LA home prices up 8.5% YOY amid plummeting inventory

Ever search for the perfect home and get the sinking feeling that there’s nothing out there? Well, in Los Angeles, the numbers would back you up.

Just over 14,200 homes were listed in Los Angeles County in January, according to Zillow, representing a year-over-year drop of nearly 22 percent. It was only the sixth time since 2013 that the number of homes listed for sale in the county has fallen below 15,000.

“Low inventory is going to mean a couple things,” Zillow economist Cheryl Young told Curbed. “One is there’s less out there. You may not find what you’re looking for right away.”

The lower inventory may have contributed to an uptick in prices, with the median price of a single-family home jumping 8.5 percent year-over-year to $650,000. Median prices for condos stayed more or less flat, at $515,000, the data show.

And homes are trading more rapidly. The average time on market for single-family homes dropped to 26 days, a decrease of 10 days from the same period last year, according to California Association of Realtors data cited by Curbed. The association also released data that shows that the average down payment for a home hit $107,700 in January – nearly $8,000 more than the same period last year. Higher down payments would make it harder for would-be homebuyers to pull the trigger.

“There’s still people out there looking,” Young told the publication. “But some of them won’t be able to get in.”

Isolate simply the wealthier submarkets of L.A, however, and it’s a different story. Looking at just Downtown LA and West Side neighborhoods such as Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Holmby Hills, Brentwood, Century City, Westwood, Malibu, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades and West Hollywood, Douglas Elliman found that the median sales price inched up less than 1 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2019.

[Curbed] –TRD STAFF