No Cooling Trend Seen in the Housing Market
The super-hot housing market continued to simmer last month in Ventura County, with median prices of resale homes and condominiums reaching record heights, experts said Monday.
Total home sales jumped 15% over May 2000, and the median home price rose 6.6%, according to figures released Monday by DataQuick Information Systems, a La Jolla-based research firm.
The median price paid for a resale house was $283,000, and the median price for a resale condominium was $193,000--both all-time highs.
“Everybody is watching the market with a magnifying glass to find signs of this economicslowdown, and it’s just not here right now,” said John Karevoll, the analyst who prepared the report.
The median price is the point at which half the homes sold for more and half sold for less.
The median price for a new house or condo was $402,000, Karevoll said.
“I’ve been saying it all along, and that’s that the home sales sector is still very strong,” said Mark Schniepp, director of the California Economic Forecast Project.
Although May showed a higher number of homes sold, Schniepp said that a comparison of thefirst five months with the same period last year shows a slight decrease.
“Last year was a pretty good year and this year is a pretty good year, but this year has been just a little slower,” Schniepp said.
The report shows that 1,519 homes were sold last month, the highest since March 2000.
Ventura County also appears healthier than other parts of Southern California, experts said.
May home sales in Los Angeles County fell 1.1%, compared with May 2000, and Orange County saw a decline of 15.7%.
Karevoll predicted that home prices in Ventura County will continue to rise during the next few months.
“Prices will continue to go up but . . . at a stable pace,” he said.
The hot spots for home sales last month were Fillmore, west Thousand Oaks and south Oxnard. Fillmore saw a 91% jump in home sales--from 12 to 23. There was a 47% increase in west Thousand Oaks, from 55 to 81, and a 33% increase in south Oxnard, from 57 to 76.
The median home price in west Thousand Oaks was $302,000, a jump of 4.1%; in Fillmore it was $186,000, a jump of nearly 5%; and in south Oxnard it was $183,500, an increase of 1.9%.
The largest decrease in home sales occurred in east Ventura, where sales near Ventura College and the County Government Center dropped from 104 to 82, a 21% decrease.
Median home prices jumped tremendously in two communities--Ojai, which saw a 60% rise from $260,000 to $416,250 with 29 homes sold, and southern Thousand Oaks, which rose nearly 14% from $383,250 to $436,500, with 31 homes sold.
The interest rate for an average 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage was 6.76% Monday, according to Bankrate.com, which publishes nightly averages based on its survey of nearly 3,000 banks in 50 states.
