of 2010 followed a very similar pattern to what we saw in the first quarter of 2009: a shallow trough in January and February followed by a substantial spike in March,” said James J. Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “One difference, however, is that the increases were more tilted toward the final stage of foreclosure, with REOs increasing 9 percent on a quarterly basis in the first quarter of 2010 compared to a 13 percent quarterly decrease in REOs in the first quarter of 2009.

This subtle shift in the numbers pushed REOs to the highest quarterly total we’ve ever seen in our report and may be further evidence that lenders are starting to make a dent in the backlog of distressed inventory that has built up over the last year as foreclosure prevention programs and processing delays slowed down the normal foreclosure timeline

California alone accounted for 23 percent of the nation’s total foreclosure activity in the first quarter, with 216,263 properties receiving a foreclosure notice — the nation’s highest foreclosure activity total.

 
At 4/16/2010 4:31 PM, Blogger juandos said...

Hmmm, looking at the short article makes me wonder just who is buying homes if the following AP story is at all credible...

California jobless rate swells to 12.6 percent

 
At 4/18/2010 8:33 PM, Blogger bobble said...

let's revisit this a few months after the federal homebuyers tax credit ends.

 

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