High end home sales in the Palm Springs area have taken a big hit. It’s hard to see trends when sales are combined with low end foreclosures, or when looking at a given price bracket. If for example you look at homes that sold for over $1,000,000, your numbers are skewed by those homes that once sold there, but now sell for less.
The first graph below attempts to get around this by looking at a constant group of homes in four Valley cities (Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert and Indian Wells) that are all 4,000 square feet in size or larger. To get rid of the “noise” of wide variation of sales prices in this range, each point on the graph represents the moving average sales price of the immediately previous 60 sales. In addition to the big average sales price drop, there are many fewer sales per month now than at the peak.
The second graph showing just the most recent 60 sales, doesn’t show any major change in the overall trend. In this graph the line doesn’t represent a moving average but just the overall trend. Keep in mind these are what people are buying, and don’t reflect asking prices. Those wanting to sell though should look at the prices that are selling.
I had expected to see a leveling off or even a small average price increase.