The house was a fixer, selling for $950,000 “as is.”
In addition to needing fresh paint, the kitchen, the bathroom and some of the floors needed to be updated, listing agent Stephen Haw said.
That didn’t stop buyers from getting into a bidding war over the West Torrance house. By the time escrow closed on May 19, the one-story, three-bedroom home had sold for $1.05 million, or $100,000 over the asking price.
”Right now, the supply of houses for sale is very limited,” said Haw, a broker with Keller Williams Realty in Palos Verdes. “There are more buyers than houses for sale on the market.”
The West Torrance house is increasingly typical of Southern California’s overall housing market, with bidding wars and deals for more than the asking price becoming more commonplace this spring.
Newly released CoreLogic figures show home prices are up since the start of the year, although they dipped slightly in May and have yet to recover fully from losses in the last half of 2022.
The median price of a Southern California home — or price at the midpoint of all sales — was $715,000 in May, down 0.3% from April after three months of gains. That’s still 3.8% below the median in May 2022 and $35,000 below the all-time high of $750,000 reached in April 2022.
Nevertheless, Southern California‘s housing market remains extremely competitive for those few buyers able to afford high prices and higher loan payments — despite inflation, high mortgage rates and threats of a recession.
“We expect prices to continue to rise on a month-to-month basis for the next few months because of the shortage of homes for sale,” Jordan Levine, California Association of Realtors chief economist, said in a recent statement. “Even with reduced homebuyer demand, California still has more homebuyers than homes to put them in.”
Meanwhile, home sales remain low, falling on a year-over-year basis for the 18th month in a row, CoreLogic reported Wednesday, July 5.
The…
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