SoCal real estate sales for May

Due to the rapidly diminishing significance of median home prices when attempting to determine what's going on in the Southern California housing market, continuing to update the historical charts hardly seems worth the time.

Plus, we don't live there anymore and, aside from a sort of morbid interest in knowing exactly when comparable homes will sell for the same amount that was fetched for ours a few years back, we couldn't care less (they still have a way to go).

Nevertheless, DataQuick again reported on SoCal real estate sales for the month of May and, as has been the custom here for quite some time, the data is presented in chart form below.


Does this match up with anything that anyone else sees in their neighborhood?

In our old stomping grounds of Ventura County, sellers are asking $100,000 less (~15 percent) than what comparables sold for in 2005 and they're just sitting there for months and months. Save for a surprising number of doe-eyed buyers who don't yet understand the difference between 2004 and 2007, only the motivated sellers are able to close a deal.

The chart below fails to capture what's happening, at least in the part of Southern California where we used to live.


DataQuick President Marshall ("almost all, if not all, of those gains are here to stay") Prentice doesn't seem to understand how the median price can remain so buoyant either:

Sales have been dropping now for the last 20 months. The first part of that was just coming off the frenzy of 2004 and 2005 and didn't put that much downward pressure on prices. The sales declines of the last half year, though, will have more of an effect on prices. It's remarkable they haven't come down more than they have.

Maybe, it's worthwhile keeping an eye on SoCal sales just to keep up with the changing outlook of Mr. Prentice.