Southern California home sales plunged 12 percent in November from a year earlier, while prices rose at the slowest pace in three years amid a broad cooling in the housing market.
The median price in the six-county region was $522,750 in November, real estate firm CoreLogic said Thursday. That's up 3.5 percent from November 2017, the smallest rise since 2015.
The median _ the point at which half the homes sold for more and half for less _ slipped 0.4 percent compared with October and is now $14,250 below the all-time high reached in June.
It's not unusual for the median to peak in summer or slip from one month to the next. But the sales decline, combined with a plethora of other data, confirms that the housing market has slowed dramatically in recent months.
Not only were there more homes on the market last month than a year earlier, but sellers also increasingly trimmed their asking prices to close a deal.
The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index also shows a sharp deceleration in price appreciation. The measure is a far better gauge of price trajectory than the median because it accounts for differences in the types of homes selling in a given month.
In October, the latest month available, the index revealed prices in Los Angeles and Orange counties rose 5.5 percent from a year earlier. That rate has declined each month since reaching a recent peak of 8.2 percent in April. In San Diego County, price gains fell from 7.6 percent to 3.8 percent during the same period.
Real estate agents and economists attribute the pullback to housing's exorbitant cost. After years of steady price increases, there are simply fewer people able to afford a home in Southern California. And some who can still swing a mortgage payment worry about buying at the top of the market.
Other factors have also pushed up costs. The tax law President Trump signed last year limited the amount of deductions for property tax and mortgage interest. Meanwhile, mortgages aren't so cheap anymore. The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 4.55 percent this week, according to Freddie Mac. That's down from a recent high of 4.94 percent, but it's far higher than the 3.99 percent level of a year ago.
Economists generally do not expect a crash like the one that happened last decade when the housing bubble popped. But they disagree on what exactly comes next.
Some predict that home price appreciation will slow, but that unless there's a recession, prices will not fall. Others think prices could come down slightly. They argue that even with continued economic growth, home values have gotten too far out of whack when compared with incomes.
In the small, expensive market of Ventura County, the median has already come down slightly. Last month, the median for new and resale houses and condos was $575,000, down 0.9 percent from a year earlier. It was the first time that figure fell, year-over-year, in a Southern California county since 2012.
Elsewhere, prices rose. In Los Angeles County, the median climbed 5.8 percent to $600,000; in Orange County, 2.7 percent to $719,000; in Riverside County, 8.2 percent to $395,000; in San Bernardino County, 3.9 percent to $330,000; and in San Diego County, 4.6 percent to $565,000.
However, depending on how the data is looked at, more declines are evident.
When looking only at sales of previously owned single-family homes, the median price fell 0.7 percent from a year earlier in Orange County and 0.8 percent in Ventura County.
The last time that happened was December 2014. At the time, the housing market had cooled following a surge in mortgage rates and a run of double-digit price appreciation.
But home values didn't tank then. Instead, the Case-Shiller index showed, price appreciation slowed _ and eventually accelerated again.
Is that going to happen now? It should become clearer in the spring, which is typically the most competitive time to buy a home.
