Tuesday, November 21, 2006

I.E. Home Prices Buck Trend! (SB Sun 112106) Sales down 21% from

BS Ranch Perspective:

This is kind of good news, the home sales drop but the values of the homes in our area seem to be holding on to their value. that is great news. I am happy to include this in my little message area. Mostly because I know most of my friends live in the area that the real estate is going up or holding its value.

Praise God!

BSRanch

I.E. home prices buck trend
Sales down 21 percent from 2005 but values rise
Michael Rappaport, Staff Writer

The national housing market may be staggering, but anyone looking for too much weakness in the Inland Empire will have a hard time finding it.

Yes, sales may have been down 21 percent from a year ago in October, but the median price of a home in San Bernardino County still went up and houses are still selling.

"We are going to see some weakness in the market in the short term," said Redlands-based economist John Husing, who studies the Inland Empire. "But the economy is strong, the job picture is extremely strong and the population is still growing."

All are signs that make 2006 very different from the early '90s, the last real period of market weakness locally.

"Three things need to happen before the market fully recovers," Husing said. "We need to work through some of the inventory on the market. We have to deal with the properties that are in foreclosure, the people who bought homes in 2005 and haven't had a run-up in equity.

"And we need to get the speculators out of the market, the ones who bought properties to flip them."

If there's a complicating factor, it's that the area has extremely low affordability. Only 6.7 percent of residents can afford to buy the median-priced home

sold in the San Bernardino-Riverside- Ontario area in the third quarter. "Despite all the doom and gloom about housing prices dropping, affordability has improved only slightly," said Robert Rivinius, president of the California Building Industry Association.

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