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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mick Mørmøny who wrote (51822)	4/14/2006 5:51:59 AM
From: Mick Mørmøny	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

San Diego housing market continues cooling trend By Emmet Pierce UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER 1:25 p.m. April 13, 2006 No longer steaming, the San Diego region's housing market continued its slow cooling trend in March, which marked the 11th month in a row of single-digit price gains. The end of the first quarter also marked the 21st consecutive month in which sales volumes were down on a year-over-year basis, DataQuick Information Systems reported Thursday. “It looks to me as if the market, at all levels, has ratcheted itself back a notch but is still stable,” said DataQuick analyst John Karevoll. “There is nothing I can see that looks particularly ominous.” Last month's overall sales count was 4,146, a decline of 17 percent from March 2005. That was the lowest count for March since March 1998, when 4,016 homes sold. The pace of resale condo sales fell by nearly 30 percent to 841 units, compared to the same month last year. That was a gain over February's resale condo tally of 657 units, however. The overall median price for all homes sold was $504,000, a 5.7 increase over March 2005 and a slight rise over February's median of $502,000. The county hit a record overall median price of $518,000 in November 2005. After a residential real estate boom that has seen the values of typical homes more than double since the late 1990s, many economists have predicted a “soft landing” in which prices flatten. Analysts nationwide are watching San Diego County to see how it will emerge from the boom, said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate at UC Berkeley. He expects prices to drop gradually over the next two years. “San Diego has had the biggest price increase of a major metro area in the last five years,” he said. “You have the cash-out sellers now. You have investors trying to sell and you have an affordability crisis for first-time buyers.” The cooling trend “generates market stability,” said Karevoll. “It is easier to make loans in a stable market than one that is volatile. We are not out of the woods here, but the numbers don't look so bad.” signonsandiego.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Emmet Pierce: (619) 293-1372; emmet.pierce@uniontrib.com