The Weird Months are Over

Just a few charts today with the updated Dataquick real estate sales data for Southern California for the month of February. As noted last month here and here, it's best not to make too much of the goings on around this time of year due to significantly decreased sales volume resulting from the holidays in November and December.

The seasonal pattern can be clearly seen in the chart of sales volume below, and during the next few months, as sales volume picks up, better conclusions about the health of this market can more easily be made.

It looks like the normal rise in sales from February to March is anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, so that should be a good indication of things to come.


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A couple counties ticked up, a couple were flat- Orange and Ventura Counties are within a thousand dollars of each other with a median price just under $620,000, which somehow, seems normal ... routine.

After years of hefty gains in housing prices, it kind of seems that median home prices at around ten times median income is normal, but it's not.


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Each time it looks like the scale needs to be changed on the year-over-year price change chart, San Diego pulls up and averts the crossing of the x-axis for another month.

How long will it keep doing this? We'll see.

Riverside County is within a whisper of single digit appreciation - that area is worth watching closely, as the slope of the year-over-year price change is the steepest of the lot in recent months .


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All in all, these last two months have just been a warm up for the months ahead. It will be an interesting spring and summer.