Real Estate Market Has Gone From Red-Hot to Ice-Cold

While the Ventura County economy is in a general slowdown, most real estate experts now agree that the local housing market has been hit hardest of all.

Single-family house sales in the county were off by nearly one-quarter in July from the previous year.

The median sales price of single-family houses dropped a whopping $2,665 from June to July and $12,311 from a year ago.

Desirable houses that would have sold overnight in the red-hot market of 1988 now take six months or longer to attract a buyer.

“We are about three months into a recession,” said Jack Gilbert, president of Told Corp., one of the largest developers in the county. “It will bottom out in five to six months and level off. Then it will go up.”

Gilbert, primarily a commercial and industrial builder, has scrapped plans to build low-priced manufactured houses in Oxnard. He is considering starting a similar project elsewhere in the county.

Ray E. Lamb, president of Lamb Realty, one of the county’s largest independent brokers, said his sales are off 50% from two years ago.

“But that was a hyper market,” he said. “Compared to normal times, we’re down about 20% to 30%.”

In an ultimate recognition of the slump, brokers say that sellers are finally realizing that they will not get top dollar for their houses nor will they sell quickly.

Clarence Bales, manager of Century 21 Central Coast Realty, said his staff now requests six-month listings from all prospective sellers. In past years, 90-day commitments were routine.

“We’re getting very little resistance” to the extended time period, Bales said. “People realize houses aren’t selling overnight, as they did in the past.”

Jim Bruckner, a Ventura-based real estate broker, believes that the slump is part of a natural market cycle that will allow the real value of houses to catch up with inflated prices.

“My theory is that prices went up so much, so fast over a three- to four-year period that this is like a technical adjustment,” he said.

But Ventura County prices are still too high for most residents. The California Assn. of Realtors reports that only about 12% of families in the county could afford to buy a house at the current median price of $240,140.

With a normal 20% down payment, a buyer of a median-price house would need an annual household income of about $70,000 to qualify for a fixed-rate mortgage.

Janet and James Black, for example, have good jobs but see housing prices as far out of their reach. When they and their two children moved to Ventura from Wisconsin five years ago, they sold their house for $48,000.

She operates a graphics business and her husband is an electronics engineer at Point Mugu, but despite their combined incomes they do not think they can afford to buy a comparable house here and now rent a house for $950 a month.

“We don’t feel we will ever own a home again if we stay here,” said Janet Black, who added that the family is considering moving to either the Pacific Northwest or Colorado in the next five years.

But Bruckner and other brokers say potential buyers are out there, even in these slow times.

“You can sell a well-priced house in this market in the neighborhood of 45 to 60 days,” Bruckner said. “But if a house is not well priced, it won’t sell at all.”

Times staff writer Kenneth R. Weiss contributed to this story.