Latest Forecast sees 9.5% price gain for O.C. homes

What do you think ? Is the OC real estate market on it's way up ?

According to First American CoreLogic Orange County home prices will be up 9.5% in August 2010 from the summer of 2009.  In the November 11th OC register article by Jeff Collins, he states that if the forecast is accurate ... the median price of an Orange County house would increase by nearly $48,000 from the $500,000 median reported by MDA DataQuick in August and September 2010.

 

That price gain would outstrip appreciation rates for the nation's 10 largest metro areas, First American reported. For example, Los Angeles County is forecast to see home prices rise 6.3 percent, the highest rate among the Big 10. That's followed by Miami-Dade County's projected 6.1 percent gain.

 

Other projections: Chicago, up 4.2 percent; Washington, D.C., up 3.5 percent; Boston, up 3 percent; New York City, up 2.3 percent; Houston, up 1.4 percent; Atlanta, up 0.2 percent; Dallas, up 0.2 percent; and Philadelphia, down 0.8 percent.

 

First American projected that California's house prices will increase 7.9 percent by next August, while nationwide prices will go up 4.6 percent. First American expects U.S. home prices to hit bottom in March.

 

First American's housing forecast is just the latest of forecasts for the Orange County real estate market in the past five weeks.

 

HERE ARE SOME OF THE OTHER RECENT ORANGE COUNTY FORECASTS:

 

The UCLA Anderson Forecast predicted that Orange County home prices will go up between 15.9 percent and 16.6 percent in 2010, followed by increases of 2.5 percent to 8.7 percent from 2011 to 2015. The median price isn't expected to reach the boom-time peak of $626,000 until 2016 or 2017.

 

Anil Puri, dean of Cal State Fullerton's Mihaylo College of Business and Economics, predicted that Orange County home prices will fall through the first half of 2010, and then either stay flat or rise by 2 percent to 3 percent at the most.

 

Economist Mark Schniepp, author of UCLA's Orange County forecast, projected that home values in Ventura, Santa Barbara, Orange and San Diego counties would return to 2004 levels by mid-2012, a gain of about 30 percent.

 

California Association of Realtors chief economist Leslie Appleton-Young forecast that California home prices will rise 3.3 percent next year, driven by sales of distressed homes.

 

Veros, specialists in automated real estate valuations, said its housing model shows Orange County housing values for its benchmark “single-family residential midprice tier properties” rising 2 percent in the year ended Sept. 1, 2010.

 

First American's Home Price Index showed that Orange County house prices in August, its most recent data, were 7.9 percent below August 2008. Prices for non-distressed homes only – which excludes bank-owned houses and short sales (where prices are below debt) – were down by a slightly smaller margin, 7.1 percent.

 

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