Case-Shiller: Orange County Price Drops Continue Moderation

Let’s check in on the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). Here’s a summary of the latest data for the Los Angeles area, which includes LA and Orange Counties:

May 2009
Month to Month: Down 0.1% (raw)
Month to Month Down 0.9% (seasonally adjusted)
Year to Year: Down 19.8%
Change from Peak: Down 41.9% in 32 months

Since Case-Shiller lumps LA and Orange Counties together, I won’t repeat everything I wrote on the LA Sweet Digs blog. For more analysis and some graphs of the LA Case-Shiller data, check out my post over there: Case-Shiller: Los Angeles Price Drops Continue Moderation.

Biggest Discounts July Update

Let’s check in on our stats once again and find out where buyers are currently getting the biggest discounts off asking price. If you are a potential buyer, this will help you to know which neighborhoods may be softer in terms of sale price discounts off list price, and help you know where to look for potential bargains.

In the charts below, we have taken all sales data from last month in Orange County and sorted it by city/town. We calculated the overall difference between the sale price and the list price. Note that this reflects the final list price, after all price drops in the listing. Any areas with fewer than ten sales are excluded from the top and bottom ten rankings, but interested readers may download the full data summary in Excel format (xls).

Here are the top ten areas with the largest overall discount:

The overall discount rate dropped from May to June, moving from 3.7% to 3.2%. Newport Coast dropped from #1 last month to #3 this month, with North Tustin debuting on the top ten at #1.

Here are the ten areas with the smallest discounts:

Of the 37 areas we ranked, only four came in in with an average sale price above the average list price.

Here’s an added bonus. The following chart shows the top ten areas with the largest overall discount from the original list price, instead of the final list price:

Newport dominates the top ten areas with discounts off the original price, taking the top two spots at over 16% off each.

Is the area you’re shopping not on either the top 10 or bottom 10? No problem, just download the full rankings in Excel format and hit the “FullSummary” sheet.

Of the 2,511 sales we tracked in the 1-month period, 154 homes (6%) sold for 10% or more off the asking price, while 252 homes sold for 5% or more above the asking price.