• Median sale price of single-family home in Ventura County reached nearly $900K in October.
• Local sales volume was down 33% in the past year.
• Pace of price increases cooled as mortgage rates rose.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, home prices in Ventura County have shot up as if out of a cannon, dipped slightly, and now appear to be leveling off at a modest annual growth rate.

The one constant has been a shortage of homes to buy and sell.

In September, there were 492 houses and condominiums sold in Ventura County, according to data from the real estate information company CoreLogic. That was 19% below the previous month and 33% less than the number of sales a year earlier, in September 2022.

The median price of all homes sold in the county in September 2023, including condos and single-family homes, was $810,000, down 1% from the previous month but up 5.9% from a year earlier. The median price of free-standing single-family homes was $855,000 in September 2023 and climbed to $899,000 in October, according to data from the California Association of Realtors.

Sales are scarce everywhere, with rising interest rates making mortgages more expensive. But in Ventura County, the market has been especially congested: Our annual decline in sales volume of 33% was significantly more than the declines in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino or San Diego Counties. Home sales in Los Angeles County, for example, dropped by 23% from September 2022 to September 2023, and sales in Orange County were down 18%.

“We have shortages at all levels of homes,” said Timothy McDougall, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s in Westlake Village and the president of the Conejo Simi Moorpark Association of Realtors. “Prices have remained steady and inventory is low, and typically homes don’t stay on the market that long.”

Mortgage interest rates are near their highest point in the last 20 years, which makes both buying and selling homes less attractive. Many homeowners are locked into mortgages on their current homes with much lower rates than what they would have to pay if they moved, and first-time buyers have to spend much more to get a similarly priced home than buyers did a few years ago.

The current average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is 7.75%, according to Bankrate.com. That rate was at 3% or lower for most of the time between the middle of 2020 and the end of 2021, and had been below 4% for most of the decade before that.

“People who are in their existing sub-3% mortgages from the last few years don’t want to get out of those,” said Carolyn Triebold, an agent with Real Broker in Camarillo. “One buyer I had told me recently, ‘I never thought this would be our forever home, but there’s no way I’d want to get out of a 2.5% mortgage to get into an 8%.’”

Pandemic spike 'crazy'

Home prices are climbing again after a dip in late 2022 and early 2023, and the recent increases of between 5% and 6% per year are still far below those of the first two years of the pandemic, when prices in Ventura County rose by as much as 20% per year.

Home prices early in the pandemic “went up unrealistically, they went crazy,” Triehold said. She said we’re now seeing a “soft landing” from those highs, with prices staying flat or growing slowly for most of 2023.

The last time home prices rose by more than 10% per year was in the early 2000s, and that ended with a massive crash in values starting in 2007, when the bubble burst. Triebold said she doesn’t see that happening again because homeowners don’t have nearly the same debt levels that they had during the early 2000s boom.

High interest rates tend to push home prices down, just as they do for other goods and services in the economy, while a shortage of available homes and high demand pushes prices up. Right now the equilibrium is the “soft landing” Triebold described, with slowly rising home prices, but she thinks prices could skyrocket again if interest rates drop.

New stock in short supply

There is still plenty of demand for homes in Ventura County, she said, even at the current mortgage rates. Triebold works with a lot of buyers from Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area who now work from home some or all of the time. They see Ventura County as an ideal location for a weekly commute to a Los Angeles-area office, or a monthly or quarterly trip to the Bay Area.

“What I’m afraid of is if we start to see more interest rate declines, it’s going to break open the floodgates and we might see a race back into the market,” Triebold said.

And there aren’t enough houses for them to buy, she said. Ventura County has by far the fewest sales of newly built homes in the Southern California region. In September, there were only four new homes sold in the county, down from 60 a year earlier. Riverside County, which has about three times the population of Ventura County, has had about 10 times as many new-home sales in recent years, according to CoreLogic’s data.

“It’s very concerning for those people who want to buy their first home, or move out of their parents’ home,” McDougall said. “It’s just a shortage of housing, that’s what it comes down to. …We live in an amazing area and people want to live here, and they need places to live.”

Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.