Category Archives: Real Estate

Home prices in San Diego County reached a post-Great Recession high in March, but are still slowing on an annual basis.

The S&P/Case-Shiller Index showed Tuesday that prices rose 1.3 percent from February to March. In the previous Case-Shiller report, San Diego County led the nation’s appreciation at 1 percent.

Still, San Diego County’s monthly upticks have not been enough to sustain big annual appreciation driven by the investor-related homebuying that dominated the first half of 2013. The index, which measures repeat sales of single-family homes, measured 199.6 in March, its eighth consecutive month in the 190-range after starting 2013 at 163.28.

“We’re hitting the upper numbers in terms of a recovery but we’re also hitting the limit in terms of affordability,” said Mark Goldman, a loan officer and real-estate lecturer at San Diego State University. Goldman said he sees annual gains on the index slowing to around 5 percent by the end of 2014 because of low inventory, flat household incomes and difficulty in qualifying for a mortgage, which currently offer historically low rates.

Read more at:  www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/may/27/case-shiller-real-estate-march-homes-mortgages/

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San Diego County’s housing market is off to one of its slowest starts to peak buying season, which began in March.

Last month, 3,057 homes sold for a median $427,000, real estate tracker DataQuick reported Tuesday. That’s a boost in activity from February’s 2,541 sales at a median $410,000, but it was a nearly 20 percent drop from the sales in March 2013. Last month was also the slowest for a March since 2009, toward the end of the Great Recession. March is generally the month in which activity in the housing market picks up, as weather improves and some families plan to move during the summer.

DataQuick analyst Andrew LePage said there are a variety of reasons for this year’s slow start.

“The inventory of homes for sale remains thin in many markets. Investor purchases have fallen. The jump in home prices and mortgage rates over the past year has priced some people out of the market, while other would-be buyers struggle with credit hurdles,” LePage said in a statement, “Also, some potential move-up buyers are holding back while they weigh whether to abandon a phenomenally low interest rate on their current mortgage in order to buy a different home.”

Last month’s median $427,000 was still a 12.4 percent jump from March 2013’s $380,000 price tag, but the value gain continued an overall trend of slowing annual appreciation. In June, for instance, when the median was $416,500, home values were up 24.1 percent from a year earlier.

read more at: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/apr/15/dataquick-homes-mortgages-realestate-property/

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