Bay Area home prices post record gains, sales fall in June
Bay Area home prices saw record gains in June as the median sale price rose 33% from a year earlier and sales declined amid extremely tight inventory.
The median sale price reached $555,000 last month in the nine-county Bay Area, a 6.9% jump from May, real estate research firm DataQuick said Thursday. The median price in Southern California, released Wednesday, saw a record gain of 28%.
A decline in foreclosure sales, an improving economy, and low mortgage rates fueled the record rise in the Bay Area, DataQuick said. Sales of homes that had been foreclosed upon within the last year fell to 6% of the resale market in June -- the lowest level since August 2007.
The number of sales, meanwhile, declined by 9.4% since a year ago, an indicator that the supply of for-sale homes remains tight, which pushes up prices.
June’s median sale price remains below the $665,000 peak reached in 2007, when loose lending standards helped push the market to record highs before it crashed. DataQuick President John Walsh said the dramatic home price gains should begin to taper off as the market continues to heal.
“We’re still bouncing off the bottom. This next part of the cycle should be fairly self-adjusting,” he said in a statement. “As prices go up, more homes will come on the market. Price pressures will ease. The only element we don’t know much about right now is how much pent-up demand there really is out there.”
Homebuyers are putting “near record amounts of their own money” into home purchases, DataQuick said. Last month, buyers put $2.3 billion of their own dollars in either down payments or cash purchases. That’s down from a record $2.6 billion in May, but an increase from $2.2 billion last June.
The median sale price is the point at which half of homes sold for more and half sold for less; it is influenced by the types of homes selling as well as a general rise or fall in values.
DataQuick said roughly three-fourths of June’s 33% increase could be attributed to a rise in values, while the rest was because a more expensive mix of homes sold.
In San Francisco, the median price reached $883,000, a 23.8% increase from June 2012. The largest increase came in Alameda County as the median price rose 44% over the year to $540,000 in June.
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