Let's take a look at the Culver City real estate market and see how prices have fared in 2012. It's also a good placeholder to see what the longer-term trends look like.
Single Family Homes
The chart to the right shows the average home price (annualized for the entire year, so it takes out the peaks and troughs) from 2006 to 2012, you can clearly see the price for a single family home in 2012 bounced back significantly.
As I have indicated all year long in my monthly video reviews, low inventory and a huge increase in buyer traffic, have contributed to this jump up in values.
There were only 149 houses sold in all of 2012, this is the lowest number I've seen since I started selling real estate in 2000.
These dynamics have given all the advantages back to seller after four years of a very strong buyer’s market. Of course, the driver for this high buyer turnout is low interest rates. There doesn't appear to be any jump in rates on the immediate horizon, so we should see home prices continue their northerly trend.
Condominium and Townhomes
The long-term trend for Culver City condos and townhomes, as you can see from the chart, has taken a different path than that of Single Family Homes.
The interest level for condos took much longer to ignite than houses, not entirely sure why, but my guess is with rates this low, buyers were trying to squeeze into a house if they could find a way to stretch their money.
However, even though the trend you see is still downward in this chart, the month of December saw a huge price jump to an average sold price of $336,000. This is way above the yearly average of $299,000.
Looks like 2013 will be the turnaround year for condos and townhomes and we will see prices start to climb out of the decline they have been in for the last four or five years.
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