Bits and pieces

Man what a week I had..... sometimes work just sucks!

Looks like SoCal had two bank failures today. Vinyard Bank and Temecula Valley Bank were both seized by the FDIC today. The estimated losses for the FDIC and nearly a BILLION between the two banks! It's not going to take many more failures of this size to decimate the reserves of the FDIC. Another two smaller banks failed. One in S Dakota and one in Georgia. Those will take another 120 million from them. 4 banks per weekend is getting to be a trend.

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The California employment mumbers are out. The state held steady at 11.6%. Unfortunately the IE jumped up the chart. We shot up to 13.7%. That's a new all time high (well for as far back as they have records).

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The June housing numbers are out and as expected there is an increase in the median. Many had expected a bump mainly due to the lack of low priced homes. The current leveling off of prices can be attributed more to the low inventory and the shift of sales to higher prices homes than to actual rising prices. Inventory usually rises this time of year. The spring/summer selling season is when most people put there homes on the market. This year the inventory is plummeting. Mainly due to the banks not getting the foreclosures through. The listings that regular Joe's would placing are just not happening because they know they can't sell them for what they need to get. This whole market is being held together with duct tape and bailing wire....

From DQ news

A total of 23,262 new and resale houses and condos closed escrow in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties last month. That was up 12.0 percent from 20,775 in May and up 29.0 percent from a revised 18,032 a year ago, according to San Diego-based MDA DataQuick.

June’s sales were the highest for that month since 2006, when 31,602 homes sold, but were 17.7 percent below the average June sales total since 1988, when DataQuick’s statistics begin. June sales peaked at 40,156 in 2005 and hit a low last year.

Foreclosures remained a major force in June, but their impact on the resale market eased for the third consecutive month.(because the banks are still not foreclosing)

Foreclosure resales – homes sold in June that had been foreclosed on in the prior 12 months – represented 45.3 percent of Southland resales last month, down from 49.7 percent in May and down from a peak 56.7 percent in February this year. Last month’s level was the lowest since foreclosure resales were 43.7 percent of resales in July 2008.

Resales of single-family houses priced $500,000 and above rose to 19.6 percent of all existing houses sold in June, up from 18.0 percent in May but still down from 29.2 a year ago. The last time the $500,000-plus market made up more than 19 percent of sales was last October, when it was 19.9 percent. Sales of $500,000-plus houses dipped to as little as 13.4 percent of sales in January this year.

The recent shift toward higher-cost markets contributing more to overall sales has put upward pressure on the region’s median sale price – the point where half of the homes sold for more and half for less.

Sales Volume			Median Price
All homes	Jun-08	Jun-09	%Chng	Jun-08	Jun-09	%Chng
Los Angeles	5,678	7,636	34.5%	$415,000	$320,000	-22.9%
Orange	2,538	2,958	16.5%	$470,000	$418,000	-11.1%
Riverside	3,757	4,694	24.9%	$275,000	$185,000	-32.7%
San Bernardino	2,215	3,438	55.2%	$240,000	$140,000	-41.7%
San Diego	3,077	3,692	20.0%	$370,000	$314,250	-15.1%
Ventura	767	844	10.0%	$420,000	$365,000	-13.1%
SoCal	18,032	23,262	29.0%	$360,000	$265,000	-26.4%