Keeping Tabs On the Southern California Housing Market

The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin observes that the Southern California housing market is a lot like the weather: Everybody talks about it, nobody can do anything about it.

To carry the analogy further, sometimes it seems as if the folks trying to analyze and predict what’s coming in the greater Los Angeles housing market and beyond about as accurate as the weatherman who says there’s no way it’s going to rain.

The lesson: Don’t forget your umbrella.

For the past two or three years, people with a lot of initials after their names have been arguing over the direction home prices will be taking.

There’s a bubble; prices are bound to fall.

There’s no bubble; prices will keep rising.

Add in the burgeoning subprime (bad credit home loan) lending scandal and the rise in foreclosures as the adjustable-rate mortgages of the past few years reset and you’ve got a veritable Rubik’s Cube to try to solve.

In February, the California Association of Realtors reported the median price of a single-family detached home in California was $564,700, more than 2 1/2 times the national median of $212,800.

In addition, the national median declined 1.3 percent from February 2006, while the California home prices marked a 5.7 percent increase over the same period.

If the conclusion you draw from this is that California is somehow through the looking glass, you might not be far wrong.

The CAR changed its method of measuring affordability more than a year ago when the results kept showing that fewer than one in seven families could afford a home loan to buy a median-priced house.

That’s not the upbeat information that any prospective California home loan seeker wants from their Realtor. The perceptions people have are clear:

• Houses are too expensive.
• California mortgage payments are too high.
• If you don’t already own a house, you’re going to have a hard time buying one.
• Something has got to give.

So what’s the real story? What’s really happening in the California housing market, particularly in the Inland Empire? Is it a good time to buy? A good time to sell? A good time to wait, or just a good time to weep?

Continue reading this article in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin …