A white-hot housing market has many West Coast buyers finding that they need to pay excessively high prices for older, less fashionable homes. Kenny Slaught notes that home prices have been steadily rising since 2008, with common reference, the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home price index, revealing that Los Angeles home prices reached their highest point during April of this year since October 2007. Having moved beyond simply recovering from the recession, Southern California’s larger metropolitan areas are approaching their former peaks. Slaught says the turnaround is due to a number of factors, including interest rates, job growth and supply and demand. As current 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages hover around 3.5% or less, these enticing numbers are nearing 3.31 percent (the record low hit in November 2012) and are encouraging many to buy. Historically low rates, coupled with strong employment numbers, such as a 2.4% gain in Los Angeles County and a 3.5% rise in Orange County, note why values have appreciated in an extraordinarily fast-paced manner. And even though home prices fluctuate considerably statewide, inflated asking prices on higher-end options are second only to Hawaii. The feverish demand for housing cannot currently be met by the slim supply available, with many first-timers forced to pursue condominium-style units: available and within a more modest price range.
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