California January 2007 Home Sales

The median price paid for a home last month was $462,000. That was down 2.1 percent from December's revised $472,000, and up 2.4 percent from a revised $451,000 for January a year ago.

A revised total of 32,425 new and resale houses and condos were sold statewide last month. That's down 25.3 percent from a revised 43,431 for December, and down 16.7 percent from a revised 38,937 for January 2006. The year-over-year decline was the most moderate since a decline of 16.2 percent last March. The year-over-year sales decline peaked last September at 34.5 percent.

Entire Report HERE

Starting with the January numbers, DataQuick has changed the way it identifies so-called "arm's-length" transactions ? normal deals with a buyer and seller and money changing hands. The change, the first since DataQuick began publishing statistics in 1989, takes advantage of significant data enhancements the past 18 years. While the revised numbers increase historic monthly sales counts by about ten percent, trends over time remain virtually unchanged. More about the change can be found at their Methodology Changes page.

DataQuick's company's chief analyst, John Karevoll, " While the redone numbers are slightly different, the trends are virtually identical. You have to remember, DataQuick has just about everything in its database. So you need to figure out what you want to look at, and eliminate the other stuff. For the numbers we use in the media, we try to do our best to identify so-called arms-length transactions. Part of the methodology has been that we want a transaction to have a seller, a buyer, a formal transfer of ownership, and we want to see money changing hands. We've changed the "money changing hands" part to include "and/or if the purchase was financed." We made some other changes, too, but that was the main one."

Housing Bubble and Real Estate Market Tracker for 2/19 from SA