Central San Diego

• 1,158 homes sold in October
• The median sales price was $320,000, down 1.54% from October 2008

North County Coast

• 589 homes sold in October
• The median sales price was $450,000, down 12.78% from October 2008

North County Inland

• 881 homes sold in October
• The median sales price was $330,000, up 0.30% from October 2008

East County

• 470 homes sold in October
• The median sales price was $285,000, the same as October 2008

South County

• 570 homes sold in October
• The median sales price was $285,500, down 1.55% from October 2008

We got these numbers from DQNews.

Dig Deeper Into the Trends

These numbers are for San Diego County. To see what’s happening in your neighborhood, check out our stats & trends pages.

The Basic Requirements

You qualify for the tax credit if the:

• Home you’re buying will be your primary residence
• Purchase price isn’t more than $800,000

This credit is not a loan; it’s yours, but keep in mind you have to live in your new home for three years. If you sell the home in less than three years, you’ll have to pay back the money.

What’s Changed?

With the new legislation, buyers have more time to find a home and more buyers are eligible for the tax credit:

• New deadline: To qualify, you need to be in contract with a seller by April 30th & close on the home by June 30th (The previous deadline was November 30, 2009).
• Not just for first-time buyers anymore: Home buyers who’ve owned and occupied a home for at least five consecutive years during the past eight years are eligible for a credit up to $6,500.
• Increased income limits: Individuals making less than $125,000 and couples making less than $225,000 are eligible (The limits used to be $75K & $150K).

First-time buyers are eligible for a credit up to $8,000 on homes purchased between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010. Qualified homeowners can a credit up to $6,500 on homes purchased between November 7, 2009 and June 30, 2010.

Bonus Link

You can check out the full text of the bill. Scroll about halfway down to sections 11 & 12:

• Sec. 11. Extension and Modification of First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit.
• Sec. 12. Provisions to Enhance the Administration of the First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit.

September Sales

• 3,347 homes sold in September
• The median sales price was $325,000, down from $329,000 in September 2008

We got these numbers from DQNews.

Dig Deeper Into the Trends

These numbers are for San Diego County. To see what’s happening in your neighborhood, check out our stats & trends pages.

What trends did you see in September?

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for San Diego County as of August:

Sixteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw an increase in their respective seasonally-adjusted HPIs between July and August. Only Cleveland, Las Vegas, Charlotte, and Seattle marked seasonally-adjusted drops month-to-month.

Here’s a look at San Diego’s latest tiered data, back through 2000:

The low tier has risen the most in this sudden summer surge, though not by a large margin (+3.55% in two months vs. +3.46% in three months for the middle tier). Given that much of the bounce has been attributed to the $8,000 tax credit available only to first-time buyers, it is not surprising to see the low tier perform slightly better.

In many other markets the low tier is seeing a more pronounced advantage, my theory as to why this is not the case in San Diego is that prices across all tiers here had already fallen quite a bit further than they had in other markets before this summer’s government intervention.

Here’s a chart of Case-Shiller HPIs for all the markets that Redfin serves:

Here’s our peak decline chart, in which we line up the peak Case-Shiller HPI value for each of Redfin’s markets, so we can see how long each market has been declining, and how much it has dropped from the peak.

Here’s the flip side of the peak decline chart—a graph of just this year, indexed to January = 100%:

According to a Reuters story from earlier today, Robert Shiller has described the sudden spike seen in many markets this summer as potential “bubble territory.” I agree. As I have discussed on these pages in recent months, the sudden and simultaneous nature of this price uptick does not bear any marks of a return to fundamentals, but instead seems to be driven almost entirely by a mad dash for cheap loans (interest rates in the 5s) and free money ($8k tax credit).

I’m a little bit concerned that by interrupting the natural correction of the housing market, recent government intervention is setting us up for even more pain down the road. I hope I am wrong.

Here’s what changed:

• Updated on the hour, every hour: We get updated listings from CLAW every hour. Before, we only could update them once a day.
• More homes for sale: We just added 145 more listings from CLAW and 217 more from MRMLS that we previously couldn’t show. There’s one catch: to see all the details for these homes for sale, MLS rules require that you sign in with a Redfin account or register with a verified email address before we can show you all the information.
• More amenities: Before, we couldn’t tell you whether the home has wood floors, if there’s a fireplace, whether the kitchen’s got marble counters. Now we can show all these details.

We plan on switching over even more Southern California MLS’s in the near future.

Questions about the updates? Just comment below or ask a question in our website forum.

In the charts below, we have taken all sales data from last month in San Diego County and sorted it by city.

