Sales pace of California resales rises 85%
Real estate brief
By Inman News, Wednesday, January 28, 2009.The sales pace of single-family, detached resale homes soared 84.9 percent in December 2008 compared to the same month in 2007, with the median sales price diving 41.5 percent, the California Association of Realtors reported this week.
The seasonally adjusted annual rate of home sales in the state was 544,580 in December -- this rate is a projection of a monthly sales total over a 12-month period, adjusted to account for typical seasonal fluctuations in sales activity. That compares to a pace of 294,520 sales in December 2007.
Sales for the entire year in 2008 were up an estimated 27 percent compared to the prior year, the association also reported, with the median price falling 38 percent in 2008.
The trade group's Unsold Inventory Index for single-family, detached resale homes in December 2008 was 5.6 months, which compares to 13.4 months in December 2007. This index gauges the length of time it would take to sell off the total for-sale inventory, based on that month's sales pace.
A separate monthly report by the Realtor group and DataQuick Information Systems, which measures prices and price changes for new and resale single-family homes and condos, found that five of 338 cities and communities tracked had year-over-year increases in median home prices.
***
What's your opinion? Leave your comments below or send a letter to the editor. To contact the writer, click the byline at the top of the story.
All rights reserved. This content may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News. Use of this content without permission is a violation of federal copyright law.
Bookmarking Sites
You must login or register to post a comment.
Submitted by Leon d'Ancona, B.T.L., M.T.L. on January 28, 2009 - 5:09am.
Leon d'Ancona, B.T.L.,M.T.L.
President/CEO IMS Incorporated
WWW.Realestatestatistics.com
It is nice to see positive real estate news on these pages. Much of the real estate crisis is fuelled by the media’s negativism.
For a biased view on positive real estate news you can take to your clients check out
www.happyrenews.com, used by many of Inman’s columnists.
Submitted by Ted Jernigan on January 28, 2009 - 5:15am.
Hope that the buyers are owner occupants and not speculators who think they have read the bottom of the market.
Ted Jernigan
Ebby Halliday REALTORS
McKinney, Texas 75071
Jernigan@ebby.com
972-489-6173
Submitted by Andrew Waite on January 28, 2009 - 9:46am.
We publish Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine. A year ago we started doubting the received wisdom and data and set about looking for leading indicators in the market attempting to predict where markets were really going. We found a vendor who tracked MLS inventory by every MLS in the country and guess what....we found it to be almost universally falling beginning end of 2007. (go to our web site www.PersonalRealEstateInvestorMag.com for Real Estate Treds)
That trend held through the 1st quarter and has acclerated since.
In our opinion there is a bottoming sequence that begins with inventory changes, pending sales, closed sales, demand catching supply, price stability/equilibrium and reset and then a return to an inexorable appreciation.
We called the bottom in residential transaction volume bottom of the first quarter 2007. Values are a different number but in leading neighborhoods these are already back to 2005 numbers, if they depreciated at all. The tyranny of averages however convenient for economic experts and index hucksters like Bob Shiller, (see January-Feb 09 PREIM cover story, Bad Data = Bad Attitude) misrepresent the residential real estate market. There is a reason our magazine is the best selling business and real estate newsstand title in US. We like the truth.
Best: Andrew Waite. Publisher Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine.
Submitted by Jose Lopez on January 28, 2009 - 3:24pm.
This is the beginning of the turnaround. Although pricing will continue to settle for the short time, the sales volumes are going up. So it is just a matter of time until the pricing stabilizes.
Jose Lopez
www.sellsarasota.com
www.fl-repos.com