California homebuying: Collapse? Crumble? Or crash?

You pick the description for the dramatic drop in California home sales.

Did sales collapse? Crumble? Cave in? Crack? Or … crash?

At 2024’s mid-point, my trusty spreadsheet peered into the California Association of Realtors’ statewide homebuying database to see the stunning depth of the current homebuying slump.

California single-family homes were sold at a 270,200 annual rate in June. Semantics aside, how slow is that?

While it’s just off 3% in a year, it’s down 32% compared with the quaint, pre-pandemic days of 2018-19.

Next, when looking all the way back to 1990, June sales were 33% below average. And only 6% of all those months had fewer sales over those 34 years.

Also, consider that the last time California’s buying pace exceeded the 300,000-a-year speed it was September 2022, not too long after the Federal Reserve began raising rates to cool an overheated economy, in turn producing painful inflation.

This 21-month streak below 300,000 is the longest dip in homebuying data stretching back to 1990. The previous record was 10 months that ended in March 2008, a time when housing’s bubble burst, collapsing the world’s financial markets into the Great Recession.

Since 2008, California’s population grew by 6% and its jobs grew by 16%. So this current sales pace looks even weaker on any per capita kind of measurement.

Price points

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