Congress is talking about bailing out homeowners facing foreclosure. Lenders are filing for bankruptcy. The National Assn. of Realtors is predicting a drop in U.S. home values this year for the first time since it began keeping records 40 years ago.
Doom, any number of forecasters and bloggers will eagerly tell you, is at hand for housing.
Yet the median sales price in Southern California went up again in March, crossing the half-a-million-dollar mark, a real estate data service reported Thursday.
The median price paid for a home in Southern California last month was $505,000, up 4.6% from March 2006, according to La Jolla-based DataQuick Information Systems. The median is the point at which half the prices are higher and half are lower.
Sales volume dropped substantially, however, continuing a trend that began 18 months ago when the red-hot market first began to cool.
March sales totaled 21,856 new and resold homes in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, Ventura, San Bernardino and Orange counties. That was down 32.4% from March 2006, the sharpest year-over-year drop since September. It was the slowest March in a decade.
The falling sales numbers reflect the fact that some owners, now that their equity is rising only modestly, are declining to move up.
Entry-level buyers, meanwhile, are being squeezed out of the market. DataQuick noted that financing with adjustable-rate mortgages had fallen sharply. These loans, many with low introductory teaser rates, have become harder to get as lenders toughen their standards or go out of business because of rising defaults and foreclosures.
There were also fewer sales to people who don't plan to live in the homes they buy, pointing to a decline in speculative house flipping.
Slow sales usually create downward pricing pressure. One reason they haven't, DataQuick President Marshall Prentice speculated, is because the 2003-to-2004 boom essentially "borrowed" from future purchases as people stampeded into the market. Current demand, in other words, was "pre-met."
The rise in the region's median price, though anemic by the double-digit standards of the boom, was more robust than last fall's increases.
If nothing else, the long-awaited downturn seems a little tardy -- at least in most of Southern California.
"The perception out there is that we're at the edge of a volcano and about to fall in, but the numbers don't indicate that's happening," DataQuick analyst John Karevoll said.
