Southern California home sales fall to 20-year low

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Southern California home sales fell to a 20-year low in January, as buyers and sellers appeared to be waiting for market turbulence to pass, according to a report issued on Wednesday.

Median home prices for the six-county area fell 14.4 percent from a year earlier to a three-year low, DataQuick Information Systems said in the report.

A total of 9,983 new and existing houses and condominiums sold last month in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties, the report said.

The six counties are the most populous region of California and were some of the hottest residential property markets during the recent U.S. housing boom.

January volume was the lowest of any month since La Jolla-based DataQuick began keeping statistics in 1988. Sales were down 24.6 percent from December and down 44.9 percent from the year-ago period, the report said.

"We don't know how much of this downturn is driven by market fundamentals, and how much is due to turmoil in the lending industry," Dataquick President Marshall Prentice said in a statement. "Our sense is that quite a bit of activity is on hold, we just don't know how long it can be kept on hold."

San Bernardino County, among the areas hardest hit by foreclosures, posted the biggest drop in house sales, down 53.2 percent, the report said.

Subprime borrowers with patchy credit and more risky adjustable-rate mortgages bought many homes in the county in recent years.

The median price paid for a Southern Californian home was $415,000 in January, down 2.4 percent from December and down 14.4 percent from the year-ago period.

Prices in Riverside County, which is also suffering from a surge of foreclosures, posted the region's biggest January drop from the year-earlier period. They were down 20.1 percent to $331,000.

Difficulty in obtaining so-called jumbo mortgages, or loans of more than $417,000, also weighed on the high-cost southern California housing market, the report said.

Sales financed with jumbo loans made up 18.9 percent of the region's January transactions, down from 38.2 percent a year earlier.