Housing Prices

Less than a year before the 2008 collapse of Lehman Bros. plunged the global economy into a terrifying free fall, the Wall Street firm awarded nearly $700 million to 50 of its highest-paid employees, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times . The documents, which were among the millions of pages submitted in Lehman's bankruptcy, show the list of top earners each were pledged $8 million to $51 million in cash, stock and other compensation....

With housing prices on Santa Barbara County's south coast rising faster than any other region of the state, U.S. Rep. Lois Capps said the federal government needs to play a stronger role in keeping the area from becoming an exclusive enclave for the rich. While stressing that the problem is largely an issue for state and local governments, Capps said changes are needed in the federal government's approach to housing assistance programs.

Investors who believe that home prices have peaked may have a way to hedge against a decline in residential real estate. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange rolled out a new derivative Monday: futures contracts based on indexes that track house prices. The contracts are designed to let pension-fund managers bet on housing and builders hedge their losses. They may be a tough sell.

It's dead inside Favorites bar this afternoon, where the propped-open door spills a bit of light onto the ancient Elvis pinball machine and the grumpy man puffing on a cigarette in front of the video poker machine. There's no food here, unless you count the vending machine against the green wall. Owner Ray Medrano had to make a choice: Close the kitchen -- or ban smoking in the joint altogether. His customers love their smokes more than their food, so the kitchen lost.

Nationwide home prices fell 5.3% in July compared with a year earlier, a government agency said Tuesday, and have now receded to October 2005 levels. Prices were down 0.6% from June on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The national decline in home values coupled with reckless lending standards during the real estate boom are the driving forces behind rising mortgage defaults and foreclosures.

Housing prices in Los Angeles and Orange Counties have fallen further during the last year than in any other part of the nation, according to a survey released Tuesday by the National Assn. of Realtors. The survey, which covered 132 metropolitan housing markets nationwide, found that the median resale price of a single-family home in the Anaheim-Santa Ana area fell to $219,900 in the second quarter--down 7.6% from $238,000 a year ago.

Bubble or no bubble? Though economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco won't speculate on whether home prices have soared too high, they say that California and the Western region don't appear any more vulnerable to a price drop than the rest of the nation. That's the word in Tuesday's quarterly Fed report that tracks the economic health of the San Francisco Federal Reserve District, which includes California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii.

The housing market stayed in high gear throughout Southern California in January and shifted into overdrive in Orange County, where prices rose at a double-digit pace not seen since the late 1980s, a real estate tracking service said Wednesday. The median home price in Los Angeles County was up 6.1% from January 1997 to $173,000 last month, with sales up nearly 16%. The median is the point at which half the sales were for less, half for more.

Housing prices in Orange County will soar above record levels over the next six years because construction won't be able to keep pace with rising demand, the author of a planning report predicted Wednesday. Nearly 74,000 new homes, condominiums and apartments--nearly 11,000 annually--are needed in the county by the year 2005, according to the report by the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

The median price for an existing single-family home in Orange County last month hit $300,000 for the first time, helping drive overall prices to another record high, according to a report released Monday. The surge, which was expected at some point this fall, helped boost the median price for all single-family homes and condominiums sold last month--new and existing--by more than 13% from a year earlier, to $277,000. That gives the county its sixth record home price in the past nine months.