Home Sales Increase but Still No Sign of Recovery : * Housing: Stagnant prices and interest rates spur a jump in sales in October. Experts warn there is ‘still a lot of fear in the marketplace.’

October home sales in Orange County jumped 12% from a year earlier, but while this continues a gradual sales growth trend that began in early spring, industry experts say there are no signs yet of a recovery in the making.

The average price of a home sold in the county during October was $239,469, up 1.3% from $236,421 a year earlier, according to the report by TRW Redi Property Services.

And with stagnant prices and interest rates at their lowest point since the mid-1970s--30-year fixed mortgages are being quoted with 8.69% annual rates--there would be more sales activity if this were a healthy market, said UCI economist David Brownstone.

October’s jump in Orange County sales “represents a few smart people taking advantage of a limited window of opportunity,” La Jolla real estate consultant Sanford Goodkin said of the 4,004 homes and condominiums that were sold in the county during the month.

Orange County, in fact, was the only one of five Southland counties surveyed by TRW Redi to post a notable sales hike from October, 1990 to October, 1991.

The only other county with any increase was Los Angeles, where sales were up only 0.2%. Overall, sales in the region dropped 2.4% in October from a year earlier, the Riverside-based data service reported.

The Orange County increase, Goodkin and other specialists said, reflects a spurt of activity in a traditionally high-priced market, prompted by people taking advantage of declining interest rates.

“But there still is a lot of fear in the marketplace,” said Dennis Macheski, research director for the Price Waterhouse Real Estate Group in Newport Beach. “We are at a pregnant pause right now, where things could either get better or worse. It is too soon to tell.”

One thing that can be foretold from the sales figures, however, is that pressure is building for a demand-driven increase in housing prices whenever the economy does recover.

Dorothea Byrnes, a broker at ERA/Diversified Realty in Buena Park, said she has seen the demand building. “There are buyers out there,” she said.

In October, realtors in Buena Park, Cypress and La Palma listed 274 homes in the three-city multiple listing book and sold 85 homes, said Byrnes, president of the area’s realty board. A month earlier, with 235 listings, the same realtors reported only 42 sales.

Of the 4,004 homes and condominiums that closed escrow in Orange County in October, 3,615 were resale homes and only 389 were new homes.

The sale of 4,556 new homes in the first 10 months of 1991 represents a 21% decline from the 5,770 units sold from January through October, 1990.

At the same time, the number of resales in the county rose 6.3% in the first 10 months of the year, to 34,868 from 32,792 in the same period last year.

“That makes it really clear that there is pent-up demand out there,” Macheski said.