September home prices hold up

Next week's Business Journal (subscription required) has the September median price of an existing L.A. County home at $550,000, unchanged from the previous two months and up 4.2 percent from a year earlier. Sales keep tumbling however - 30 percent from a year earlier. All of which would suggest that sellers remain reluctant to lower their price and buyers are being choosy.

"The indicators we are seeing are consistent with a soft landing,” said Delores Conway, director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast at the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. “The market is stabilizing to some degree. But we still need more time.”

Also worth noting is that as of August, L.A. County homes were staying on the market a median 51.9 days, compared to 29.2 days a year ago. That translates into an inventory of 6.8 months, meaning that at the current pace of sales, it would take 6.8 months to sell everything that’s on the market now. A year ago, the inventory was 2.6 months. Business Journal gets its numbers from HomeData Corp. There will be a bunch of other September reports from different sources in the next couple of weeks