Housing Market News for the IE
The Inland Empire is still the Real Estate Market in Southern California where investors flourish. It is also a place where people can buy affordably and sell with way less effort than other parts of Southern California. With that said, newer private housing starts for Inland Southern California remain low and steady. At the same time the index for housing prices continues to rise. So prices are going up and newer homes are not selling like they should. This isn’t a huge problem unless you’re a developer, but it does effect the market as a whole. This is no reason for people to now want to buy or sell though. We need to continue to stimulate the market with new inventory and interest rates are still great for buyers.
There were still a lot of permits issued for residential builds, but less than 600 were issued so in the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metropolitan area it was 10% lower. That is the number down from 633 in May and almost 90% down the pre-recession peak of 5,401 in September 2005. The high so far for 2016 was 783 in March. The all-transactions house-price index for the area stood at about 250 for the first quarter of 2016. The index, which does not reflect a dollar amount, has a baseline of 100 established in 1995. It peaked near 332 in the last quarter of 2006, and dipped as low as 164 in the middle of 2012. In technical real-money terms, the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metropolitan area posted almost a 1% increase in the price of homes in May over the previous month, according to CoreLogic, a property information provider.
The median price of a Riverside County home was $330,000, it was $255,000 in San Bernardino County. I always talk about this median home price because I am proud to be in the Inland Empire where you can enjoy a great quality of living in a lot of areas and pay a fraction of what you would pay for a house in bordering counties. With properties being almost unaffordable in L.A. and Orange Counties, there have been a record number of apartment rentals on those counties. Now people out there are scared to buy. I believe that will push them to buy where they can afford to buy. We all know where they can afford to buy. That means, like I have blogged about previously, our entire economy will be stimulated. I see news about Detroit and other struggling parts of the country and there is a high rate of vacancy. We are still improving.
I believe now and have always believed that the Inland Empire has so much to offer. We may not have Knott’s Berry Farm, but we have Castle Park and Pharoah’s Lost Kingdom. Much lower priced attractions. We have vinyards in Temecula and Rancho Cucamonga, we have apple orchards in Oak Glen, Redlands offers a gas-lamp style pub walk. There are tons of great cities and and places to go out here that most people in L.A. and Orange County probably never bothered to look up. All I know is, we are still growing and they are still struggling. Don’t let the numbers keep you from owning your dream or selling. A good agent can take care of all the things you need and give you an honest outlook on your personal dream.