California's home appreciation remained in the single digits for two consecutive months for the first time in nearly five years. The dip comes after several years of statewide price increases that sometimes surpassed 20 percent. June prices for existing, single-family detached homes were up 6.2 percent compared with a year ago in the state, the Los Angeles- based California Association of Realtors said Tuesday. That brought the median price of a home to $575,800. Despite the dip into single digits, the state's housing market is merely slowing down rather than about to collapse, said Delores Conway, director of USC's Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast. "We still are expecting a soft landing. This is part of a soft landing," said Conway, who works at the university's Lusk Center for Real Estate. "Naturally, you are going to go down from double-digit appreciation to single digits." Conway said that a normal real estate market would see price appreciation ranging from 4 percent to 8 percent, with an average of about 6 percent. "We are coming down from a torrid real estate market to a more normal real estate market," Conway said.
August 3, 2006