LA home prices hit a record high in July—again

 

For the fourth month in a row, sale prices are the highest they’ve ever been

Prices are up in LA County, but overall sales have dropped off since June.
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Home prices in Los Angeles climbed again in July, breaking or tying a record for the fourth month in a row, according to a new report from CoreLogic.

The report shows that the median sale price in LA County jumped to $575,000 in July—a 1.1 percent increase over the month before and the highest price ever recorded in the area.

That’s also a sizable 8.1 percent bump over July of 2016, when the median price was just $532,000 (okay, that’s still pretty high).

Though prices climbed during the month, the total number of homes sold dropped off 4.7 percent. That’s consistent with trends across Southern California, where the number of sales dropped 17.6 percent month-over-month.

According to CoreLogic, a reduction in sales is typical between June and July, but this year that decline was particularly steep, with 15.7 percent fewer homes sold last month than the July average in Southern California.

According to CoreLogic analyst Andrew LePage, the smaller number of sales isn’t too surprising, given the fact that an unusually high number of homes sold in June.

“The drop-off in activity suggests that late-spring homebuyers burned through a sizable chunk of an already tight inventory of homes for sale, which then constrained July sales,” says LePage.

That tight inventory may help to explain the soaring prices across Southern California. The report notes that, regionwide, the median sale price is 47 percent higher than it was 15 years ago—even when adjusted for inflation.

LePage notes that the current surge in sale prices is reminiscent of the housing bubble that led to the mortgage crisis beginning in 2007, but that today’s market is less dependent on the risky loans that fueled the explosion in prices at that time.