California report

The CAR has published it's Feb report. Lot's of cheerleading about sales being up over last year. although they dropped a fraction from January. CAR's data shows Riverside/San Berdu's median price falling 1% from January (which conflicts with DataQuicks report showing the decline closer to 4%). The yearly decline was 39.8%. The CAR report shows the sales numbers fell 9.2% from January to Feb in the IE. That's a little surprising as we have been hearing about how well stuff is selling. A 10% monthly decline doesn't seem like a good indicator. Although I do see a lot of homes going pending, what I'm not seeing is homes actually closing in the areas I watch. In the last 4 months I bet 30% of the nice homes in the areas I track have dropped of the MLS. But very few have shown up as sold. Where have they all gone??? The pending file must be bursting at the seams.


California home prices dropped 41 percent last month from a year earlier, more than double the U.S. decline, as surging foreclosures drove down values, the state Association of Realtors said today.

The median price for an existing, single-family detached home in California sank to $247,590 in February from $418,260 a year earlier, the Los Angeles-based group said in a statement. The U.S. median price fell 16 percent during the same period, the second-biggest drop on record, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Home prices have been falling since their 2006 peak, pushed down by rising foreclosures blamed for the U.S. credit crisis. California, the most populous state, has one of the highest rates of foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of real estate data. Lenders usually sell foreclosed properties at a discount, dragging down the median price, so it doesn’t necessarily reflect the value of most homes, the California Association of Realtors report said.

“The median, for all its imperfections, tells a really interesting tale right now,” Andrew LePage, an analyst at research firm MDA DataQuick, said in an interview. “It tells you what is and what is not selling. What’s selling right now is foreclosures.”

Foreclosures accounted for 58 percent of existing California home sales in February, compared with 33 percent a year earlier, according to San Diego-based MDA DataQuick. Inland California, where prices are lower than coastal areas, accounted for half the state’s mortgage defaults in the last three months of 2008, MDA DataQuick said.