This information was given from Metro San Diego Homes and Jason Coriano.

So for more information contact him directly.

Here are the sold condos in the downtown San Diego from last week of 3/7/11 to 3/13/11. There are some great condos that sold last week in Bayside, Harbor Club and Horizons. Lets take a look at the numbers.

Between The Numbers:

The week previous there were 28 sales with the average sales price of $405,059

This last week there were 22 sales with the average sales price of $452,431

These downtown San Diego condo sales are showing great signs of improvement this is the 3rd week in a row that we have seen double digit numbers for the number of sales 7 day span but not just double digits we are seeing them in twenties. This means that those buyers that have been sitting on the sidelines waiting to see some stabilization in the market place are now taking advantage of the opportunities that are out there in this real estate market.

I read a great article today on CNN Money that shows signs of this countries million dollar homes and how San Diego has seen a 14% up tick home values.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The rich are different from you and me: They’re buying real estate.

After four straight years of declines, sales of million-dollar homes and condos rose last year in all 20 major metro areas, according to DataQuick Information Systems. On average, these cities saw an 18.6% jump in high-end home sales.

San Jose, Calif., had the biggest market for million-dollar homes, with a 27.4% spike in sales last year; Phoenix saw the smallest increase at just 0.4%.

Meanwhile, sales outside of this price point actually fell 2.8%.

“It hasn’t been a good six months for all people, but it was a good six months for rich people,” said Glenn Kelman, CEO of Seattle-based real estate brokerage Redfin. “When Wall Street goes up, rich people buy homes.”

And Wall Street has gone up: Stock values have nearly doubled from their March 2009 lows.

“Higher income households are feeling better about their financial security,” said Greg McBride, chief economist for Bankrate.com.

As their confidence soared, the wealthy took advantage of bargains in expensive homes. An average seaside manor on Jupiter Island, Fla., that might have sold for $4 million in 2006 cost less than $3 million last year. The Brentwood bungalow in L.A. was $1.5 million instead of $2 million, and that Scarsdale colonial fell to $1.1 million after gong for $1.5 million four years ago.

Getting a mortgage for these expensive homes was cheaper as well.

Normally buyers have to take out a jumbo loan to finance any mortgage beyond the $417,000 threshold ($729,000 in high-cost cities such as New York). These loans have higher interest rates because they are considered non-conforming — or higher risk — and are not backed Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

In 2009 buyers of high-end homes paid 1.8 percentage points more in interest than the average buyer. But in 2010, that spread had shrunk to just 0.6 points more.

That reduction would save about $780 a month on a million-dollar mortgage. That may not matter much when you’re a software gazillionaire, but for buyers stretching to reach that league, it can make a difference.

Some metro area markets experienced modest price rebounds in 2009, which was enough to push a handful of homes above the million-dollar threshold. In San Jose, for example, home values rose for several quarters, boosting the prices of homes right on the border of a million.

“You had some creep into the million-dollar bracket,” said broker Scott Kliewer with Windermere Silicon Valley.

But in most cities, the million-dollar homes sold were actually million-dollar homes, not just those that crossed into the high-end territory because of rising prices.

In New York, where volume grew nearly 25%, high-priced home sales were driven by bonuses on Wall Street. Even though bonuses were slightly smaller last year, they still topped $120,000. And that’s just the average; many employees brought home significantly more.

Wealthy clients have driven the business for Gary Reavis, the CEO of Keller Williams Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, where sales rose about 20%.

He attributes the jump to the stock rebound and good times in some of the area’s best-paying industries, including entertainment.

And in Washington, government workers continued to bolster the high-end market, which grew 20% here as well. The DC area is now the best educated place in the nation and and one of the highest paid. Median family income is now over $101,000 in the D.C. area and more than $109,000 in the Bethesda-Rockville, Md., area.

Other big gainers were Honolulu (26%), San Diego (14%) and Nashville (13%).

The real estate industry may take some solace from the mini boom in high-end sales, but it does not necessarily mean good times are ahead for the rest of the market. In fact, the rest of the market is facing a potential 25% drop in prices and stalling sales.

“There are not a lot of million-dollar home buyers even in the best of times,” said Bishop. “It’s always nice to see any segment come back, but it’s the middle of the market we would like to see set the pace.

Here is last week sales in the Downtown San Diego condo market. 2/20/11 to 2/28/11

Between The Numbers:

The week previous there were 9 sales with the average sales price of $309,000

Last week there were 18 sales with the average sale price of $401,583

This improvement on the number of sales and the sales price is a great sign of the improvement of Downtown San Diego Condo market. However I need to see these numbers for several months in a row before I will buy into a strong recovery of the downtown market. But I will buy that there is a small improvement over all in this downtown real estate market.

Here is a great article from the LA Times:

Home prices ended the year on a high note in 2010, according to the latest government figures.

For only the second time since the sector’s 2005 collapse, the average price of both new and previously owned houses sold registered a year-over-year gain. It wasn’t much, at least not by pre-crash standards — just 3.5% — but it was more than respectable given the nation’s economic doldrums.

Of course, your local market may not have turned the corner just yet. But in another positive sign, the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s survey of the country’s 32 largest metropolitan statistical areas found that prices were up in 19 markets and practically unchanged in another.

The FHFA’s survey is based on data from a sample of lenders, which report the terms and conditions on all single-family mortgages closed during the last five days of the month.

