Southern California Home Sales Rise 14% as Investors Make Record Purchases
Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Charles Calomiris, a professor at Columbia Business School, talks about the outlook for the U.S. housing market and global central bank policy. He speaks with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance Midday." (Source: Bloomberg)
House and condominium sales in Southern California rose 14 percent in December from the previous month as investors and second-home buyers made a record share of purchases, DataQuick said.
A total of 19,247 homes sold last month in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, Ventura, San Bernardino and Orange counties, the San Diego-based data seller said today in a statement. Investors and second-home buyers accounted for 26.4 percent of transactions, up from 25.1 percent in November and matching a February 2011 peak.
The regional housing market in 2012 “might offer the ‘rock bottom’ for pricing that many buyers and sellers have been waiting for,” DataQuick President John Walsh said in the statement. Foreclosures and short sales, where a home is sold for less than the amount owed, accounted for more than half of Southern California sales, pushing values down.
The median price paid in December was $270,000, down 1.8 percent from the previous month and 6.9 percent from a year earlier. Prices matched the low for 2011 and marked the 10th consecutive decline on a year-over-year basis, DataQuick said.
November’s sales volume was down 1.4 percent from a year earlier, the company said.
In a separate report today, the California Association of Realtors said completed sales of existing single-family homes in the state rose 3.3 percent from November and 0.1 from December 2010. It was the third gain in a row from the previous month and sixth straight on an annual basis, according to the Los Angeles- based group.
To contact the reporter on this story: Dan Levy in San Francisco at dlevy13@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Daniel Taub at dtaub@bloomberg.net
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