Thanks, LukeAJ! Here’s the “loser’s list” (all off by 20% or more) – I’m tracking SF resales:

Sorrento Valley
Escondido West
Rancho Santa Fe
Encinitas
Del Mar (the biggest loser, YOY, at -30.5%)
Cardiff

Looks like the biggest losers are some of the nicest areas.

Is there any way to see what prices in N. County Coastal areas have done YoY on a per SQF basis? Some of these neighborhoods saw only a handful of sales in August, so could be skewed by a couple of very expensive / cheap home sales. Visited an older home in Leucadia on Sunday where owner / agent wants 35% more than he paid Q4 last year…DHH

Some improvements to electrical and plumbing, and minor cosmetic stuff, but no additional sq footage. My ballpark estimate is about $75K in improvements and he’s asking $300K more than he paid…! DHH

I suspect this guy in Leucadia is operating on the ‘greater fool’ theory. Alternatively, I believe he may have bought the place expecting to be able to expand (it’s on a very large lot) but cannot do so due to septic system limitations. In any case there are 2 houses on the market just down the street from him asking 20% less for a LOT more square footage…and they’ve both been on the market for 100 days so far. Biding my time as a renter…DHH

It’ll be accurate for the Zipcode in question…

SB-
You’re correct to point out that median associated with a small sample size is sometimes unreliable. However, your subsequent assertion that a statistically accurate median requires all prices from all SFRs in the county is absurd.

Assuming an underlying normal distribution of home prices within any region, which is quite safe to do, standard statistical theories require only about 20 independent samples to reliably estimate the central tendency (i.e. the mean, median, or mode).

So yes, Chrispy and VRundy should be careful about reading too much of anything into the 30% drop in Delmar SFRs based on only 11 sales. At the same time there is useful information in some of the DQ numbers.

For instance, of the 43 sub-regions with greater than 20 SFR sales, 33 showed a YOY decline. To test the hypothesis that the market is flat, we assume that the chance of a decline or increase in any one region is equal to 50%. Given that assumption, the probability that one will see 33 out of 43 declining (or for that matter increasing) regions is 0.00021798 or roughly 2 out of 10,0000. So by all conventional criteria of statistical reliablity we can reject the hypothesis that the county-wide market is flat.

In addition, if we exclude all those regions with less than 20 sales and recompute the yoy change weighted by the number of sales in each of these ‘relaible’ regions, we see the mean drop for the county is closer to 3.37% YOY. Using the same back calculation including all the sales gives me a number close to the reported 2.2% YOY drop.
-tim

vrudny, your friends could very well be in over their heads. At 8x income, their ability to ride out bumps depends on how much they put down, and what type of loan they got. An option ARM at 7x income, with $250K down, is a disaster waiting to happen. In the last downturn, Del Mar and Rancho Sante Fe had foreclosures, too.

No area is immune to price drops and foreclosures. Just last week, someone told me that the area around Poway High School, which has some of the most expensive Poway real estate, was full of foreclosures in the early 90’s. He said the area was littered with foreclosures.

We should all expect to see the most high priced areas full of REOs in 5 years. People make the mistake of projecting today into the future. Do you rememher last year, when the media was writing only about housing as a great investment? Hardly anyone mentioned the housing bubble. I didn’t see one story about exotic lending, the danger of option ARMs, the overbuilding. Now the media is full of those stories. By next year, the stories will have shifted to banks in trouble, large number of homeowners in foreclosure, and problems at Fannie Mae. In 3 years, you will realize that 10% – 25% of For Sales signs are distress sales, or owned by the bank, and our inventory should be at 50,000 – 80,000. Maybe even 120,000. We’re going to have 100,000 people with resetting ARMs in the next few years.

From foreclosure.com, here is today’s list of
City….foreclosures…preforeclosures
Poway… 4………..44
Del Mar…..1…….12 (near Beach: Luneta Dr, but the rest are off Del Mar Heights Rd)
Rancho Santa Fe….1……11
La Jolla……..1………30
San Ysidro…..13……..56
Fallbrook……11………63
Lakeside…….13………75
National City..13………76
Carlsbad…….11……..100
San Marcos…..24……..105
Oceanside….. 38……..238
Chula vista….67……..439