Methodology
In order to maintain consistency with the automatically generated statistics posted to the Redfin neighborhood pages, we have slightly tweaked the way the statistics are compiled for this post series. First, we complied a list of every sale that took place in the month, calculating each sale’s sale-to-list ratio (based on the final list price). Next, we simply take an average of every individual sale’s sale-to-list ratio to calculate an entire area’s sale-to-list ratio. Any sales that came in with a sale-to-list ratio above 150% or below 50% are excluded from the calculation, and areas with fewer than twenty sales are excluded from the top and bottom ten rankings. Interested readers may download the full data summary in Excel format (xls).

Here are the top ten areas with the largest overall discount:

It’s interesting to note that on average, buyers are actually paying slightly above list price across the county. The overall discount rate was obviously lower than our last update, but since we tweaked the methodology slightly, unfortunately they’re not really comparable.

Here are the ten areas with the smallest discounts:

In the 66 areas we ranked, the median discount was -0.5%.

Is the area you’re shopping not on either the top 10 or bottom 10? No problem, just download the full rankings in Excel format and hit the “FullSummary” sheet.

Of the 2,738 sales we tracked in the 1-month period, 474 homes sold for 5% or more off the asking price, while 623 homes sold for 5% or more above the asking price.

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for San Diego County as of July:

Seventeen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw an increase in their respective seasonally-adjusted HPIs between June and July. Only Las Vegas, Seattle, and Detroit continued to mark seasonally-adjusted drops month-to-month.

San Diego already appeared to be finally headed into the price floor before the massive government intervention into the market and the economy in general this spring, so it is not terribly surprising to see that the year-over-year price declines have moderated significantly in the last few months.

Here’s a chart of Case-Shiller HPIs for all the markets that Redfin serves:

Here’s our peak decline chart, in which we line up the peak Case-Shiller HPI value for each of Redfin’s markets, so we can see how long each market has been declining, and how much it has dropped from the peak.

I suppose this summer could be called the summer of the sudden surge or the summer of the massive desperate government intervention. Either way, the result has been increasing prices in most markets over the past few months. Potentially good news if you’re trying to sell your house, but not especially encouraging if you’re hoping to buy, but prices had not yet come down quite into your reasonable range yet. Whether the $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit expires or not, I think this winter will be interesting.

Here’s the flip side of the peak decline chart, the Great Summer Bounce of Aught-Nine:

Remember: All real estate is local. Except of course when the federal government throws billions of dollars into the market, I suppose. Then we get a nationwide sample of the best recovery that $700 billion plus $787 billion can buy!

The following charts show the percent of MLS, FSBO or REO listings that were price-reduced at some point before leaving the market (either sold or removed unsold from the market) in the past 90 days. Cities/towns or neighborhoods in which the number of homes taken off the market was too small to provide believable estimates are excluded from ranking.

For those that are interested, I have uploaded the full data set in Excel format here. The downloadable Excel file also includes charts showing the top ten cities/towns/neighborhoods with the least reduced-price listings.

First up are the top ten cities with the most price-reduced listings:

Of the 31 cities/towns we ranked in the San Diego area this month, just two had price-reduced ratios of fifty percent or more. The median price-reduced ratio was 30.2%.

Getting a little more granular, let’s look at the top ten neighborhoods for price reductions:

Of the 68 neighborhoods we ranked this month, only one had a price-reduced ratio of fifty percent or more. The median price-reduced ratio was 28.0%.

Download the full spreadsheet to check where your neighborhood came in.

August Sales

• 3,306 homes sold, down from 3,148  in August 2008
• The median sales price was $325,000, down from $350,000 August 2008

We got these numbers from DQNews.

Dig Deeper Into the Trends

These numbers are for San Diego County. To see what’s happening in your neighborhood, check out our stats & trends pages.

What trends did you see in August?

Let’s check in on our stats once again and find out where buyers are currently getting the biggest discounts off asking price. If you are a potential buyer, this will help you to know which neighborhoods may be softer in terms of sale price discounts off list price, and help you know where to look for potential bargains.

In the charts below, we have taken all sales data from last month in the San Diego area and sorted it by zip code. We calculated the overall difference between the sale price and the list price. Note that this reflects the final list price, after all price drops in the listing. Any areas with fewer than ten sales are excluded from the top and bottom ten rankings, but interested readers may download the full data summary in Excel format (xls).

Here are the top ten areas with the largest overall discount:

The overall discount rate dropped noticably from June to July, falling from 2.3% to 1.5%.

Here are the ten areas with the smallest discounts:

In the 118 areas we ranked, the median discount was just 0.38%. 32 areas had an average sale price above the average list price.

Is the area you’re shopping not on either the top 10 or bottom 10? No problem, just download the full rankings in Excel format and hit the “FullSummary” sheet.

Of the 3,232 sales we tracked in the 1-month period, 582 homes sold for 5% or more off the asking price, while 706 homes sold for 5% or more above the asking price.