Beverly Hills Values Down Nearly $1 Mil

— Photo by TJ Sullivan —

Homeowners on the Westside have started to lose some of the tremendous values they've built up during the past 10 years, according to a story in Monday's Los Angeles Times.

Anecdotally, I've noticed many Westside properties sitting on the market since the start of fall, most of them condos, and some despite price reductions of more than 20 percent from when they first listed.

The report in the Times says the latest data indicates values dropped 26 to 30 percent in the last few months of 2008.

From the story:

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 prepared for The Times by research firm MDA DataQuick. Pacific Palisades 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.

Even among the merely well-off in Culver City, prices have come down, to $647,500, 17% below the peak. In ZIP Code 90035, just south of Beverly Hills, the median sale price had been more than $1 million for most of 2007 but fell in the fourth quarter of 2008 to $800,000.

Some of the quotes from the real estate industry in the story would be funny if the subject matter wasn't so sad. Many Los Angeles real estate agents long considered much of the Westside immune to economic downturns and would dismiss anyone who suggested otherwise as simply ill-informed. Now, however, they're connecting the dots, or dominoes, as one tier of the market affects the one after that, and the one after that, and ...

It's bad news all around.

— TJ Sullivan in LA