Home Buyers San Diego Home Prices

July, 2008

San Diego and many other metro areas around the country continued to see record home price declines in May.

Home prices dropped a record 15.8 percent from May 2007 to May 2008, with San Diego down a record 23.2 percent.

Let's rephrase these numbers with some common sense:

1. home prices have gone down the last 12 months
2. the decrease in home price does not mean every home is worth 23.2% less than last year
3. roughly 40% of all sales in San Diego County were foreclosures (or bank-owned etc.), mostly in the lower-class neighborhoods
4. this means significant more homes are sold in the lower-bracket than average which makes the number home price decrease look significantly more than when looking and just resale of homes bought in 2004-2007 and resold for roughly 5- 15% less than 1 year ago (not 23%)
5. Foreclosures/ bank-owned properties generally do not sell for a top price relatively to the assumed property value. Fast sale makes it tough to get a good amount of "descent offers" .

Home Prices Decline

09/06/2007 source: Mercury News
Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller national home price index reported that prices in the second quarter fell 3.2 percent compared with the second quarter of 2006.

Declines in property values in some metropolitan areas were much more severe - down 11 percent in Detroit, 7.7 percent in Tampa, 7.3 percent in San Diego, 7 percent in Washington, D.C., 4 percent in San Francisco and 3.7 percent in Boston.

	Apr-Jun '08	Jan-Mar '08	Apr-Jun '07	Apr-Jun '03
Normal Heights	$287,375	$345,651	$398,216	$266,299	-37%
All of San Diego	$405,837	$423,632	$550,990	$438,025	-38%
Kensington	$683,598	$756,417	$579,317	$416,714	-10%

The overall median last year of nearly $500,000 represented a more than doubling of San Diego County's home prices since 2000, when the average property sold for $234,000.

The median resale price for existing single-family homes dropped $15,000 from November to December to stand at $550,000, the largest month-to-month decline since DataQuick began keeping records in 1988.

San Diego County Resale House Prices

01/062006 SAN DIEGO –
San Diego County resale house prices tumbled last month by the biggest number in 18 years of record-keeping and contributed to the smallest year-to-year rise in overall prices in six years,

DataQuick Information Systems reported Monday. The median resale price for existing single-family homes dropped $15,000 from November to December to stand at $550,000, the largest month-to-month decline since DataQuick began keeping records in 1988.

Negative Migration

The monthly mortgage cost for a median priced home has been an issue for a large group of San Diegans. This has lead that San Diego has been experiencing negative net migration since 2004.

Source: California Association of Realtors

California June 2008 Home Sales

July, 2008 -

June home sales was the slowest in DataQuick's statistics, which go back to 1988.

Source: DataQuick Information Systems

Of the homes sold in June, 41.9 percent were foreclosure resales, up from a revised 40.1 percent in May and 6.6 percent in June a year ago.

December, 2007

The median price paid for a home last month was $328,000, down 3.2 percent from $339,000 for the month before, and down 31.5 percent from $479,000 for June a year ago. Around half the drop in median is due to depreciation, the other half due to shifts in the types of homes selling, and how those homes are financed.

The median home price hit $402,000 last month, down 14.8 percent from $472,000 in the year-ago period, according to DataQuick Information Systems. The state's median home price peaked last spring at $484,000.

In May 2007, a median house in San Diego cost $612,000.

Source: California Association of Realtors

Housing Affordability

Growth of real estate prices in San Diego County has not been accompanied by comparable growth of household incomes: housing affordability index (percentage of households that can afford to buy a median-priced house) has been below below 20% since 2003.