Friday, December 26, 2008

Laguna Beach Median Home Price Tanks in November

Dataquick's latest numbers are out in the OC register and on www.dqnews.com.
The drop in Lagnua' median home price is quite astounding. It is now $970,000, down a whopping 47% from last year. To all of those people who thought high end areas were "immune" - here is your dose of reality. I've skipped open houses for the last 3 weeks and am glad I didn't buy a home last year - my losses would have already been staggering. Happy holidays to all out there. Peace.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I dont know why anyone would think Laguna Beach would be immune? LB is not high end. A nice beach town with middle, upper middle and a hand full of poor people. adverage household income is lower than all surrounding communities except Dana Point. I think over the recent years Laguna got asswollen head, assinine tv shows, more mcmansions on the sand,poseur artists and wanabees. The real estate will continue to go down until people in the community can afford to buy.

Anonymous said...

I notice the first listing of a house in the Port streets of NB for under $1.25 million. Maybe those areas will start to drop off also.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous, I agree with you about the class structure of Laguna Beach, but it is a high end area based on prices. Once I checked last year, and the median in Laguna Beach was even more than in Beverly Hills.
As for the lower median in the $900,000K range, to me that means that more lower priced homes in the market are selling and the higher priced market didn't do as well. It doesn't mean that $1,500,000 homes dropped to $$999,000. There are still way, way too many WTF prices in Laguna Beach.

Mr. Blue said...

If higher priced homes don't sell so well, then the market pressure means the prices of those higher priced homes will go down....

Anonymous said...

The fact is, there are a lot of rather badly constructed older homes in LB, some ready to slide in the next rainstorm, some, just Tiki-shack ugly and built as beach houses in the 50s and 60s when So California was still laid back--the myth the Beach Boys sang about that has now evaporated. My realtor friend tells me the high-end are people from abroad--maybe some Russian oligarchs will be buying!
The OC was once where people went to get away from it all , particularly LB, a funky, artsy place--rather slow, really.
Nowadays, the image of the OC is all speculation and big money, the Crystal Cove set, but it wasn't always this way.
LB is not so easy to get in and out of in the high summer months, so not everyone can live there and commute effectively.
Maybe lower prices will bring back some real artiss and bohemians--not just Warren Buffet's crowd!
And maybe big sideburns and wide ties will come back, too.