LA home prices kept climbing in August

Editor's Note: This post was originally published September 19, 2017, and has been updated with the most recent information.

According to real estate data tracker CoreLogic, the median sale price in Los Angeles County reached $580,000 in August, shattering an all-time record for the fifth month in a row. That number represents a huge increase of over 9 percent since August of 2016.

Update: CoreLogic has revised its calculations and now estimates LA County’s median price for August to be $575,000 (equal to July’s number).

But the high prices weren’t enough to turn off many homebuyers; the total number of homes sold rose 15 percent over the month before and was over 4 percent higher than a year earlier.

CoreLogic analyst Andrew LePage says that booming sales at the upper end of the market are helping to drive those numbers up. Across all of Southern California (where the median sale price was $500,000 in August), sales of homes worth $500,000 or more are up 15 percent since last year. Meanwhile, sales of homes under that price are down 8.2 percent.

That’s not necessarily because buyers aren’t interested in lower-priced homes. LePage notes that inventory has been “especially tight in the lower price ranges, in part because of rising values, and demand for those more affordable homes remains strong. The result is somewhat higher price gains in many of the region's more affordable communities.”

He goes on to say that recent mortgage rate hikes are making the market even tougher for entry-level buyers.

But there is a bit of good news for homebuyers; across Southern California, median sale prices dropped off a bit in August, suggesting that the hot summer market may be cooling off a bit.

Will LA prices finally start to level off this month? We’ll just have to wait and see.

• LA home prices hit a record high in July—again [Curbed LA]
• Report: LA is the nation’s most unaffordable housing market—and prices will keep rising [Curbed LA]
• How much does it cost to buy near the Expo Line? [Curbed LA]