Ventura County's housing market continues to show signs of vast improvement, with home sales last month reaching a level not seen since 2007.
In May, 993 new and existing homes and condos sold in Ventura County for a median price of $360,000, San Diego-based DataQuick reported Wednesday.
Year over year, the price stayed flat, while the number of sales jumped 43 percent — the highest percentage increase among six counties in Southern California. Sales numbers haven't been that high since March 2007, when 999 homes sold.
The greatest portion of Southern California home sales are occurring in the higher-cost coastal markets of San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Sales in these areas represented about 70 percent of all activity last month, up from 67.6 percent a year earlier.
Overall, the Southern California housing market continued moving toward normalcy last month, with the median sales price increasing 5.4 percent over the previous year to $295,000, while sales rose 20 percent to 22,192.
"We are looking at more of the fundamental strength of the housing market, and I'm reasonably confident that we are near a bottom," said CSU Channel Islands economist Sung Won Sohn.
Affordability is at a record high because of historically low interest rates and depressed housing prices, Sohn said.
Renters are now shopping, too.
"If you compare rents versus monthly payments for a median-priced house, rents are more expensive, so we are seeing more people moving out of rental units and purchasing houses," Sohn said.
Realtor Judy Seeger has seen the renters entering the market. She's also seeing more foreign investors buying rental properties in the Conejo Valley.
"We have a ton of Asian clients coming from Malaysia, China and Japan," she said.
"It is so interesting these days," said Seeger, who works for Century 21 Rolling Oaks in Thousand Oaks.
Despite clear and ongoing signs that the market is improving, DataQuick President John Walsh cautions that there's still uncertainty in the marketplace.
"But it looks like more move-up buyers are concluding it makes sense in the long run to sell their homes now, even when it's hard to swallow the price," he said.
For Southern California, last month's $295,000 median sales price was 41.6 percent below the $505,000 peak in mid-2007.
Also Wednesday, Irvine-based RealtyTrac reported a significant drop in foreclosure filings for May. In Ventura County, there were 640 foreclosure filings in May: 309 default notices; 265 auction sale notices; and 66 bank repossessions. The total represents a 41 percent decline from the same month a year earlier.
Banks are getting better positioned because the number of foreclosures has fallen since 2010 while the number of short sales has risen, said Peter Rupert, director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project.
"Banks are going to be better off because they get more if it's a short sale than a foreclosure," Rupert said.
Seeger, who does work for banks, echoed that, saying it's much cheaper for banks not to foreclose because they avoid having to deal with the costs, fees and court system.
"The thing that people have to remember is banks, they don't want to own houses," Rupert said. "That's not their job. So when they get forced into it, that's very costly for them."
DataQuick report on home prices
Reports, charts and broken down statistics about home prices and sales from DataQuick Information Systems. View now »