San Diego Housing Market News and Analysis

The burgeoning slowdown I described in last month's post seems to have arrived... witness, months of inventory:

My favorite single indicator of housing market strength is the following ratio:


This ratio is called "months of inventory," because it measures how many months it would take to sell the current amount of inventory at the current sales pace. Thus it is a handy single indicator of both supply and demand. It also happens to be very predictive of near-term price changes (a relationship which I first learned of from the great Bill McBride).

Getting on with the current state of affairs: the months-of-inventory ratio (let's called it MI for this post!) shows that the market has cooled off quite a bit in recent months. Here's a graph of MI for each month over the past almost-4 years:

Let's start with some big picture stuff... here are assorted MoM and YoY stats:


Prices have decelerated but are still rising, at least based on the 3 month average for single family homes:

Time for a valuation update! These graphs should be familiar to regular Piggs; for anyone who'd like some background please see these two Voice of San Diego articles: how to measure housing valutions and how mortgage rates impact prices.

Onto the graphs... here is San Diego home valuation index, measuring how expensive homes are compared to local incomes and rents:

Apologies for the delay in updating the data... let's dive right in!

Home prices have been very strong so far this year, with the median price per square foot showing a big jump in February. Bear in mind that this is a noisy figure, but the fact that the single family median held firm in March strengthens the case that the price increase is "for real":