From Lansner at the OC Register– and a novel concept; appraising the same houses:
Real Estate Research Council of Southern California has a most unusual home-valuation technique: Twice a year, the group gets volunteer appraisers to review the same, exact homes from the regional over and over again. The exercise — that adds an human eye to the great price debate — goes on every October and April.
The latest version is out (April’s), and the group — HQ’d at Cal Poly Pomona — found San Diego County values up 0.2% on a year-over-year basis.
As much as I hate to say this, I’m not seeing that prices are flat from last year in my admittedly small, satistically invalid sample of homes I’m looking at. I haven’t crunched any numbers, but I’d say prices are up something like 5% in general. It depends on the exact neighborhood, zip code, etc. I’m also only looking at houses around $700k. Possibly I’m being fooled by looking at the lowest of the low that sold a year ago. Like I said, I haven’t crunched numbers but it sure seems like there’s been a little price appreciation.
Now list prices, in some cases, are way up. Generally those prooperties are sitting, though a couple of properties have sold at prices that I don’t think would have worked a year ago.
I like this method, it is the human factor Case-Shiller repeat sales index.
Which for all SFRs sold in my OC town, has been CS=172+/-8 for the past 24 months.
ie no change