Home Prices Drop: On a brighter side,...

Home Prices Drop: On a brighter side, the recession is making the Orange County housing market a bit more palatable to people whose annual incomes don’t approximate the British royal family’s.

In the new single-family-home market, average prices in Orange County dropped a hefty 9% during the past year, to $245,322 in January from $269,708 in January, 1992, according to TRW Redi Property Data.

That’s a bit better than Los Angeles County, where January’s $188,697 average price for a new single-family home was off 10.1% from a year earlier; and it is much better than San Bernardino County’s 17.8% price plunge to $149,001.

Resale prices fell 2.4% in Orange County to a January average of $243,605. That compares to a 3.8% decline to $237,830 in Los Angeles and a 5.8% drop in Ventura County to $221,903.