The Market Wrap Up for September

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

September Sales

• 3,347 homes sold in September
• The median sales price was $325,000, down from $329,000 in September 2008

We got these numbers from DQNews.

Dig Deeper Into the Trends

These numbers are for San Diego 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 Seen in All Price Tiers

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). Starting this month, we will be basing all of the charts in this series of posts on the seasonally-adjusted data provided by S&P. For the full source data behind this post, plus non-seasonally adjusted and tiered price data, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website. For an explanation of how the Case-Shiller data is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – August data is released in October).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for San Diego County as of August:

Sixteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw an increase in their respective seasonally-adjusted HPIs between July and August. Only Cleveland, Las Vegas, Charlotte, and Seattle marked seasonally-adjusted drops month-to-month.

Here’s a look at San Diego’s latest tiered data, back through 2000:

The low tier has risen the most in this sudden summer surge, though not by a large margin (+3.55% in two months vs. +3.46% in three months for the middle tier). Given that much of the bounce has been attributed to the $8,000 tax credit available only to first-time buyers, it is not surprising to see the low tier perform slightly better.

In many other markets the low tier is seeing a more pronounced advantage, my theory as to why this is not the case in San Diego is that prices across all tiers here had already fallen quite a bit further than they had in other markets before this summer’s government intervention.

Here’s a chart of Case-Shiller HPIs for all the markets that Redfin serves:

Here’s our peak decline chart, in which we line up the peak Case-Shiller HPI value for each of Redfin’s markets, so we can see how long each market has been declining, and how much it has dropped from the peak.

Here’s the flip side of the peak decline chart—a graph of just this year, indexed to January = 100%:

According to a Reuters story from earlier today, Robert Shiller has described the sudden spike seen in many markets this summer as potential “bubble territory.” I agree. As I have discussed on these pages in recent months, the sudden and simultaneous nature of this price uptick does not bear any marks of a return to fundamentals, but instead seems to be driven almost entirely by a mad dash for cheap loans (interest rates in the 5s) and free money ($8k tax credit).

I’m a little bit concerned that by interrupting the natural correction of the housing market, recent government intervention is setting us up for even more pain down the road. I hope I am wrong.

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 San Diego 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:

It’s interesting to note that on average, buyers are actually paying slightly above list price across the county. The overall discount rate was obviously lower than our last update, but since we tweaked the methodology slightly, unfortunately they’re not really comparable.

Here are the ten areas with the smallest discounts:

In the 66 areas we ranked, the median discount was -0.5%.

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 2,738 sales we tracked in the 1-month period, 474 homes sold for 5% or more off the asking price, while 623 homes sold for 5% or more above the asking price.