Liar Loan said:
During the last crash, Irvine got bailed out by Chinese buyers. During this crash, Chinese buyers are drying up. So the case could be made that Irvine has more excesses built into the market than coastal cities, which accounts for the faster and sharper drop in prices you are experiencing.
So you just proved one of my points. Home prices aren't just data points. There are many factors, including non-fundamentals ones, that can affect pricing that the median/mean/average don't reflect or predict. Many were skeptical of my FCB Theory... seems like your are a believer.
Liar Loan said:
Once you average a series of six or twelve medians, they cease to be medians. You have to pick one or the other, mean or median, because even the lowliest statistics professor at UCI would advise against taking the mean of a series of medians to derive anything meaningful about the data. The mean, median, and mode are all meant to be summary statistics that capture the "center" of the data. They are alternatives to one another, not designed to be layered on top of one another.
As I said, "housing analysis" isn't just statistics. Why can't we use averages of medians over time to smooth out the outliers so you can see the trends? Look at the numbers I posted, notice something about those medians? Looks a bit seasonal doesn't it?
And using a median from peak to trough and YOY is flawed. Another poster pointed this out to you before on your usage of "median" to determine actual house to house price comparison doesn't really work. I've said this many times before but it's not the same housing stock unless these numbers are broken down into more micro categories. Just like your 28% drop number from peak to trough during the last crash. A reason the median was so low was during that one month, could be more lower priced housing like condos were sold... and conversely, during the peak, higher priced housing like large SFRs sold (which is usually the case, in a rising market, higher end homes sell from move-up buyers cashing in on equity and during a down market, lower end homes sell to first time buyers jumping in and people looking for bargains).
That's why I prefer to use a rolling month average to smooth out this housing stock factor so you get a more realistic picture of what actual price drops were. This also takes into account that home buying isn't an instant transaction (as you said), it takes months from searching to offers to escrow to closing. I did this before but if you use a 3 or 6 month average around your peak/trough points from the last crash, the number is closer to 20% for Irvine which is closer to what I saw in the housing stock I was looking at.
Sales volume is a leading indicator of the market. Once sales start to decline, it takes awhile for prices to find a new equilibrium, especially since real estate transactions take a long time to close, and the market then needs time to absorb that new information.
Yes. Someone else keeps saying this too. But according to you guys, sales volume have been down since March 2018. How long does equilibrium take? And since 2018, prices hit a new high in May/June 2019, how did that happen if volumes were at record lows this past year?
And you want to keep using that whopping 4.6% drop. Isn't that within a seasonal delta? I've posted that YOY prices in the last 5-8 years have experienced drops of 5-15% so isn't anything in that range considered business as usual?
Drops beyond that... to me, is worth talking about. Some have predicted that *prices* will drop over 15%. You said "big"... is that what you mean?
And what factors are you citing that would do this? There are no more ninja loans, everyone is well qualified who bought not just in Irvine but most of SoCal. What events are going to lead to "big" drops in Irvine home prices? 2020 Election? Chinese mass exodus from Irvine real estate? Rising mortgage rates? Earthquake? Lagging price to volume inflection point?
But I'll backtrack here a bit. From what I remember before, real estate usually cycles in 7-9 year time spans and it looks like we are due, so any predictions for future drops are more likely to come true... it's just what is the quantity and length of time.
And again, if you can afford it, buying when you find the right home despite what the timing is, isn't exactly a "don't do it" situation. If you can stay, usually it will cycle within your favor if you are worried about "investment" value.