California's Existing Home Sales, Inventory Drop Year-to-Year

The pace of existing home sales decreased year-to-year in January in California, but the inventory of unsold units sitting on the market waiting for buyers dropped as well, according to the California Association of Realtors. Sales were off 10.6% from the same month a year ago, CAR said. Nevertheless, the pace of sales remained above the half-a-million-units-a-year threshold for the 17th consecutive month. In that regard, the sales pace is "holding steady at prepeak levels from early in the last decade," said CAR president Steve Goddard. At a seasonally adjusted rate, sales were running at a 539,040-unit-a-year pace in January, according to data collected from more than 90 local Realtor associations statewide. The median price of an existing, single-family detached house in January was $287,440, a 15% jump from the revised median for January 2009 of $259,960. But the January median was down 6.3% compared with $306,820 in December 2009. The year-over-year gain was the largest since December 2005, said CAR's chief economist, Leslie Appleton-Young. And though the month-to-month decline was large, it was not as great as the dropoffs in the same time period in both 2008 and 2009, when the median fell by more than 11%. Better yet, according to the economist, "the median price still is 17.2% ahead of the trough in this cycle."