Clouds in San Diego!? Housing prices down 5.5% y-o-y

Date:February 9, 2007 | Author:Spencer Rascoff | Category:Real Estate

Although I live in Seattle, I frequently "Fantasy Shop" for houses in San Diego. So naturally, yesterday’s release of Zillow’s Q4 data on housing prices piqued my interest when I learned that San Diego housing prices (as measured by our Zindex) were actually DOWN 5.5% in the 4th quarter of 2006 versus a year earlier. However, I did a little data digging (if you’d like to do your own data analysis, feel free to download the San Diego data) and found these interesting tidbits:

  • Zillow has Zindex data on 163 different neighborhoods in San Diego, ranging from Del Mar Mesa (Zindex: $2M) to Mission Valley West (Zindex: $294K)
  • The median Zindex of those different neighborhoods is $491K, meaning that half of the neighborhoods have homes worth more than that, and half worth less

Now here comes the really interesting part — the average change in home prices in 4Q06 vs 4Q05 for the more expensive neighborhoods (as defined by their Zindex being > $491K) was -2.2%. Meanwhile, the average change in home prices for the less expensive neighborhoods was -5.4%.

Sandiegooverview

As with most income disparities in the US and elsewhere, this gap is even more pronounced at the top. The average change in housing values for all 12 neighborhoods with Zindexes > $1M was a stunning INCREASE of 5.8%. So while, overall, housing prices in San Diego DECLINED 5.5% year over year, the most expensive neighborhoods INCREASED 5.8%.

Sandiegoneighbs

If you’d like to read further about San Diego — here are a couple blogs written by locals you might find interesting: