If you want to be technical about it, 49.5 percent - just 4,361 homes sold in all of L.A. County last month, half the number sold in September, 2006. Yowser. The numbers were mind-blowing throughout Socal, with September sales falling to their lowest monthly level in more than two decades (all numbers courtesy of Dataquick). Yet when you think about it, the results are not all that surprising, given that September closings fell into that horrible Twilight Zone stretch when basically no one was approving mortgage loans. In fact, Dataquick notes that throughout Socal, "jumbo" mortgages - that's a home loan for $417,000 or more - fell by half. In L.A., lots of folks use jumbo loans. The good news, according to Dataquick's John Karevoll, is that the lending spigot appears to be opening up. That could mean a carryover of would-be September deals into October and November. But he told Larry Mantle on KPCC this morning that some folks unable to finance a home in September might just sit tight for a while. In other words, it's just hard to know.

As for prices, L.A. County was alone in seeing an increase in the median price from a year earlier - and the increase, to $525,000, was only 1.2 percent. As has been true all year, the numbers are still high because what homes have sold tend to be at the upper end (in some neighborhoods, property is being snapped up in days). Perhaps the biggest story was in OC, where the median fell 9.5 percent, to $570,000. This is most likely a one-time deal, perhaps due to the small number of homes sold (just a guess). Anyway, here's the bad news:

SEPTEMBER HOME SALES (from Sept. '06)

Los Angeles 4,361 (-49.5%)
Orange 1,643 (-43.7%)
Riverside 2,208 (-53.3%)
San Bernardino 1,509 (-56.1%)
San Diego 2,152 (-35.5%)
Ventura 582 (-48.8%)

SEPTEMBER HOME PRICES (from Sept. '06)
Los Angeles $525,000 (+1.2%)
Orange $570,000 (-9.5%)
Riverside $375,500 (-10.8%)
San Bernardino $325,000 (-11.0%)
San Diego $470,000 (-3.1%)
Ventura $545,500 (-7.9%)

Source: DataQuick Information Systems, DQNews.com