Housing Sales

Southern California home prices may have finally hit bottom, with median values rising last month for the first significant increase in two years, new data show. Along with the 6.4% rise in prices from May, fewer than half of the sales were foreclosures -- the first time that has happened in nine months.

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.

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.

After three real estate agents, two price reductions and nearly a year with no offers on their town house in Las Vegas, George and Katherine Grodin turned to a higher power for help. They bought a 4-inch plastic figurine of St. Joseph -- the patron saint of home and employment -- and placed it upside down in their patio with hopes of breaking their home-selling slump. "I just felt so helpless," said Katherine Grodin, 47. "I needed to do something."

The Southern California real estate crash has finally reached the high-end areas of the Westside. Home prices in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Malibu -- which continued to soar well into 2008 -- finally tanked at the end of the year, losing between 26% and 30% of their value in just a few months, the latest data show.

Banks could get incentive payments for allowing borrowers to sell their homes at a loss rather than go through foreclosure under new guidelines issued Thursday for the Obama administration's $75-billion housing plan. The program, known as Making Home Affordable, focuses on paying lenders to modify distressed borrowers' loans so that payments are cheaper. But under this expansion of the program, lenders can also receive incentive payments if the homeowner's loan is not modified.

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.

Sales of new U.S. homes in May were down sharply from levels of a year earlier and also dropped below April's total, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of new-home sales was down 0.6% from April and fell 32.8% from May 2008, amid a glut in housing. New-home sales in the West, however, were up 1.3% over April's adjusted annual rate. From April to May, new-home sales increased in all regions of the U.S. except the South, where they fell 8.

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.

The roller-coaster ride of the real estate market over the last 15 years has soared higher and plunged deeper for minorities nationwide than it has for whites, according to a study of homeownership released Tuesday. The declines in homeownership among African Americans and U.S.-born Latinos in recent years were especially sharp, according to the study by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center in Washington.