California’s high-end real estate takes hit - Fort Wayne Journal Gazette
LOS ANGELES – The Southern California real estate crash has finally reached the high-end areas of Los Angeles’ west side.
Home prices in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Malibu – which continued to soar well into 2008 – finally tanked at the end of the year, losing between 26 percent and 30 percent of their value in just a few months, the latest data show.
The sudden drop came as a surprise to Shelley Conn, who remained a believer that the wealthier parts of the area were immune until she put her Santa Monica house on the market last spring.
She and her husband had been offered $2.4 million for the three-bedroom just months before, so she listed the house for $2.3 million. But it didn’t sell until November, after the couple dropped the price to $1.9 million.
The median price of a single-family home in Beverly Hills was $2.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2008, down from $3 million in the second quarter, according to data by research firm MDA DataQuick. The Pacific Palisades neighborhood closed the year with a median price of $2.2 million, down from a high of $2.6 million during the second quarter, and Santa Monica’s median was $1.6 million, down from $2.1 million last winter.
