Area home sales fall - prices dip
March sales of homes in much of the South Bay was less than half of what it was a year ago, a sign of the continued weakness in the real estate market, according to a new report.
Last month, 149 single-family homes sold - a drop of 52 percent - and 84 condominium and town homes changed hands, representing a fall of 64 percent, according to the report released Friday by the South Bay Association of Realtors.
The Realtors' report excluded the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Inglewood and Lennox, three areas the group says follow different market dynamics than the rest of the South Bay.
The median price of a South Bay single-family home sold in March was $640,000, down 8.4 percent compared with the same month last year, the report says.
(The median represents the middle figure where half of homes sold for more and half for less.)
The median price of a condominium or town house sold last month was $534,280, a drop of 6.3 percent.
By comparison, the median home price in Los Angeles County was down 18.5 percent in March, according to DataQuick, a San Diego-based firm that compiles real estate statistics. Southern California's median home price fell 24 percent in March.
"Twenty-four percent is nowhere near a reality in our market," said Carol Olney, the association's president.
"We're in single digits."
Regarding the steep drop in the number of homes sold, Olney said, the volume is the disturbing thing.
It is unclear how the South Bay median price would have fared if the Peninsula, Inglewood and Lennox were included in the calculations, or if condos and town houses were grouped with single-family homes.
"We have a sense that Inglewood tends to trend more to South Los Angeles ... and Palos Verdes is a uniquely different dynamic as well," said David Kissinger, the group's director of government affairs.
Olney added that The Hill has its own Realtor association, "so I really shouldn't speak for them."
In addition to the median price, the South Bay Realtors report also included average sales prices.
The average price of single-family homes sold in March was $924,215, which was down just 0.7 percent compared to a year earlier.
The average price for condos and town houses was $614,109, down only 3.6 percent.
For both categories, the average sales price was much higher than the median, while the drop in average price was much milder than for the median.
The median is considered a more accurate measure of home prices, especially when representing a market with widely varying home values, said Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist at the Los Angeles-based California Association of Realtors.
"We rely on the median because we know there's a mix of homes out there. And there are some high-end homes out there that can skew the average up," Kleinhenz said.
That was the point of including the average, Olney explained, to show that even with a down market, sales of high-end homes are strong enough to skew the average upward.
"The average shows you that the high end is still selling," Olney said.
"Those who have money are spending it. Those who are working stiffs are hit. The middle class gets hit every time."
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