Tracking firm says Calif. median home price rises 11 percent in February from previous year

Firm: California median home price rises in Feb.

LOS ANGELES — The median home price in California recorded its fourth consecutive month of year-to-year increases after more two years of declines, suggesting that a lasting recovery may be taking hold, a tracking firm reported.

San Diego-based MDA DataQuick on Thursday said the 11 percent increase in the median price from February 2009 was due to a dip in foreclosures and an increase in high-end sales.

The median for the state increased to $249,000 from $224,000 in February 2009 and about 1 percent from $247,000 in January.

Richard Green, who directs the University of Southern California’s Lusk Center for Real Estate, said banks, which hold the purse strings to the recovery, should find the median increase heartening.

It shows that loans they extended in recent months have not lost value, as they did during the downturn, and it should encourage them to keep the recovery going by offering more mortgages, he said.

“Banks are not good at looking forward; they’re good at looking back, and that frightens them,” Green said. “But if mortgage performance improves, lenders will be more comfortable and you’ll see finance loosen up a little bit.”

Lending was apparently not loose enough in February to hold back a year-to-year drop in home sales. More than 28,100 homes were sold in the state in February, up about 1 percent from January but down nearly 4 percent from February 2009.

DataQuick President John Walsh attributed the ongoing difficulty obtaining financing, as well as job security fears among potential buyers and a decrease in the number of low-priced homes on the market that are affordable to most buyers.

“The sales and price data remain choppy, with more ups and downs than we’d typically see,” Walsh said.

In the nine-county region of Northern California, sales dropped about 1 percent to 4,990 in February from a year earlier. That figure crept up about a percent to more than 15,000 in a six-county region of Southern California.

The median home price in Northern California increased 20 percent to $354,000 last month from $295,000 in February 2009, its fifth consecutive year-to-year increase.

In Southern California, the median price rose 10 percent to $275,000, up from $250,000 in the year-ago period. It was the median’s third consecutive year-to-year increase.

Foreclosures comprised 44.3 percent of statewide resales last month, up from 43.8 last month but down from the all-time high of 58.8 percent reached in February 2009.

Walsh said the volume of homes in various stages of the foreclosure process suggested that the housing market’s outlook would remain murky for some time to come.

“The key question is how much more distressed inventory is coming, and when,” he said.