Times ‘Remodels’ Its Southland Home Price Guide

We’re remodeling around here--who isn’t these days?--and we want to tell you about some major improvements you’ll find, starting today, in our Southland Home Prices feature.

First, we’re now reporting separate sales prices for single-family houses and condominiums. Previously, the prices for both had been combined in a single figure. Now you’ll be able to track price changes and sales activity in both houses and condos in your community.

Second, we’re publishing the median sales price, rather than an adjusted average price. The median price means that half the homes sold for more and half the homes sold for less, and is considered a more accurate gauge of home prices.

We report prices for seven Southland counties on a five-week cycle, and we start today with Los Angeles County. Next week will feature Orange County, then San Diego, then Riverside and San Bernardino counties, then Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, and back to Los Angeles, with a new batch of updated sales figures.

With that introduction, turn to K21, and you’ll see how easy it is to use our more precise reporting format to check the condo and single-family home market in your part of town and your neighborhood or--and this can be useful--your dream neighborhood.

Let’s say, for example, that you live in a condo in Culver City, in ZIP Code 90230, or that you’d like to.

Check the chart and map layout on K21 for Zone 12, which includes Culver City, Santa Monica, Venice, Rancho Park and Palms.

You’ll see that the median-price existing single-family homes in the area in August was $370,000, down 2.6% from a year ago August, and that 166 houses were sold in the reporting month. The median price of existing condos was $263,000, down .7%, and a total of 75 were sold.

Sales of newly built homes and condos, light in some areas and heavy in others, is reported as a combined figure on the third line. In Zone 12, 21 new units were built and sold for a median price of $249,000. Because they are new, there is no comparison to last year.

Now turn to K20 to check prices in ZIP Code 90230. There you’ll see that median house prices, at $289,000, have dropped 7%, and condo prices, at $175,000, have risen 17%, and that total sales are less than half what they were in the same month a year ago. (For all counties besides Los Angeles, you’ll find zone and ZIP data combined on one chart.)

Our new home price information is provided by Dataquick, a San Diego-based real estate information service company, which gathers its data on California’s 11 million pieces of real estate from public records in each of the state’s 52 counties.

Among Dataquick’s 5,000 customers are government agencies, lending and financial institutions, title companies and other commercial users, and increasingly, consumers.

By calling Dataquick and paying a fee, home buyers, home sellers or simply interested homeowners can tap into the company’s storehouse of real estate information for:

--Checking “comps,” or what homes of comparable size and condition have sold for recently in the neighborhood, a useful tool for prospective buyers or sellers.

--Checking the sales history of a house under consideration for purchase.

--Checking the general price level of a neighborhood for purposes of refinancing or taking out a home equity loan.

“Until now, this information has really only been available to the people on the other side of the desk when you want to buy, sell or borrow,” said Dataquick president Donald Cohn.

“The more knowledge you have when you’re negotiating, the better off you are,” he said. “Access to good information empowers the consumer.”

Just as any successful “remodel” requires high-quality craftsmen, our make over of Southland Home Prices couldn’t have been accomplished without the help of Times’ graphics editor Michael Chaplin, computer systems architect Victor Pulver and copy editor David Van Houten, and Dataquick’s vice president of technical services, Larry Denning, and product development manager Chris Smith.

For more information on this home-price data, or any of the other consumer services offered by Dataquick, call (800) 553-9997.