Don't know what it means, don't know how it'll shake out, but there are signs that the California housing market is -- finally! -- cooling:
on Friday, the Commerce Department reported that sales of new single-family homes fell 11.3% nationwide in November, the largest drop in nearly 12 years. The report hurt shares of KB Home, D.R. Horton and Pulte Homes over concerns that the home-building industry was starting to cool off.
In the Southland, the median price for homes last month hit a record $479,000, but sales of new and previously owned homes fell 3% from October, according to DataQuick.
For the first 11 months, single-family home construction in California was up 3.5% to 145,119 units, compared with 140,145 for the first 11 months of 2004, the California Building Industry Assn. said.
Most of my peers are not corporate lawyers or MBA's -- the idea that they could, in the next couple of years, plunk down half a million (or whatever the mortgage payments amount to) on a first home is absurd. In a housing market like this, it's easy to see how folks who already have homes are trading around, but it's much trickier to understand where new entrants into the market are coming from. And yet they're building at a record rate.
Man, FISA is so much simpler than real estate.
