A new leader in the race to the bottom

From out of nowhere, Ventura County accelerated past both Riverside and San Bernardino counties last month in the race to the bottom for Southern California home prices.
DataQuick reported the latest real estate sales data for Southern California earlier today and the news wasn't good. It's a slow time of the year but, nonetheless, things just aren't going well when one-third of all homes sold are (or have been) foreclosures.

Almost half of all homes sold in Riverside County were foreclosures.

The charts above and below have been published here for almost three years now and it's only natural to start feeling a little sorry for the homes and homeowners that those colorful curves represent.

Not a lot, just a little.

In absolute terms, our former SoCal stomping ground of Ventura County has now ducked down below Los Angeles County for the first time in many years as shown in the chart below. It looks like it has its sights set on San Diego County now.
From a high of $630,000 in December of 2005, the new median price of $445,000 in Ventura County represents a 29.3 percent decline.

Maybe it's time to strike the "almost all" portion of the oft-repeated quote from Marshall Prentice in the paragraph below, words that were uttered exactly one month after that $630,000 price was posted for Ventura County back in 2005. It would surely be more consistent with the data his company publishes.

Marshall "almost all if not all of those gains are here to stay" Prentice, President of DataQuick, had these comments on the February data:

Sales remained extraordinarily low, and a significant portion of what did sell was in areas beset by foreclosure activity. That's where sellers are the most motivated and price cuts are largest. Mainly it's in the inland markets, often in newer suburbs, where prices got pumped up artificially with the sort of crazy loans that no longer exist.

Now he tells us.

And to think that some analysts are now saying that we're not even half way done with the home price declines.