Second look at August home sales in Redondo Beach

I have good news and bad news for housing bears who want to see prices come down. The bad news - that sales slowdown that hit in early August is gone, and sales picked up in the latter half of the month and the pace is maintained so far in September. The good news - new inventory is hitting this market at a rate of greater than 3 properties a day.

July-August was a very schizo time, with a substantial sales slowdown and a spike in prices. In such a bi-polar market, obtaining a measure of median price trend is an increasingly futile exercise (and increasingly meaningless). Because of the financing logjam that hit the financial markets this summer, lower-end buyers were stonewalled, thus more sales came out of the high end, which drove median price higher. As the financing logjam cleared, and more lower-end buyers were able to complete their escrows, median price dropped down as expected, though it is still high relative to June and before.

With more August data in, we can revisit our statistics from SALE records.

STAT     FEB 2007   MAR 2007   APR 2007   MAY 2007   JUN 2007   JUL 2007   AUG 2007      
records        64        105        114         91         62         78         90
MEDIAN   $745,358   $755,000   $799,000   $777,000   $764,500   $860,000   $808,500
AVERAGE  $787,799   $813,252   $884,271   $855,228   $830,711   $880,279   $883,399
MIN      $387,500   $370,000   $470,000   $453,000   $485,000   $359,000   $342,500 
MAX    $1,878,000 $2,027,000 $1,750,000 $1,640,000 $1,565,000 $2,299,000 $1,975,000

From my SUPPLY records, median is $805,000, and average is $877,824. Here I have sales by SQFT from SALE records, and from SUPPLY records. I believe the SUPPLY records tend to have square footage more accurately recorded, but on the other hand there are more SALE records, so it's unclear which is the most accurate. What is clear from both charts, though is that the 2250-2500 sqft range has a lot of activity. And here are August sales categorized by price. And here is a more concise way of looking at SQFT and PRICE data (taken from SUPPLY records): From SUPPLY records, median DOM was 84 and average was 120. Increases were expected, since part of the market seized up and delayed the closing of sales.

Median reduction in price was 3.7%, and the average was 4.9%. The median original asking price was $847,000, and the median final sale price was $805,000 (according to SUPPLY records). The difference, when looking from the original asking price, is 5%. This gap between buyer and seller has closed substantially since the beginning of the year, when it was more like 15%.