San Diego Housing Market News and Analysis

The median price per square foot was up about 1% in February, but that's a smaller amount that its January decline.  So I would characterize prices by this measure as continuing to go nowhere, as they have done since September.

The Case-Shiller data for December, released last week and covered in detail by Kelly, exhibited the same pattern that we have seen in recent months: prices in the high tier continued to drop even as the low tier rebounded further, with the middle tier and aggregate indexes more or less splitting the difference.


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A couple of interesting bailout-related items crossed my desk today.  I have given up on trying to keep track of all the bailouts, but these both relate directly to our beloved topic of shadow inventory so I thought I'd note them.

First, the White House is trying to ban any foreclosure unless the loan in question has been screened for HAMP, the government's flavor-of-the-month home loan modification program.  As I understand it, HAMP has been fairly useless, for reasons I will describe below.  But no matter -- an extra mandatory step to screen every mortgage for eligibility will further delay the foreclosure process, perhaps resulting in even more delinquent mortgages remaining in pre-foreclosure limbo.

The reason that HAMP and the government's other varied foreclosure prevention schemes haven't made much of a splash is that they don't address the main cause of foreclosures: that many homeowners owe more than their homes are worth.

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The median price per square foot declined between December and January for both detached homes and condos:

Prices by this measure have really gone nowhere since September 2009.  As I noted at the Voice last week, the rally that began in early 2009 has clearly come to an end. 

I haven't focused on new foreclosure activity for a while because the topic has become somewhat irrelevant, analytically speaking.  The question is not whether a large "shadow inventory" of foreclosed homes exists -- it does -- but whether and over what timeframe that inventory will actually become relevant by entering the market.   That being the case, the question of how fast the shadow inventory might be growing isn't terribly high on my list of compelling topics.

It is nonetheless at least mildly interesting to note that new foreclosures, as measured by mortgage default notices, have slowed substantially. 

continue reading at voiceofsandiego.org

The data rodeo will be out shortly, my friends. In the meantime I just put a price chart for January up at voiceofsandiego.org.

Earlier this week, Kelly Bennett gave us the lowdown on the Case-Shiller home price data for November.  I'm going to just add a couple of things.

First, I have updated the requisite post-peak chart...

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Recent months have seen a fairly steady improvement in the year-over-year rate of job losses for San Diego County.  That annual rate of change was still firmly negative -- just less so than it had been previously.

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Well, I thought the old "Shambling Toward Affordability" title for this series of articles was a bit pithier but it just doesn't quite work now that home prices have been rising for the better part of a year.  In any case, regardless of the what we want to call it, it's time to check in on San Diego housing valuations as of year-end 2009.

The 2009 home price rally reversed the direction of the shamble, but it didn't really change the overall picture, which is that San Diego home prices (in aggregate, of course) are still at middling levels of valuation.

Here's the price to per capita income ratio:

The San Diego housing market managed to squeek out another gain in the median price per square foot as 2009 drew to a close:

It feels like I've been writing about "shadow inventory" -- homes that are in foreclosure but haven't hit the market yet -- forever.  Yet no flood of foreclosures has yet inundated the market, and as a matter of fact, inventory has been quite scarce lately.  Is there anything to this shadow inventory concept?

As Kelly Bennett documented in a recent blog entry, the answer is yes.  Kelly noted as of Tuesday, there were 19,453 San Diego homes that were in foreclosure but that were not yet listed for sale.  That, my friends, is your shadow inventory.

For purely illustrative purposes, let's try to understand what the effect would be if all these homes in foreclosure were to suddenly hit the market. 

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The latest release of the Case-Shiller home price index showed that San Diego's home price rally continued into October.

As it did last month, the high-priced tier once again put in the weakest showing -- an increase of .2 percent for the month compared to a 1.8 percent increase in the low-priced tier.  The middle tier rose by .5 percent and the aggregate index by .4 percent.

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It wouldn't be a proper Christmas without a little holiday cheer from legendary housing bubble analyst Ramsey Su.  So pour yourself a couple buckets of egg nog and read on...

I wrote Monday about the increase in employment at San Diego businesses between October and November.  I also discussed how the year-over-year change in payroll employment, while still firmly negative, had become steadily less so in recent months.

Today we'll look at the other job survey I've been writing about of late... 

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Employment at San Diego businesses dropped on a year-over-year
basis, according to the latest estimates from the EDD.  But the
trend we've seen in recent months of consecutively smaller annual job
declines strengthened once again.

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