October L.A. home prices slip

Not by much - the median price of an existing home in Los Angeles County was $545,000, according to HomeData Corp., which prepares the data for the Business Journal. That's down from $550,000 over each of the previous three months and up 5 percent from October 2005. Is this the start of a deep and prolonged price slide? Probably not. The prevailing view is that L.A. won't see huge price declines. The more likely scenario is a kind of price stagnation that could drag on through 2007. Perhaps more significant than price is an 11 percent drop in sales from a year earlier. That's a much lower decline than was seen during the summer months and might reflect the fact that 2005 sales began to slow around this time last year. Meanwhile, the county's home inventory level was 8.3 months in September, meaning that it would take 8.3 months to sell everything on the market. A year ago, it was 3.2. Other groups will release their own October numbers in the next week or two (everyone has different ways of compiling the data) but the trendlines are usually consistent.