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September home prices drop
| Monday, Oct 6 2008 2:11 PM
Last Updated: Monday, Oct 6 2008 2:29 PM
Bakersfield home prices slipped closer to pre-bubble levels in September, according to the latest report from local appraiser Gary Crabtree.
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The median price for an existing single-family home in the greater metro area was $179,000 last month, the Preliminary Crabtree Report shows.
That’s a mark passed sometime between May and June 2004, when local home prices entered a mad spike that peaked two years later.
In May 2004, the median was $175,000; the next month it reached $193,000.
“That’s where it really took off,” Crabtree said, into the sustained price hikes that followed.
Over the next two years, the number shot to its high-water mark of $299,925 in June 2006, Crabtree said.
September’s median is a 40 percent decline from that June 2006 high, a drop of almost $121,000.
Last month’s price was also 31.4 percent lower than September 2007’s, Crabtree’s report showed, when it stood at $261,000.
It dropped just $1,000 from August’s level.
Average price per square foot stood at about $110.
Sales volume was up year-over-year to 551 homes, more than double the previous September’s volume, though sales pace was down about 11 percent from August numbers.
About 75 percent of sales were “distressed,” meaning the property had been foreclosed on or was in the pre-foreclosure process and the lender agreed to sell the house for less than the delinquent borrower owed.