San Diego County’s resale home price dropped in May and may be the first sign of a cooling housing market.

The resale single-family home price was $940,000, a $10,000 drop from the previous month, said CoreLogic/DQNews on Wednesday. This is the first time in 2022 that the resale home price has gone down, and is part of a slight slowdown seen across Southern California.

This story is for subscribers

We offer subscribers exclusive access to our best journalism. Thank you for your support.

It comes as the number of homes with a price reduction is starting to rise across San Diego County. While rising mortgage rates are typically seen as the biggest reason for a cooldown, it hasn’t meant much yet for final sale prices. The overall median home price in San Diego County — a combination of new and resale condos, townhouses and single-family homes — was $850,000, a record high, surpassing the previous record in April of $840,000, and representing a 17.2 percent annual increase.

Chris Anderson, board president of the Greater San Diego Association of Realtors, said higher interest rates are slowing the market but not to the level a lot of potential buyers might want to see.

“There has been a bit of cooling with interest rates,” she said. “It has made a difference. But I’m still getting multiple offers.”

The average rate in May for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage was 5.23 percent, its highest monthly average since 2010, said Freddie Mac. It has gone up considerably since, with the average around 6.23 percent Tuesday, said Mortgage News Daily.

Anderson said a lot of her buyers are fed up with high rent prices and are determined to buy. The difference now is their buying power is lower, meaning they are changing what they are searching for to “smaller and older,” she said.

From May 9 to June 5, 6.5 percent of San Diego County home prices had a price reduction — the highest level in at least four years, said the Redfin Data Center. At the same time, 62.5 percent of homes were off the market in two weeks. That’s much lower than a high of 75 percent in February.

Home inventory is also up, but not much in a historic sense, so shopping for a home is still likely to be competitive. Redfin said there were 3,714 homes for sale in the same time period. While that is up from a low of around 2,000 at the start of the year, it is still reduced from past years. In May 2021, there were 4,176 homes listed for sale; 6,163 in 2020; and 8,875 in 2019.

Jeff Grant, owner and agent with Sand & Sea Investments, said he now has 11 homes he is getting ready to list for sale, compared with three at this same time last year. He said many of his sellers have a mentality that they better sell soon or will miss out.

“They are trying to cash out,” Grant said. “It’s significant. I’m seeing more listings hit the market than I’ve seen in a year.”

He said the difficult thing for local sellers is that they will need to buy a new home, once they sell, at a higher interest rate. Grant said a lot of his sellers are avoiding some of that, with plans to sell here and then move to a state with a lower-cost housing market, like Texas.

San Diego’s home market might be cooling more in June, based on price reductions that have been ongoing the last few weeks.

Here are some examples of recent price reductions:

While the market for resale single-family homes cooled a bit in May, it isn’t the same for all home types. The median for resale condos — the point at which half the homes sold for more and half for less — reached a record high of $663,000 in May, up from the previous record of $655,000 in April.

The newly built median was $809,500, a figure that combines condos, townhouses and single-family homes. A peak of $812,500 was set in October 2018 when there was an influx of luxury single-family homes for sale.

There were other examples of the home market cooling in Southern California. On a monthly basis, Ventura County’s median was down 2.3 percent to $794,250, and Los Angeles County was down 0.6 percent to $860,000.

The biggest monthly increase, 1.4 percent, was in Riverside County for its median of $598,500; It was followed by San Diego County with a 1.2 percent increase; Orange County up 0.4 percent for a median of $1 million; and San Bernardino County up 0.1 percent for its median of $520,000.

Get U-T Business in your inbox on Mondays

Get ready for your week with the week’s top business stories from San Diego and California, in your inbox Monday mornings.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Authorities are investigating what caused a cargo ship to become grounded in the shipping channel to Georgia’s busiest seaport

Russian energy giant Gazprom announces reduction in natural gas through key European pipeline for second day in a row

Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov’s centrist coalition government will face a no-confidence vote brought by the main opposition party

Ford is recalling over 2.9 million vehicles in the U.S. to fix a transmission problem that can increase the risk of inadvertent rollaway crashes

Russia’s Gazprom has announced a reduction in natural gas flows through a key European pipeline for the second day in a row, hours after Germany’s vice chancellor said its initial move appeared to be political rather than a result of techical problems

Budget airline Ryanair says it has scrapped its controversial Afrikaans language test for South African travelers aimed at weeding out people with phony passports

Privacy Policy Terms of Service Sign Up For Our Newsletters