San Diego County's median home price dipped below the $300,000 mark last month for the first time in seven years as distressed properties continued to weigh down the market, MDA DataQuick reported Wednesday.
The overall median in January was $280,000, down from $300,000 in December and off $149,000 or 34.7 percent from January 2008. It was the first time since April 2002 that the median fell below $300,000 and the lowest median since January of that year.
At the same time, sales rose 34.7 percent from a year earlier to 2,459 transactions. Resale houses and condos soared 57.5 percent and 74.5 percent, respectively, while new homes, including condo conversions, fell to only 119 sales.
That was the lowest for any month in the 21 years that DataQuick has been monitoring San Diego – with developers virtually halting construction while they clear out unsold inventory and seek financing for new phases.
The drop in prices and rise in sales reflected the growing dominance of low-cost foreclosures, which represented a record 55 percent of all resales in the county last month.
Of the 2,240 house and condo resales that closed escrow in January, 1,232 were properties that had gone through foreclosure sometime in 2008.
As foreclosures have grown, owners of nondistressed properties have generally chosen to keep their homes off the market while hoping for prices to rise.
That attitude is reflected in the number of active listings maintained by Sandicor, the multiple listing service for local real estate.
According to the San Diego Association of Realtors, there were 15,108 active listings yesterday, down 18.1 percent from year-ago levels but up slightly from mid-January's 14,997, a normal seasonal uptick.