June Swoon Flattens Spring Real Estate Boom : Housing: Home sales dropped 6.6% from May. Most brokers blame the county’s sluggish economy.

Ventura County’s spring real estate boom came to a sudden halt in June, the California Assn. of Realtors reported Thursday.

After three consecutive months of hefty increases, sales of existing houses fell 6.6% in the county last month from May, the Realtors group said.

The decline represented a dramatic reversal from a 34.7% gain in May over April. Single-family house sales in the county registered month-to-month increases ranging from 30% to 63% in March, April and May.

Despite the end to the short-lived boom, agents said the market for existing houses in Ventura County is considerably better than it was a year ago. Single-family house sales in the county during June were 43.9% above June, 1990--the strongest year-to-year increase of any county in the state.

Home prices in the county also showed the state’s highest month-to-month increase. The median price of an existing house was $241,800 in June, the association said, representing a 4.4% rise over $231,580 in May but a decline of 0.4% from $242,810 in June, 1990.

Prices in Ventura County are the third-highest in California, the Realtors group said. The highest median price in June was $283,770 in Santa Clara County. Second-highest was elsewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a median of $266,880. Orange County was fourth with $240,540.

“A large part of the spring upswing was due to buyers’ optimism related to the end of the war in the Middle East,” said Dale King, co-owner of Century 21 Realty Sales in Ventura. “That optimism and the boom it inspired both sort of died in the water.”

King, like other brokers, blamed the county’s sluggish economy for the sudden downturn.

“It’s been seven to 10 years since we’ve seen a significant increase in spendable income when you consider the cost of living. Meanwhile, house prices have gone up and up. They’ve gone up about as far as they can go.”

King, who is chairman of the Multiple Listing Service of the Ventura Board of Realtors, predicted a further drop in sales in July, followed by a stabilized market the rest of the year.

Ventura real estate agents sold 102 houses and condominiums in June, King said. That represented an 8.1% decline from 111 escrow closings in May but a 37.8% increase over 74 sales in June, 1990.

Dave Norman, president of Dave Norman Real Estate Services in Oxnard, said the market “isn’t bad by any means, but the properties being sold tend to involve motivated buyers and motivated sellers. The price has to be realistic.”

As an example, Norman cited a three-story condominium that he recently sold. “It’s on a Ventura hillside and has great ocean and city views. The owner paid $470,000 for it in November, 1989. The escrow closed this week at $410,000.”

Both King and Norman said the fastest-selling properties in Ventura and Oxnard right now are single-family houses with asking prices of $200,000 or less.

“That’s the market for first-time buyers,” Norman said. “It’s the last market to die in a turndown and first to come back when conditions improve.”

Ruth Thomas, manager of Coldwell Banker’s Simi Valley-Moorpark office, said she was not surprised to see sales turn downward in June. “It’s a notoriously slow month. People are involved with graduations and so many other things besides buying houses.”

On the bright side, Thomas said, her office closed almost twice as many deals this June as in the same month last year. And, she added, business during July has improved over last month.

“Prices have dropped to a point where a lot more buyers can qualify than in the recent past,” Thomas said.

Relatively low interest rates also are helping many would-be buyers, Thomas said. She said lenders are now offering 30-year fixed-rate mortgages of 9 1/2% and even less, with a 1.5% loan fee.

Members of the Simi Valley-Moorpark Assn. of Realtors sold 189 houses in June, down 2.5% from 194 sales in May but up 54.9% from 122 sales in June, 1990.

The Conejo Valley Assn. of Realtors said sales of single-family houses in Thousand Oaks and other communities in the eastern county totaled 225 in June, down 8.9% from 247 in May but up 4.1% from 216 in June, 1990.

Conejo Valley brokers sold 65 condominiums in June, down 12.1% from 74 in May and down 1.5% from 66 in June, 1990.

As the spring boom has subsided, inventories of unsold homes have increased, brokers said. In Ventura, King said the average house is on the market 110 days before being sold. That is up from about 95 days earlier in the year, he said.

THE ECONOMY: Nation’s stagnant-housing report wasn’t the only bad news. D1