By Jeffery Marino
Home prices in Northeast Los Angeles continued to cool down in the fall, as higher interest rates and persistent inflation took their toll on NELA’s once surging market for residential real estate.
The median sale price for a home in NELA was $1.09 million in October, the latest month with comprehensive data. That’s a drop of $35,000, or about 3%, compared to September. It’s also a mere 2.3% increase compared to a year ago, which is the lowest annual price growth since June 2020, when the pandemic created a brief stall in the market.
Price moderation is not the only sign of a slowdown. Median days on market in October in NELA was 38, which is four days more than the same time last year and the slowest pace since January 2022. If you’re a seller, that’s a bad sign, because January is typically the slowest month for sales activity.
Flickers of life that remain in the market are driven largely by the chronically low inventory of homes for sale in NELA. Scarcity gets buyers to pounce, but even so, competition is not as fierce as it once was. For instance, in October, the average buyer paid 5% over the list price for a home in NELA. That’s the lowest sale-to-list ratio since March 2021. Moreover, the sale-to-list ratio has fallen for five straight months now. Sellers are getting more realistic and buyers are less frenzied. Those are the hallmarks of a slowdown — and an apt description of the market in NELA today.
