A four bedroom in sunny San Diego for $785,000. For further information:
TruliaMedian home price: $385,000
1-Year change through 2010: 1.6%
Move.com, which runs the Realtor.com website, has identified the 10 top metro areas where it thinks housing markets have started down the road to recovery. Move.com, with a database of homes for sale all over the United States, looked at several factors.
One is changes in asking prices, which reveals seller confidence (or lack thereof). Then there's the time homes are sitting on market, which shows how fast homes are selling. Move.com also looked at how often prospective buyers were logging on to Realtor.com.
One example of a turnaround town is San Diego. Like the rest of the coastal California housing markets, it went through some post-bubble hard times, with high foreclosure rates and a big dip in home prices. They fell about 40% from their boom highs.
Now, with mortgage related foreclosures pretty much cleaned out of the system, the city has begun a recovery; it has been on the comeback trail for more than a year. Its prices rose 1.6% in 2010, according to Fiserv.
Move expects the recovery to strengthen. Sales have gotten brisker and inventory lasts on the market only a median of 79 days, about half the national median. Sellers have noticed the improvement and raised their asking prices 1.4% in March, compared with a month earlier.
By Les Christie, staff writer
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