South Bay Resale Activity for January 2007
Apparently I was mistaken about the changes in DataQuick's methodology. The firm is indeed making changes in its methodology that I described but the changes won't be applied uniformly throughout all the areas it covers. Apparently it is still reporting only RESALE activity for Southern California. And here I was hoping for a merging of new construction sales and resale activity. Oh well. At least Shorewood provides us a calculation of that.
And judging by how few sales are recorded in some of these zip codes for January, I am inclined to believe that Shorewood's data is consistently more reliable. When you're talking about only 6 or 7 SFR sales in a zip code within a month, it's difficult to come to any solid conclusions about median price trend. On the other hand, Shorewood aggregates sales data out of the beach city zip codes, and there is a large dataset as a result.
The thinness of data is evident in the zig-zagginess of the raw trendlines in the charts. Compare the trendlines of the individual zip codes with the trendlines for the Los Angeles county graphs, which contain literally thousands of data points, and are so smooth they really don't need to be represented by a moving average. We can clearly see from the Los Angeles County graphs that the trends have reached a "resting" point. YOY trends are hovering between 5% and 0%. Will the trends poke through 0? Stay flat? Rebound upwards?
Here is the resale activity for the immediate area. Just keep in mind what I said about coming to conclusions with such small sales numbers - and this is not a new problem or unique to DataQuick, by any means.
SFR MEDIAN %YOY CONDO MEDIAN %YOY
COMMUNITY ZIP SALES SFR CHG SALES CONDO CHG
LA/Westchester 90045 24 $695 -13.1% 6 $469 20.7%
El Segundo 90245 6 $760 -1.7% 4 $550 7.7%
Hawthorne 90250 35 $545 1.3% 4 $392 0.5%
Hermosa Beach 90254 7 $1,715 55.9% 3 $894 -0.6%
Lawndale 90260 7 $570 10.2% 6 $329 -15.6%
Manhattan Beach 90266 31 $1,308 -11.6% 3 $1,525 -2.9%
Palos Verdes Pen. 90274 20 $1,600 -5.7% 1 $640 125.7%
Rancho P.V. 90275 31 $929 -24.2% 2 $560 -15.0%
Redondo Beach 90277 8 $865 -11.7% 14 $750 11.5%
Redondo Beach 90278 15 $735 -6.4% 23 $659 -7.2%
Los Angeles County and the beach city zip codes - El Segundo, 90245; Hermosa Beach, 90254; Manhattan Beach, 90266; Redondo Beach, 90277, 90278 - are charted here. All charts graph RESALE activity.
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posted by bearmaster at 12:33 PM
10 Comments:
Thanks for posting this info! The trend continues down...both price and sales. However, I think there is a suckers rally brewing with pendings increasing. However, closings will be a different story with lenders tightening.
Yes, I agree, I think there is a dead cat bounce coming too.
If the lenders tighten, what will buyers do? Heaven forbid they cash in all their stock market investments.
If the lenders tighten, what will buyers do? Heaven forbid they cash in all their stock market investments.
Rotfl.
I think, as gobig noted, we're going to get into a bind with lots of pendings freezing up the market and fewer closings.
My interest is primarily in the "upgrade markets" and those have a time delay before they're hit. But they will slow too.
Its tough to have a dead cat bounce when credit is tight. ;)
The scuttlebutt I'm hearing is that the mortgage brokers are having trouble selling off certain trauche's of debt. That in itself isn't a big deal... its the fact that any debt that they do not sell crimps their ability to lend... its a very quick credit tightening spiral.
Oh yea... the bearish blogs have noted this.
Bearmaster,
Love the charts, did you do $$$ YOY? (did I miss that chart?)
Got popcorn?
Neil
Hi Neil,
Yes, I did the January $$$ volume transaction charts. I am experimenting with an additional measure of pain related to the %YOY change in the $$$ volume, I'll see if I can incorporate it at the end of the month.
I got your email, and am considering what you said about "borrowing" the data, but my dataset is so thin! I started scraping housing data out of Domania 4-5 years ago, and still have it available to enter into my DB, to fatten up this dataset a bit. Let me think about your request.
On a little different note...have you seen all the work continuing in the Play Vista area. The builders are going to get killed...and they can't stop the construction. I go past this area all the time on my way to the gym in MDR. I talked to our nanny and she told me that a lot of the people she knows are swinging hammers on the Playa Vista Condos.
Yes, sometimes I take the Santa Monica 3 home from work and I see the construction right on Lincoln Blvd. Maybe I'm due to post another photograph of the Playa Vista construction.
Let me think about your request.
Of course. Take your time. I just think we will quickly get a picture out of it. I'm mostly interesting in October 2006 on sales... That is going to tell an interesting story. :)
Gobig said:
On a little different note...have you seen all the work continuing in the Play Vista area. The builders are going to get killed...and they can't stop the construction.
Have you noticed all of the townhouse & SFR construction throughout the south bay? Everything from $700k to multi million mansions! ("Starting at $2.5 million..." for the ones on PV drive near the RPV/PVE border)
Once ground is broken the next cheapest place to quit is when the property is done (due to the way banks do construction loans).
My radar for job transfers out of state is going wild, but producing no new real information. :( About all I'm hearing is more subtle transfers by Boeing to Colorado and New Mexico, but the numbers are pretty small...
Patience will pay off. :)
Got popcorn?
Neil
Now totally off topic:
My fiancee and I have agreed to a "trial home ownership" strategy. No, we're not buying, we're cutting expenses to see what it would "fell" like.
On my blog:
http://recomments.blogspot.com/2007/02/2859-per-month.html#links
Got popcorn?
Neil
Can you clarify your comment about resale homes and Dataquick? They publish new home sales and median for all counties. It's on their website, under total.
Then I calculate the new home info from the agreggate off their site (available on the 14th or so of the month) with the resale info that the LA Times publishes on the last Sunday of the month (LA Times chart is on dqnews.com). Then I can calculate the attached and detached sales and medians.
This is a great blog. Are there any others for LA?
CaliforniaHousingForecast.com
You can read about DataQuick's change in methodology and their news release in my prior post.
My national map of housing bubble blogs is at this link. Westside Bubble and Manhattan Beach Bubble are my nearest neighbors and they look at their neighborhood inventories up close. There are other blogs that make more general comments about Southern California real estate. All are very good and I only wish I had time to visit and just read them more often.
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