San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

A commenter over at Piggington (my own little internet stomping ground) raised an interesting point in regard to last month's article on San Diego employment. The reader noted that the monthly data I cite measures the number of jobs held in San Diego with no regard for whether the job holders are actually San Diego residents. There is a separate data series that tracks the employment status of San Diego residents whether they are employed in the county or elsewhere. And, for the time being, the two job surveys are providing mixed signals.

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A while back, I noticed a funny thing about the year-over-year rate of change in the Case-Shiller index of San Diego home prices. It seemed that movements in the annual price change rate from positive to negative or from negative to positive provided a good indicator that the long-term price trend had changed direction.

Allow me to demonstrate with some graphs.

The graph below shows the home price index in blue with the year-over-year rate of change for the index in orange. It covers a ten-year period more or less centered around the early-1990s housing bust.

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The Case-Shiller index is the most accurate measure of aggregate home price changes, for reasons long-since described here. But it's been an ongoing gripe of mine (and everyone's) that the index lags so badly. The data that was just released a couple days ago on October 27, for instance, only tracks home prices through August.

So lately I've taken to using the median price per square foot data to guess, for lack of a better word, what the Case-Shiller index values for more recent months might be. An example of this estimation can be found in the graph below, which appeared in the writeup of the most recent median price data:

Here's how I arrive at these estimates. (Non-nerds may wish to fall asleep for the remainder of this paragraph)...

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Nobody should be very surprised that the Case-Shiller index rose again in August.

This time around, the long-suffering low tier turned in the best performance with a robust 2.5 percent increase. The middle tier rose 1.6 percent for the month and the high tier increased .3 percent, with the aggregate index rising 1.6 percent.

Here's a graph of the three price tiers and the aggregate index since their bubble peaks:

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Here, a little later than usual, is the monthly foreclosure activity update.

The following chart shows that default notices and trustee sales, respectively the initial and final stages of foreclosure, both declined last month.

But both defaults and trustee sales remain at levels that are, shall we say, elevated.

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Let's take a slightly different look at the construction, finance/real estate, and retail job sectors. I have long highlighted these three industries in my analysis because they were directly involved in the housing bubble, benefitting from the respective frenzies for building homes, lending funds, selling homes, and spending all the money that issued forth from the regional home equity ATM.

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The rate of year-over-year job losses in San Diego declined again last month, according to the latest estimates from the EDD. Between September 2008 and September 2009, the region lost 52,000 jobs. This is not great, obviously, but it's an improvement over recent months.

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For a long time I have been discussing, with various degrees of rantiness, government intervention in the housing market. When I first touched on the subject in early 2007, before any bailouts had begun, some of the potential interventions I envisioned seemed kind of far-fetched. By late 2007, as I noted in a Manimal-referencing followup, many of these same interventions were already underway.

And now? The lengths to which the government has gone to prop up the housing market have surpassed even my own cynical expectations. By a long shot.

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The July update of the Case-Shiller San Diego home price index is in. The index increased by 2.5 percent from June -- a substantial (if expected) one-month bounce.

As usual, Kelly has done a nice writeup on month-to-month changes with and without seasonal adjustments. I'll supplement her piece with some visual aids.

First up is a look at the three price tiers and the aggregate price index from their respective peaks in the 2005-2006 region:

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In response to last week's article on historical home sales, a reader requested charts expressing the sales data in terms of dollars' worth of homes sold instead of just the number of homes sold.

I had to cobble a few things together to make these charts. (Non-nerds may skip the rest of this paragraph). Ideally, the dollar volume of homes sold would be calculated by either just adding up individual prices of every sale or multiplying the average price times the number of units sold, which would both come out to a precise total of dollar volume. But I didn't have historical average prices. What I did have historical data on was the Case-Shiller index, which I rebased to the median price for all homes sold in San Diego in August 2009. This isn't exactly the same as the average price for any given month, for various reasons, but I suspect it will be close enough to get a general idea of what's going on.

Okay, everybody back? Here is the chart of existing home sales in terms of dollars since 1990, with the requisite 12-month average to smooth out the seasonal ups and downs:

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According to the Employment Development Department's latest estimates, San Diego's year-over-year rate of job losses slowed for the first time in 2009. The region's employment decreased by 55,600 jobs between August 2008 and August 2009, a decline of 4.3 percent.

That is good news -- if the latest numbers turn out to provide an accurate picture of San Diego's employment situation.

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Home sales may have recovered strongly from the depths they plumbed in 2007 and 2008, but they are still anemic when compared to San Diego sales activity over the past couple of decades.

You wouldn't know it from looking at a chart of historical home sales. The number of sales, indicated by the blue line in the following graph, has recently vaulted up to the upper part of the historical range:

But it's not quite that simple. (Is it ever?)

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Summer may be winding down, but the summer rally in the size-adjusted median price of San Diego homes continued another month. From July to August, the median price per square foot rose .7 percent for detached homes, 1.3 percent for condos, and .8 percent in aggregate.

This was not much of a month, relatively speaking, but it turns out that the mid-2009 rally as a whole has been unusually powerful.

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For a while I've been tracking a set of statistics that highlighted the great disparity between homes sales in higher-priced and lower-priced areas of San Diego. What we've been seeing for quite some time now is that compared to the expensive areas, the cheap areas had fallen a lot more in price but had experienced drastically higher sales volume on a year-over-year basis.

As of July, this disparity was still in place to some extent -- but the gap had closed substantially.

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As with every month so far in 2009, more existing San Diego homes went into foreclosure than were sold. Just barely, though -- the ratio of home sales to default notices (the initial stage of foreclosure) was just gnat's eyelash below one-to-one. The ratio was .997, to be exact. That's the best sales-per-default ratio all year.

But it's still terrible. The following graph shows that while the sales-per-default ratio is above the lows set earlier in this downturn, it's still well lower than it was at any time during the two decades or so that preceded the current housing crash.

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