Good news for home sellers and buyers comes from CoreLogic, a real estate tracking company that reported an uptick in home prices and the number of homes on the market in San Diego County.
The median price of a single family home jumped from $555,000 in March to $570,000 in April — a 2.7 percent increase following what had been a relative weak market at the end of 2018.
At the same time, the number of homes sold in San Diego County went from 3,224 in March to 3,593 in April — an 11.4 percent increase.
The median price paid for single family homes sold in April throughout Southern California was $527,500, up from $515,000 in March and from $520,000 in April 2018, according to CoreLogic.
Declining mortgage rates and increased inventory helped attract new buyers, according to CoreLogic analyst Andrew LePage.
Despite the month-over-month gains, LePage said home sales throughout Southern California so far in 2019 are below what they were in April 2018 and below the annual average.
Statewide, sales have fallen on a year-over-year basis for the last nine consecutive months.
What might be surprising is that best time to sell a house varies from neighborhood to neighborhood in San Diego County, according to a recent report from HomeLight, a real estate referral company based in San Francisco.
Based on a survey of more than 75,000 home sales from 2014 to 2018, people in San Diego who list their homes for sale in May could sell them for 2.9 percent more that the annual average.
In Poway listing a home for sale in November could lead to a sale that’s 3.6 percent higher than average, and in El Cajon, August is the magic month to list home with a likelihood that it will sell for nearly 4.6 percent above average.
There is a catch.
Bad news for buyers comes from a recent study by Trulia — another tracking service — that ranks San Diego fifth among metro areas in the nation for having priced the most people out of the housing market.
With a median family income pegged at $75,110, Trulia said people flat out can’t afford any homes in 8 percent of San Diego County neighborhoods
Only San Francisco, San Jose Los Angles and New York City were worse.
The least affordable neighborhoods in San Diego County were two in Rancho Santa Fe, where the median home prices were about $2.8 million and about $2.2 million.
The two neighborhoods with the most affordable housing were in Campo, where 92.6 percent of the homes were in a price range that median income families could handle with a median price of $294,804 and in Borrego Springs, where 85.2 percent of the homes fit the budget of the average family with a median price of $257,541.
