Residential Sales in County Increase by 5.4% From 1992 to 1993 : Housing: Most of the rise occurs during the fourth quarter. Experts say many first-time buyers were lured by a mix of low interest rates and low prices.
Residential real estate sales in Ventura County jumped 5.4% from 1992 to 1993, with a large chunk of the increase occurring in the fourth quarter of last year, according to a report by TRW-REDI Property Data, a national real estate information company.
“This could mark a turn-around for Ventura County,” said Nima Nattagh, an analyst with TRW-REDI.
Nattagh said low interest rates combined with low prices at the end of 1993 to make the Ventura County market irresistible to many first-time buyers. Local real estate agents confirmed Nattagh’s observations and data.
“A lot of people sitting on the fence said, ‘We’d better start doing it now,’ ” said Robert Gilbert, branch manager for Prudential California Realty’s Channel Islands office. “I live in Mandalay Bay, and this is the best pricing I’ve seen since the early ‘80s.”
Local agents, however, say they are puzzled that the lower end of the market has begun selling at a fast clip, but sales do not seem to be “bumping up” and rejuvenating the middle and higher ends of the market.
Mark Schniepp, director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecasting Project, said this is because more residents are leaving Ventura County than are arriving.
“People are cashing out and getting out of here,” he said. “The main reason is there are no jobs. There is nothing to keep them here.
“Jobs--that’s the major piece of the puzzle that’s missing,” Schniepp said.
Local real estate agents hope last week’s earthquake will add some stimulus to the county market. Already, they say, phones are ringing off the hook in east county realty offices, the result of San Fernando Valley homeowners looking for rental properties while they repair their damaged houses and condominiums in Los Angeles.
“I think there will definitely be a move to buy, but people may have to rent temporarily,” said Mary Hall, president-elect of the Conejo Valley Assn. of Realtors. “I’m not going to say for one minute that the Conejo Valley is earthquake-proof, but people’s perception is that it is safer out here.”
Schniepp said the same rental boom occurred in the area around Santa Barbara after the devastating 1990 fire there but that most renters eventually moved back to their original neighborhoods.
“The trouble that still exists is jobs,” he said. “If people are willing to commute, then yes, this earthquake could be a final straw kind of thing.”
The Ventura County residential market, however, proved healthier last year than the regional residential market.
Southern California as a whole saw its residential sales fall 1.3% from 1992 to 1993--an improvement over the 11.4% drop in sales between 1991 and 1992 but still quite a ways from the level of activity in the Ventura County market.
“I think the quality-of-life factor has something to do with it,” Nattagh said of the difference between the local and regional markets. “There’s been a big push out of Los Angeles in the last two years.”
Overall in the county, 8,845 new and existing single family houses and condominiums were sold in 1993, up from 8,394 residential units in 1992, according to the report.
Last year’s market still cannot compare with a boom market such as 1988, when 17,312 houses sold in the county in one year, Nattagh said. “You always reach a base level of activity in any given market,” he said, speculating that Ventura County reached its base level this fall and could only go up from there.
The average residential selling price in Ventura County in 1993 was $234,381, 1.6% lower than in 1992. Nattagh and other analysts, however, caution against paying much attention to average pricing figures. Many more lower-priced houses and condominiums sold in 1993 than did properties on the higher end of the market, and that phenomenon alone can drag down the county’s average selling price, Nattagh said.
