IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
It was good news and bad news for the Inland Empire housing market in December.
First, the good news: prices are getting back to levels where people have some equity in their homes, which is encouraging for anyone who is still struggling with an underwater mortgage.
The median price of a single-family home in Riverside County last month was $280,000, a 21.2 percent increase compared with December 2012, according to DataQuick in San Diego.
In San Bernardino County, the median price of $232,000 represented a staggering 28.9 percent year-to-year increase, the largest jump in Southern California during the last month of 2013, according to DataQuick.
To put that increase in perspective, San Bernardino County’s median home price in December 2012 was $180,000.
Now the bad news: the dramatic increase in prices threw a wrench into sales. Single-family home sales last month were down 5.5 percent in Riverside County and 0.9 percent in San Bernardino County, according to DataQuick.
For all of Southern California – the two-county Inland region plus Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and Ventura counties – the median price rose 22.3 percent while sales declined 9.2 percent.
A “pitifully low” supply of homes is the main reason home sales fell in Southern California during each of the last three months of last year, according to John Walsh, DataQuick president.
“Home building has risen but remains at relatively low levels, meaning no major boost to the overall supply of homes for sale,” Walsh said in a statement. “Meanwhile, demand is being fueled by a gradually improving economy [and] some of the people who lost homes during the foreclosure crisis will be looking to own again.”
The foreclosure crisis is going away but it’s not quite finished.
Foreclosure resales, which are defined as homes that were foreclosed on during the previous 12 months, accounted for 5.8 percent of the Southern California resale market in December. That was a 14.2 percent year-to-year drop and the lowest level of foreclosure sales since May 2007, according to DataQuick.
