County’s Home Sales Rise 58%; Prices Decline

Ventura County home sales continued to shake off the doldrums of 1995, increasing almost 58% in April over the same time last year, figures released Friday show.

A total of 896 homes were sold last month, 328 more than in April 1995, said Nima Nattagh, a market research analyst with TRW-Redi Property Data. There were 801 home sales in March.

However, the statistics can be deceptive, he said.

“When people talk about a [real estate] recovery, it’s a recovery relative to 1995, but it’s not a recovery,” he said. “One might well say the level of activity we’re seeing in Ventura County is normal market activity, and really what we had in 1995 was artificially low. For all intents and purposes, the volume of sales, put in a longer-term context, is really stable.”

Home sales for the first four months of the year are up 27% over depressed 1995, Nattagh said.

If the pace is not exactly prompting local real estate agents to uncork the champagne, they’re not complaining, either.

“We’ve gone from ‘Home sales, what’s that?’ to ‘Oh yeah, I remember those,’ ” said Bobbi Courselle, president of the Ventura Assn. of Realtors and chairwoman of a multiple listing service for Camarillo, Oxnard and Ventura.

Courselle offered a slightly more optimistic view than Nattagh, saying she believes home sales are at least slightly better than they have been for about three years.

She attributes that partly to pent-up demand among buyers, despite slightly higher interest rates than last year.

“My company is doing much better than in ‘95, ‘94, ‘93,” said Courselle, a broker with Prudential-Jon Douglas Realtors in Ventura. “I think we’re seeing a modest recovery.”

In addition, repossessions, which have kept a lid on price increases, are drying up, Courselle said. Similarly, housing inventory is dropping. Residential property that formerly remained on the market for six months is selling after 70 to 80 days, she said.

However, it’s still more of a buyer’s than a seller’s market.

“Prices haven’t started up yet,” Courselle said. “When our inventory goes down a little bit more and prices start going up, then we’ll figure the buyers aren’t going to get as good a deal as they are today.”

The average Ventura County home price in April was about $225,000, approximately $8,600 less than last April’s figure.

“It’s still a good time to buy, because mortgage rates are still good and values are still declining, so that has boosted affordability,” Nattagh said.

Home sales in Thousand Oaks were up 58.5% over April 1995; in Ventura, the figure was 46.9%, TRW-REDI said.

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Ventura County House Sales

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April 1995 April 1996 Number Average Number Average City/ZIP code of sales price of sales price CAMARILLO 93010 28 $248,154 59 $241,776 93012 20 $334,975 30 $268,561 93066 2 $165,000 1 $500,000 FILLMORE 93015 6 $155,333 6 $149,500 MOORPARK 93021 29 $268,948 58 $258,377 OAK PARK 91301 29 $280,172 NA NA 91304 1 $110,000 NA NA OAK VIEW 93022 4 $143,000 5 $171,750 OJAI 93023 22 $247,524 28 $231,643 OXNARD 93030 42 $194,962 101 $194,586 93033 27 $149,804 22 $155,075 93035 17 $257,844 28 $239,464 PIRU 93040 1 NA 2 104,000 PORT HUENEME 93041 12 $132,458 19 $152,395 SANTA PAULA 93060 18 $144,500 21 $165,974 SIMI VALLEY 93063 31 $189,419 92 $185,820 93065 69 $224,584 59 $193,158 THOUSAND OAKS 91320 25 $235,185 59 $248,285 91360 33 $229,333 56 $239,283 91361 11 $318,150 22 $303,523 91362 54 $312,193 58 $330,342 VENTURA 93001 22 $284,800 47 $219,446 93003 33 $176,688 35 $197,371 93004 28 $219,411 40 $189,713 COUNTY LINE / CANYON AREA 90265 1 $500,000 NA NA COUNTYWIDE 568 $233,685 896 $225,073

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Source: TRW-REDI Property Data