July 30, 2008

Laguna Hills State of the City: Real Estate Market

With all this talk of bottoms, plateaus, and leveling out of the local real estate market I thought I would take a look at the numbers and see what story they tell us about the state of the Laguna Hills real estate market. 

Days On Market

It turns out that the inventory in Laguna Hills is on the up and up.  It’s gone from a low around 120 in January to about 134 now.   While it’s an increase, we’re still only talking about 14 additional houses.  I didn’t even post the chart because it looks scarier than it really is!  The other good bit of news is that the average days on market has leveled and stayed level for about three months.  The disheartening part about it is that the average days on market is that it’s sitting just over four months.  That’s an awfully long time to sell your home.  With the number of foreclosures out there, the competition to sell is steep and sellers will have to take drastic measures in order to remain competitive.

Median Price

Speaking of some of those drastic measures, one look at the median prices shows just what measures need to be taken - price it right.  The median price of the home on the market in Laguna Hills sits right around $777k.  This is by far the most surprising number of them all.  At the lowest the number dipped to about $755k.  To see an incline is shocking.

Looking at these numbers many might jump to say that we’ve hit the bottom, but given all things I’m reluctant to say so.  The median price does seem to be increasing but with a market as small as Laguna Hills, the simple sale of some larger homes (say Nellie Gail) can really skew the data.  In fact, a quick glance shows that in the last three months there were over 10 of the $950K Nellie Gail homes sold - many in June and early July. 

I think these numbers only affirm what I’ve been discussing a lot lately we’ve hit a plateau of sorts, not the bottom.  There’s a little stablization in the market and we’re not facing the full on free fall that we experienced for the last twelve months.  But there’s still a lot of sorting out to be done.  There’s a long way to go so we’ll have to see where the road takes us.