The Market Wrap Up for September

Let’s take at look at some September numbers for Orange County and see how they compare to a year ago.

Single-Family Homes

• 1,862 re-sale houses sold, up 8% from September 2008
• The median sales price was $500,000, up 4% from September 2008

Condos

• 839 condos sold, up 12% from September 2008
• The median sales price was $300,000, up 3% from September 2008

We got these numbers from DQNews.

Dig Deeper Into the Trends

These numbers are for Orange County. To see what’s happening in your neighborhood, check out our stats & trends pages.

What trends did you see in September?

Case-Shiller: Summer Surge Benefits High Tier Most

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:

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: Summer Surge Benefits High Tier Most

Now We’re Showing More Homes for Sale, Even Faster!

Redfin’s database of homes for sale just got more comprehensive and faster in the greater LA area. Before, we got homes for sale directly from CLAW, which serves Los Angeles County, and MRMLS, which serves the Inland Empire and the South Bay. Now, we get those listings even faster from CARETS, (California Real Estate Technology Services), a larger database of Southern California Multiple Listing Services that real estate brokers use to list homes for sale.

Here’s what changed:

• Updated on the hour, every hour: We get updated listings from CLAW every hour. Before, we only could update them once a day.
• More homes for sale: We just added 145 more listings from CLAW and 217 more from MRMLS that we previously couldn’t show. There’s one catch: to see all the details for these homes for sale, MLS rules require that you sign in with a Redfin account or register with a verified email address before we can show you all the information.
• More amenities: Before, we couldn’t tell you whether the home has wood floors, if there’s a fireplace, whether the kitchen’s got marble counters. Now we can show all these details.

We plan on switching over even more Southern California MLS’s in the near future.

Questions about the updates? Just comment below or ask a question in our website forum.

Where Were the Biggest Discounts in August?

Let’s check in on our stats to 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.

Methodology
In order to maintain consistency with the automatically generated statistics posted to the Redfin neighborhood pages, we have slightly tweaked the way the statistics are compiled for this post series. First, we complied a list of every sale that took place in the month, calculating each sale’s sale-to-list ratio (based on the final list price). Next, we simply take an average of every individual sale’s sale-to-list ratio to calculate an entire area’s sale-to-list ratio. Any sales that came in with a sale-to-list ratio above 150% or below 50% are excluded from the calculation, and areas with fewer than twenty sales are excluded from the top and bottom ten rankings. 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 was lower than our last update (and barely in the positive), but since we tweaked the methodology slightly, unfortunately they’re not really comparable.

Here are the ten areas with the smallest discounts:

In the 33 areas we ranked, the median discount was 1.6%.

Here’s the bonus graph, showing the discount off the original list price:

Looks like there are definitely still some sellers out there that are overestimating the current moderate strength in the market when they first list their house, especially over in Laguna.

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 2,363 sales we tracked in the 1-month period, 498 homes sold for 5% or more off the asking price, while 279 homes sold for 5% or more above the asking price.