Hi all - the migration to the new platform is going to begin shortly here. We need to "freeze" the site during this process, so logins will be disabled for the duration. You'll see a read-only, not-logged-in version of Piggington until the migration is done, at which point it will cut over to the new live site. I'm not sure how long this will take but it will be at least a day or two. Apologies for the abrupt notice; I'd meant to provide a bit more warning but the stars suddenly aligned for this weekend to be a good time for us to do the migration. See you on the other side ..read more

Hi - I know I threatened this several years back then never got around to it… but FOR REAL this time: the site is going to be moved to a new platform in the near future. The main reason for this is that the current content management system is embarrasingly out of date, and the newer version is really no longer suitable for the site, so it’s necessary to move to an entirely new one. (Wordpress, to be specific). While some current features won’t carry over to the new site, this will largely be a big improvement. More to the point, this site will be much less likely to get hacked or to just sudd ..read more

Not too much change last month. This continues to be an interesting story of very low demand (not far off the lows of the GFC)... Set against fairly low supply (nothing at all like the supply glut we saw post-GFC... and while inventory may seem high compared to the last couple years, it's still quite low compared to the post-GFC/pre-Covid years). read more ..read more

Mortgage rates did not cooperate last month, hitting an average of 6.9% for October (30 year mortgage, per FRED). That made for a new high in monthly payments, despite the recent decline in home prices: A chart that caught my eye was this one -- pending sales have dropped to quite a low level compared to recent years: That made me curious about where they stand in the long run, so I made this graph of monthly pendings going back to 2006. It was even worse than I expected -- October had the smallest number of pending sales since the GFC! To put that in perspective, that's happening ..read more

I don't have much to add to the title, so I will leave it at that. Oh actually one thing I want to note: the 30-year mortgage (per FRED) averaged 6.1% in September, so that's what's reflected in the monthly payment related charts. As of last week, the mortgage rate was up to 6.9%. So that's going to put further upward pressure on monthly payments, unless rates drop pretty hard at this point. OK, carry on. Charts below. read more ..read more

Home prices appear to have dropped further last month, with the median price per square foot for single family homes down by 4.2% from a month prior. (Insert usual disclaimer about this being a noisy figure and Case-Shiller being a lot more accurate). Here's a visual: In inflation-adjusted terms, home prices have just about round-tripped to where they were a year ago: Real monthly payments are still up 30%+ though! And this doesn't account for the recent surge to the 6% range for rates. Switching to supply/demand... inventory flattened out (actually even declined slightly), after it ..read more

I had a chance to update the valuation info. There shouldn't be any big surprises here based on what I've been posting in the regular monthly threads. The good news is that I can reinstate the "shambling towards affordability" title for this series. As a reminder, these valuation ratios attempt to measure the fundamental expensiveness of San Diego housing by comparing home prices or monthly payments to a combination of SD rents and per capita incomes. The small apparent purchase price decline, combined with the upward march of rents and incomes, has resulted in a slight retreat in purchase v ..read more

Hey all, sorry for the delay... I've traveling, but I wanted to at least put some charts up. Mostly just charts but here are couple quick observations: First, the probability grows that there was something to last months' price decline, as we've had another month at that price level. (See the prior update for musings on how much of the decline was real vs. noise). Still, I put a ton more weight on the (unfortunately 2-month lagging) Case-Shiller index than on the median price/square foot. Second, look at that move up in months of inventory. In just a few months, we've gone from epic lows t ..read more

Well... single family home prices look like they dropped a lot last month, but I suspect there is a lot of noise in that data point. In specific -- the price per square foot was down 5.6% from May. Though I think current valuations are unsustainable and wouldn't be surprised by declining prices, that's just too big a decline in one month to be "genuine."* Supporting this idea is the fact that condos (usually much more volatile than single family homes) only dropped 1.5% in price/sq ft terms. *(What I mean by this is, the price per square foot is a pretty crude proxy for how much a given house ..read more

Prices were down a (very) wee bit last month: Inventory started to build: Pending sales hung in there from the prior month, but are still lower than a couple months ago. It's probably the case that many people going pending last month still had lower rates locked in. read more ..read more