Bay Area home sales jump in March

<p>Bay Area home sales rose again in March, led by bargain hunters grabbing up foreclosure properties in Sonoma and other outlying counties, according to a report issued Thursday.</p><p>The concentration of purchases at lower prices drove down the region’s overall median price for all new and resale houses and condominiums to $290,000 — down 45.9 percent from a year ago and more than half off the record high reached during the last housing boom, reported MDA DataQuick, a real estate information service.</p><p>But there are signs the Bay Area market’s falloff in prices could be nearing a bottom. The March median was down just 1.7 percent from February, slowing significantly from previous months.</p><p>Sales increased for the seventh straight month, but remained well below the region’s historical average for March. There were 6,325 homes and condos sold across the Bay Area in March, up 29.1 percent from a year ago.</p><p>Still, sales of higher-priced homes remain sluggish. Buyers face expensive financing for jumbo loans, which are needed to purchase more expensive properties. Banks have tightened the money supply in response to foreclosures continuing to inundate many housing markets.</p><p>“More than any other region, the Bay Area is waiting for so-called jumbo loans to come back on line. Even with prices off their peaks, most home purchases in the upper half of the market still require a mortgage for more than $417,000, which are far more difficult to come by. We think there’s a good chance those larger loans will become more available during the second or third quarter,” said John Walsh, MDA DataQuick president.</p><p>Jumbo mortgages were used to finance 19 percent of the Bay Area home sales last month, compared with more than 60 percent of purchases before the credit crunch hit in late summer 2007.</p><p>The use of government-insured FHA loans — often the choice of first-time buyers — represented a record 25.4 percent of all Bay Area purchase loans in March, up from 1.5 percent a year ago.</p><p>First-time buyers and investors are purchasing many of the region’s foreclosed homes.</p><p>Last month 51.2 percent of all Bay Area resale homes had been foreclosed on at some point in the previous year, up from 23.2 percent a year ago.</p><p>Homes are far more affordable, as indicated by lower mortgage payments for homes purchased in March.</p><p>The typical monthly mortgage payment that Bay Area buyers committed themselves to paying was $1,245 in March, down from $2,553 a year ago. Last month’s typical mortgage payment — assuming a 20 percent down and a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage — was the lowest since February 1997 when it was $1,236.</p>