Historical housing market data by location (California)

Factual Questions
1

I was having a discussion with my uncle on the housing market, and mentioned this chart, from Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance. He said that it would be interesting to see the same for California only (where we both live).

I’m hoping that someone can help me find some data along those lines. Specifically, I’m looking to see if the spikes near 1980 and 1990 look the same, and if prices generally return to pre-spike levels when corrected for inflation. His claim (from personal recollection) is that the trend was more generally up, and that prices only came down slightly after the spikes. It would be interesting to see other data, but my purposes will be well served by data from 1970 onward.

I looked at data availabe on Shiller’s website, but the housing index data isn’t broken down by geographic area at all.

Thanks for anything you can offer.

2

I tried doing a little research because we had a GD thread about this. The Los Angeles Almanac has historical prices for Southern California, but I don’t think it includes Santa Barbara. I also found a chart for all of California, but I don’t remember where at the moment. I’ll post if I find it. One thing to remember, if you’re talking percentages, is that if, say, a house that is $500,000 goes up 50% to $750,000, and then goes back down, the percentage that the price falls to get back down to $500,000 is less than 50% if $750,000. So the “down” numbers are always going to seem smaller than the “up” numbers. Does your uncle realize this?

IIRC, it took something like 10 years for the market to get back to the peak it reached in 1989. Prices fell for several years straight, a little at a time. The current price run-up has gone far beyond the run-up in the late 80s, percentage-wise.

3

Ooh, I just found a source:
http://www.car.org/library/media/papers/pdf/2006AHDSFinal.pdf

Watch out, it’s PDF. Go to page 5.

4

In Santa Barbara, prices peaked in '89 and hit bottom in '93. The were back to '89 levels in around '96. By '06 they were four times the value of the bottom in '93. The drop from '89 to '93 was around 25%.

5

Yeah, I was referring to California. I didn’t know how the numbers break down for Santa Barbara specifically.

6

Here’s some information and housing price graphs and charts from Zillow on California as a whole. You can also search specific counties.

7

Thanks for the info.

My project for tonight is going to be putting the data from lowbrass’s links into a spreadsheet with inflation rates to see how CA stands compared to the nation as a whole. I’ll post a link in this thread when I’m done.

8

I put my little spreadsheet up here. I can’t make a graph on Google’s spreadsheet… and it lost the formulae when I imported from OO.org, but you should be able to copy paste the data.

The executive summary is that the CA market did not return to pre-1980 spike levels, but did return to pre-1989 spike levels before rising again.