From the DQ:
http://www.dqnews.com/Articles/2014/News/California/Southern-CA/RRSCA141112.aspx
An excerpt:
“It was another sub-par month for Southern California home sales. We’ve yet to see traditional buyers fill the void left by the drop-off in investor and cash buyers, which began in spring last year,” said Andrew LePage, data analyst for CoreLogic DataQuick. “Of course, there are multiple reasons for this year’s lackluster sales. New-home transactions are still running at about half their normal level. The resale market is hampered by constrained inventory in many areas, in part because some people who want to put their homes up for sale still haven’t regained enough equity to purchase their next home. Then there are the would-be buyers who continue to struggle with affordability and mortgage availability, if not uncertainty over their employment or the direction of the housing market.”
They are great at reporting the MoM, YoY, and regurgitating the same tired old excuses. If sellers would just lower their asking prices it would fix everything.
It appears that sellers are just waiting for the market to catch up to their list prices. But this is why inventory starts to build – sold prices aren’t going up.
The median-sales-price trend can be skewed by the hotter low-end doing all the heavy lifting. While the low-end is still hot, it looks like the higher-end must be soft or declining – the Median SP has been flat for 7-8 months straight (which includes decisions made at the end of the last selling season).
From the DQ reports:
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Rates are 4% and under, buyers are sticking around, and there are 7,680 houses and condos for sale in SD County. Price will fix the rest!
My favorite tidbit:
The number of homes that sold for $500,000 or more rose 2.6 percent in October compared with a year earlier. Sales below $500,000 fell 10.4 percent year-over-year, and sales below $200,000 dropped 30.8 percent.
Don’t know who should be crying about up 25% over 22 months. I think you are right that many sellers are just waiting for the market to meet their price, and if that takes months or even years, so be it — they’ve ridden the rollercoaster this far. They inevitably saw friends on their street get squeezed out in 2009-2011 (and probably have seen a flipper or two make an “easy” couple hundred grand as a result) and aren’t going to be the sucker to let it go cheap. It will be a tough crowd to convince that things are going bounce around the flat line for the next 2-4 years.