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

To: The Reaper who wrote (142098)	8/20/2008 3:55:52 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Respond to of 306849

unfortunately reagan didn't round up the oil.

To: The Reaper who wrote (142098)	8/20/2008 4:08:59 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Respond to of 306849

Bay Area home sales climb above last year; median price falls hard dqnews.com La Jolla, CA.----Bay Area home sales eked out their first year-over- year gain since early 2005 last month as buyers responded to price cuts and snapped up more inland foreclosures. The median sales price dove to a 53- month low, a real estate information service reported. A total of 7,586 new and resale houses and condos sold across the nine- county Bay Area in July. That was up 5.7 percent from 7,178 in June and up 2.2 percent from 7,423 in July 2007, according to San Diego-based MDA DataQuick. July sales were the highest for any month since June 2007 and marked the first annual sales gain for any month since January 2005. However, last month's sales still fell 22 percent short of the average July sales total since 1988, when MDA DataQuick's statistics begin, and were the second- lowest for a July since 1995. Sales of distressed properties played a major role in most areas logging annual sales gains last month. Foreclosure resales -- homes sold in July that had been foreclosed on in the prior 12 months -- made up 33 percent of all resales. That was up from 29.9 percent in June and 4.2 percent in July 2007. Foreclosure resales ranged from 4.6 percent of the resale market in San Francisco to 65.9 percent in Solano County. In Solano and Contra Costa counties, where deeply discounted foreclosures are most common, 11 zip codes posted sales of existing houses that were at least twice as high as in July 2007. "So much of today's market is driven by distress. Unless interpreted in that context, the stats give a rather distorted view of the overall market. We know one-third of the Bay Area's resales in July were homes fresh off foreclosure. Who knows how many more involved a desperate seller and a lender who accepted a short sale," said John Walsh, MDA DataQuick president. "Meanwhile, many would-be sellers wait for a healthier market and many would-be buyers, especially those eyeing costlier coastal homes, wait for signs of a market bottom or for the return of more favorable financing. A clearer picture of the entire housing market will emerge once more of these foreclosures burn off and more lenders, sellers and buyers get off the sidelines and back into the housing game." Since the credit crunch hit last August, making "jumbo" mortgages over $417,000 more expensive and harder to obtain, the percent of Bay Area homes financed with jumbo loans has plummeted. Last month jumbos made up 32.3 percent of all home purchase loans, down from 63.1 percent in July 2007. In addition to undermining sales, the dropoff in jumbo use helps explain why the median