San Diego housing prices dip

LOS ANGELES – San Diego County kicked off California’s housing boom six years ago with dramatic price rises and became one of the nation’s hottest real estate markets.

Now it has attained a more dubious distinction: It’s the first major California real estate market to see its median home price fall below year-ago levels, according to data released Wednesday.

Another once-sizzling market, Los Angeles County, saw home prices in June rise at their slowest year-over-year rate since 2001.

San Diego County’s median price for new and existing homes in June was 1 percent lower than a year ago, a stark contrast to the 20 percent-plus annual gains it was posting during the peak of the boom two years ago, according to data released by DataQuick Information Systems, a San Diego-based real estate research firm.

It was the first time the county had suffered a decline in year- over-year prices since July 1996.

The question now is whether the county’s slump is a harbinger of an even deeper decline in prices, or part of a “soft landing” in which prices merely level off in the near future.

Many other attention-getting U.S. markets, such as Miami, New York and Las Vegas, have also seen sharp decelerations in home price gains – but have yet to post year-over-year price declines. Some smaller California markets and markets that never joined the boom, such as Wichita, Kan., and Flint, Mich., have already started to see price depreciation.