O.C. Median Home Price Passes $200,000, Best in 3 Years
Orange County’s median home price surpassed $200,000 last month for the first time in three years, buoyed by brisk sales and a shrinking supply of homes on the market, a real estate data firm reported Monday.
Home sales in June rose 5.8% to 3,726, making it the second-busiest month since 1990, according to Acxiom/DataQuick.
The county’s robust economy is fueling renewed confidence in the housing market, said Barbara Amstadter, an agent with Ellis Realty Group in Newport Beach.
“There is now a sense of urgency to the market,” she said. More choice properties are receiving multiple offers, and homes in general are moving more rapidly after being put on the market, she noted.
These factors combined to push median prices up 2% to $201,000 in June. The price surge was even stronger for new and existing homes. The median price for new homes climbed 6.4% to $233,000, while the price of existing homes, the biggest segment of the market, climbed 4.4% to $215,000. Only the condominium market, which dipped 1.5% to $128,000, prevented overall prices from going up more in June, according to DataQuick.
“We’re starting to regain some of the ground we lost in values during the recession,” said DataQuick analyst John Karevoll.
Analysts say the housing market, which began to bounce back in earnest earlier this year from a prolonged slump, should continue to pick up momentum, particularly if interest rates remain low.
Since the end of May, the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has dropped from 7.8% to as low as 7.32%, according to Morro Bay-based Mortgage News Co.
Lower interest rates helped convince Kelly Dinh, 24, of Santa Ana, to take the home-buying plunge with her sister Angie, 28. The pair, who had been living with their brother, recently purchased a four-bedroom house with a pool just one block away in the Sandpointe community.
“The interest rates have gone down and the prices had decreased,” Dinh said. “We wanted to move before the prices went up,” she said.
The 2,300-square-foot house Dinh chose was listed five years ago at $280,000, then dropped to $260,000 and $225,000 before she picked it up for $219,000 in June.
“I really feel like I got a good deal,” she said.
Although prices are now starting to rise, many sellers are still holding back from listing their homes, figuring they can reap more from a sale when the market bounces back further, real estate agents said.
This wait-and-see attitude combined with the increasing demand had dropped the available supply of housing in the county to 4.5 months as of April, according to Fullerton-based Dynamic Marketing Resources, meaning that it would take 4.5 months for buyers to exhaust the current supply of houses.
