San Diego Housing Market News and Analysis

Well, it's 2011, and yet I am still lacking the following:

• laser eyes
• hyper-evolved glasses-wearing chimp assistant
• self-aware email client
  
• minotaur
  
• huffable bacon
  
• tank full of precogs to help me match my outfits

Someone please tell science to get on it.  For now, we'll have to make do with the January resale data.

The median price per square foot took a bit of a beating last month: down 3.0 percent for detached homes, 7.2 percent for condos, and 4.5 percent in aggregate:


The condo series is often all over the place; I prefer to watch the detached series.  But even there it was a pretty big drop, atop an even bigger drop that had taken place in December.  Granted, we are in the weak season for real estate, but these are some fairly sizable declines.

With this, the Case-Shiller proxy predicts a 2.2% decline in the January Case-Shiller index.  That would be a slightly (1.6%) year-over-year decline, which supports the idea that this is more than just seasonal weakness.


Speaking of seasonality, you can try to spot the seasonal patterns in the following crosshatched versions of the above graphs:



The number of closed sales was down for the month (more seasonality) and down 2.8% from a year ago.  (Look for the black dot as the 2011 "line" only consists of one data point thus far):


Pendings increased (yet more seasonality) and were nearly identical to both the January 2009 and January 2010 levels:


Inventory declined (something something seasonality) and, while almost identical to the January 2009 level, was up 21.3% from a year ago.


This left months of inventory also at January 2009 levels but up around 21% from January 2010:


You'll note that after January 2009, months of inventory dropped hard and stayed down until the winter slowdown.  After an initial drop in 2010, though, months of inventory rose for the rest of the year.  Which one will it be this year?  I don't know (though I will note that the tax credit stimulus coincided with the increased activity).  It does seem that inventory is at a level that's putting downward pressure on home prices, so unless sales pick up or inventory declines, we may be in for further price declines.