Southland Home Sales Move on a Fast Track
Half way through a year when land use and community growth have become ballot-box issues, the Southland’s housing market is experiencing a heady period.
Prices keep escalating, camp-outs and sellouts follow as nervous buyers snap up homes, even bidding up the prices for new and existing properties.
While this year may end a six-year period of economic growth nationwide, the Southern California experience doesn’t seem to fit that pattern. Its diverse and vigorous economy, despite its traffic, infrastructure and environmental shortcomings, continues at a steady pace.
From among a flood of press releases sent in by happy builders and developers, here is a sampling of single-family homes and prices involved in one of our classic hot-sales cycles:
The third phase of construction at San Remo, a Pardee Construction Co. project in Del Mar Highlands, San Diego County, has more than 400 would-be buyers for 23 homes. Prices will start in the mid-$200,000s. The first two phases sold out within hours of their respective openings.
Another San Diego area project, Sunland Housing Group’s Vista Mar in Rancho Penasquitos, quickly sold out all 160 units in its final phase at prices ranging from $165,990 to $210,000.
At the northerly end of the market, in the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys, sales activity increased 109% during the spring quarter, says Mike Volz, vice president of Continental Land Title Co.
A record 2,799 homes were sold, ranging in price from $55,950 (attached units at Desert Hills, Lancaster) to--stand back!--$545,450 for single-family homes at the Windemere Collection, Valencia.
At Leisure Technology’s 19-unit Santa Clarita project, 12 of the homes at The Oaks sold at prices upward from the somewhat odd figure of $369,990.
And Royal Ridge homes, view estate dwellings in a gated Hills of Anaheim project, has 49 homes in its newly opened initial phase, priced from the “low $400,000s.” Its developers, Taiyo Investments USA (Japanese-owned) expect a lively weekend.
Industry leaders attribute much of this buying spree to consumer concerns about the limited-growth movement throughout the state. Any mandated slowing of the homebuilding process or moratoriums would automatically increase the value of housing and land.
On the positive side, they cite the stability of the area’s economy and still-palatable mortgage interest rates.
Although a key slow-growth initiative issue failed in Orange County on June 7, efforts to slow the construction pace contin ues in other areas, and San Diego will be the next big battleground in November.
While the median price for an occupied, typical American home is now $87,700, the median prices hereabouts are drastically higher, as always.
The latest (April) tabulations from the California Assn. of Realtors shows that the highest median priced home is in Orange County, standing at $198,000. Los Angeles County follows with $170,000 and San Diego, with $137,000.
Remember that those are median prices. Do some of you have the nagging thought that, at today’s prices, you couldn’t afford to buy your own home?
