Wednesday, September 26, 2007
From staff and news-service reports
Realtor data shows home shoppers remain skittish. S&P details pricing slump.
Two sets of housing data released Tuesday – one from Realtors, the other from S&P/Case-Shiller – show continued weakness here and across the nation.
Sales of existing Orange County houses fell 20.5 percent in August from the same month a year ago, the California Association of Realtors reported. Statewide, home sales decreased 27.8 percent in August. Closed escrow sales of existing, single-family detached homes in California totaled 319,200 in August at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate, CAR reported. That compares with the 442,150 sales pace recorded in August 2006.
Nationwide purchases declined 4.3 percent, less than forecast, to an annual rate of 5.5 million, the National Association of Realtors said. Sales dropped 13 percent compared with a year earlier and median home prices rose 0.2 percent to $224,500.
Lawrence Yun, a senior economist with the National Association of Realtors, said problems in the mortgage industry contributed significantly to the drop in sales activity to the lowest level in five years.
Meanwhile, California Realtors reported that the August median selling price of a detached single-family Orange County home was $710,380, up 1.8 percent year over year. Experts say prices appear to be holding only because more costly homes are selling better than lower-cost homes due to tightened home loan standards that made mortgages for the lower end of the price spectrum harder to get.
The national median price of existing homes sold in August increased to $224,500, up 0.2 percent from a year earlier, the first increase in 12 months. But Yun said, "I would not read too much into a single month of data."
Realtors reported that nationwide existing housing inventory for sale rose 0.4 percent at the end of August to 4.58 million. That represents a 10-month supply at the current sales pace, about twice the amount some analysts consider healthy. "Inventory is off the charts," said Mike Larson, a real estate analyst with Weiss Research Inc. of Jupiter, Fla.
See the full article here:
http://www.ocregister.com/money/percent-year-sales-1852296-august-realtors
