Real Estate Report presented by Tami McCraw

The median sales price for single-family, re-sale homes in San Diego County reached $625,000 in March, a new high. It was up 9.9% year-over-year.

The average sales price also set a new high last month: $809,160, a gain of 16.8% over last March.

The median price for re-sale condominiums was up 5.4% year-over-year, while the average price gained 5.1%.

That’s seventy months in a row the median price for both homes and condos has been higher than the year before.

Home sales, meanwhile, were down 17.5% from last March. Condo sales were down 12.7%, year-over-year.

Homes continue to sell quickly, taking only thirty-two days from coming onto the market to when they go under contract. The average since January 2001 is fifty-seven days. Condos are selling in twenty-seven days, the average is fifty-five days.

The sales price to listing price ratio continues to tease the 100% level: 98.8%. The ratio for condos is 99.5%.

Inventory continues to be abysmal. It is just over one-third the average since 2001. As of the 10th of March, there were 3,390 homes for sale. We average 8,515!

Condo inventory is at 1,248 units for sale. The average is 9,603.

This is reflected in our Days of Inventory statistic which is fifty-six for homes. The average is one-hundred and forty-four.

There are forty Days of Inventory for condos. The average is one-hundred and thirty-two.

If you would like to know what’s going on in your neighborhood, click on Recent Sales & Listings. That will tell you what is for sale and what has sold.

Big investment firms have stopped gobbling up California homes

By: Cal Matters

Astronomical prices are forcing a rising share of California families to postpone buying a house. As a result, the state’s record-low homeownership rate has been a boon to one growing segment of California’s housing market: single-family home rentals.

Between 2005 and 2015, the number of owner-occupied homes in California shrunk by nearly 64,000 units, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Meanwhile the number of renter-occupied homes increased dramatically.

California now has 450,000 more homes used as rentals than it did a decade ago. Compare that to the 1990s, when the number of rented homes grew by less than 120,000 while the state added 700,000 homes owned by the people who live in them.

The rising tide of single-family rentals has renewed attention on who actually receives the rent payments that nearly 2 million Californians make each month. Lawmakers and first-time homeowner advocates have been scrutinizing a relatively new form of landlord: private investment firms that snapped up thousands of homes during the foreclosure crisis and now rent them out.

With nearly one in four California homes now purchased in all-cash, these well-financed institutional investors have also been blamed as unfair competition against families bidding on starter homes. So how much are institutional investors impacting California’s housing prices? The data says not so much now.. 

The rest of the article is much too long for this space. You can access it here: https://tinyurl.com/y8ucd9fc