Sales of high-end homes ticked up across the Bay Area in May, pushing the median price higher for the second straight month, according to a new report.
The median price rose to $341,500 in May, up 12.3 percent from April, as the mix of sales changed. Purchases of homes financed with so-called jumbo loans rose and sales of foreclosure homes dipped, according to MDA DataQuick, a San Diego real estate research company.
Despite the increase in the median price, it remained far below levels from a year ago, when the median was $517,000. The region?s housing market remains unsettled and it is too soon to know whether the real estate downturn is nearing a bottom, analysts said.
?Some people are going to take this as a sign that the market has bottomed out. Maybe ? or maybe not. We won?t know for at least half a year,? said John Walsh, MDA DataQuick president.
A total of 7,447 new and resale houses and condos sold in the nine-county Bay Area last month. That was up 19.8 percent from a year ago, the ninth consecutive year-over-year gain for region.
Still, sales remain far below the historic average in the Bay Area, where MDA DataQuick has tracked home sales for two decades.
Last month?s sales included a notable increase in homes financed with jumbo mortgages, which are used to purchase higher-priced properties. Jumbo loans accounted for 25.5 percent of May?s sales, the highest since October.
At the same time, purchases of foreclosure homes fell. Last month, 42.1 percent of all homes resold in the Bay Area had been foreclosed on in the prior 12 months, down from 46.4 percent in April and the lowest since September.
Sales of bank-owned homes and properties homeowners are selling to avoid foreclosure have dominated the market, particularly in Sonoma and other counties on the Bay Area?s fringe. Many of these lower-priced homes were originally purchased with subprime and other risky loans.
First-time buyers and investors are grabbing up foreclosure homes, slowly cutting into the supply of distressed properties.
But the recession still could push more homeowners into foreclosure as a result of job losses or pay cuts, analysts said.
?The market has been working its way through the craziness of the ?loans-gone-wild? activity of 2005 to 2007. We know a lot about how that is playing out,? Walsh said. ?What we don?t know is how the distress from the recession will ultimately play out in the housing market. The elements are different.?
The housing slump continues to make homes affordable to more buyers.
The typical monthly mortgage payment to purchase a Bay Area home in May was $1,443, down from $2,458 a year ago. The payment assumes buyers put down 20 percent of the purchase price on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.
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