Housing Prices

Southern California's median home price slipped slightly in April, new figures show, but the volume of home sales tells a tale of two housing markets. In distressed areas such as the Inland Empire, homes are selling at a quickening pace, as buyers snap up foreclosed properties at cut-rate prices. But in more expensive areas such as Pacific Palisades and Corona del Mar, activity is still largely frozen.

Looking for a mortgage that exceeds $729,750? Not long ago, you would have been charged about 8% interest on a loan that large -- if you could find a lender willing to grant you one. Now, rates on these "jumbo" loans are much more affordable, having settled in the low 6% range, on average, for the last few weeks. But taking advantage of the lower rates remains tough.

Southern California property values have sunk below historic norms, various indexes show, but ongoing foreclosures and economic woes mean that the market bottom may not yet have been reached. The forecasting firm IHS Global Insight reported this week that Los Angeles County home prices are now 6% undervalued. Its calculations are based on home prices, interest rates, area incomes, population density, and historic premiums and discounts in given markets.

The median sale price of San Francisco Bay Area homes jumped in May and the overall number of homes sold in the region also rose, MDA DataQuick reported Thursday. According to the real estate information service: It was the second month in a row that the median increased, and the ninth that overall sales went up. The median price paid for homes in the Bay Area was $341,500, up 12.3% from $304,000 this April but down 33.9% from $517,000 in May of last year.

Mark Kiesel saw the real estate crash coming. Kiesel, a managing director at investment firm Pimco, wasn't alone in his 2006 warning of a looming housing market meltdown. But he was among the few who put his money -- in his case, a lot of it -- where his mouth was. Kiesel and his wife, Amy, sold their Newport Beach house in the summer of 2006 for 20% more than they had paid and moved into an apartment one-fifth the size. Now, news reports highlight signs of a real estate market bottom.

Southern Californians are shopping for homes again, optimistic that values have been beaten down about as low as they will go and triggering the highest sales levels in more than two years. A report released Tuesday shows a sharp rise in home purchases and an increase in median prices for a third straight month -- suggesting that the two-year decline in home values may finally be over. In Los Angeles County, the median home price hit $321,000 last month, after lingering at $300,000 for most of the year.

Southern California's median home price climbed for a fourth straight month in August, boosted by investors snatching up homes in distant suburbs and a relative decline in foreclosed homes for sale, a real estate research firm reported Tuesday. The median price inched up 2.6% from July to $275,000, according to MDA DataQuick. The market bottomed out in April at a $247,000 median, the San Diego company said. Behind the price improvement are investors like Robert S. Moore, a Rancho Palos Verdes management consultant, who is wrapping up his third home purchase in as many months.

New-home sales in the U.S. rose slightly in August from the previous month but still trail even the dismal pace of last year. Sales of new homes inched up 0.7% from July to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 429,000 units, the Census Bureau reported Friday. August's sales pace was 4.3% below the same month a year earlier. Last year ended with 485,000 new homes sold, the worst year for new-home sales since 1982 and the third-worst year since the federal government began tracking the data in 1963.

Prices of existing homes fell in 80% of the nation's metropolitan markets in the third quarter as distressed sales -- foreclosures and short sales -- accounted for nearly a third of all deals, a national group said Tuesday. The U.S. median sale price for an existing single-family home was $177,900, an 11.2% drop from the same period a year earlier, according to the National Assn. of Realtors in Washington. Distressed sales continued to weigh on prices despite a popular tax credit fueling the volume of deals.

This chart lists median prices in thousands of dollars for sales of pre-owned single-family homes and condos. Percentage changes are a year-over-year comparison for the reporting month. The price per square foot in the far right column includes only single-family home sales and does not include attached garages. Prices, provided by MDA DataQuick in La Jolla, are drawn from records and are determined on the basis of the documentary transfer tax, when paid in full. Questions: (909) 878-1051 or dqnews.