It does not include government-backed financing or refinanced mortgages, both of which tend to be somewhat lower than conventional mortgages. So the findings are skewed higher than they otherwise would be. Nevertheless, a housing market looking for any shred of good news will take heart in the latest numbers.

At the same time, the FHFA figures include distressed sales, which add a downward pull to the results. Stan Humphries, vice president of data and analytics at Zillow, the online real estate marketplace, said foreclosures can sell for 20% to 40% less than other properties, depending on the number of such properties on the market at any given time.

“We’ve done three different analyses, and even in markets with an extremely high volume of foreclosures, non-distress properties sell for more,” Humphries said.

For that reason, he advises buyers and sellers to look at distressed and non-distressed properties separately and act accordingly.

“Foreclosures are an important part of the market, and a house needs to be priced competitively to stand out from the pack,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean you have to price your house like a foreclosure.”

Distressed sales are different in several ways, Humphries said. For one thing, the seller, typically a bank but sometimes an owner who has the lender’s permission to sell for less than what’s owed, usually wants to offload the property quickly. For another, the house usually isn’t in the best condition.

On the other hand, regular houses are generally in better shape. There also tends to be far less drama involved than with a foreclosure or short sale — fewer delays, no lost papers and no chain of approvals. But most of all, the economist pointed out, the seller’s motivation is quite different.

Regular sellers often are willing to wait to achieve the price they think they deserve, even if it’s not as much as the place could have fetched some years back. Consequently, if you are a patient seller or a buyer who doesn’t want to hassle with someone else’s problems, Humphries said, you should expect to sell and buy at a somewhat higher price than what is suggested by the FHFA’s index.

(It should be noted that Zillow’s monthly price index is the only one of the popular indexes that does not include foreclosures.)

With those caveats in mind, here’s a closer look at the latest government numbers.

Of the 19 markets with higher prices, 11 registered double-digit gains. The largest jumps were recorded in Detroit (25.9%), Philadelphia (19.4%), Boston (19.1%) and San Antonio (18.6%). Also, gains of more than 16% were logged in Houston; Orlando, Fla., and San Diego.

Be cautious in reading too much into these increases. Although they include some measure of price appreciation, they also contain an element of market mix. In other words, to some degree, the gains probably were influenced by a larger number of transactions than usual in the higher-priced brackets.

As usual, the San Francisco Bay Area is the priciest in the land. The average paid for both new and previously owned homes in the Bay Area last year was $614,200. And that’s only 0.3% higher than the average of $612,300 in 2009.

San Diego, on the other hand, registered a 16.5% jump in its average price, to $549,600 when 2010 came to a close from $471,600 at the end of 2009, making it the second-most-expensive place to buy a house.

New York moved up on the list to the third spot, displacing Los Angeles. In the Big Apple, the average increased 11.9%, to $488,600 from $436,500, while the average bumped up 4.9% in L.A., to $480,700 from $458,200.

The Washington-Baltimore, Md., market is now fifth on the top-10 list, even though prices there rose only 0.5%, to $451,200 from $449,000.

At the other end of the price spectrum, the five least-expensive markets all recorded declining prices. But as it is with price increases, part of the change is a result of an abnormal number of sales in the lower-price brackets.

How else to explain a 29.6% plunge in Kansas City, Mo., to $152,500 from $216,700? Or the 12.4% slide in Indianapolis to $197,800 from $225,900?

The declines drop Kansas City to the bottom of the list and Indianapolis to the third lowest. But those markets are generally considered to be relatively inexpensive anyway.

In between them now, though, is Las Vegas, which is emblematic of the housing-market crash. The average in the neon city in the Nevada desert is now down to $189,700. But as was noted earlier, that figure is highly influenced by the huge number of distressed sales.

Here is a great article from the LA Times:

Southern California’s housing market turned chilly in December, with prices falling in most counties and the region’s median price barely improving over last year.

The median price paid for a home in the region was $290,000, up 1% from November and 0.3% from December 2009, according to data released Tuesday by San Diego research firm MDA DataQuick.

It was the smallest year-over-year gain in the median — the point at which half of homes sold for more and half for less — in the Southland since December 2009.

“Southern California is starting to show some of the weakness that the state as a whole has been showing,” said Jacquelynne Chimera, an analyst for investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.

“Given the fact that higher-priced homes are more prevalent in the market — we are seeing more sales in that category of homes — you would expect the median to go up,” she said. “Home prices were basically flat. And so what that means is that on a home-by-home basis, prices must be declining.”

The median sale price on a year-over-year basis was down in the counties of Los Angeles (2.7%), Orange (5.7%), San Bernardino (1.3%) and Ventura (1.4%). The median in San Diego and Riverside counties was up 0.9% and 2%, respectively.

Regional economists said the housing market won’t get moving again until the job picture brightens. California’s financial problems are a major concern hanging over any improvement.

“I don’t think you are going to see any immediate, strong surges,” said Kerry D. Vandell, director of UC Irvine’s Center for Real Estate. “A lot of folks are concerned about the state situation, the budgetary issues and what are the implications for job cuts, and how that will affect various communities.”

Jerry Nickelsburg, senior economist for the UCLA Anderson Forecast, said he expected a weak spring sales season because the economy would not have improved enough to have created jobs by then.

“We are not seeing substantial job growth happening until at least later in 2011,” Nickelsburg said. “We should see a little bit of price depreciation in the housing markets. This market has a little bit more to work through with its inventory while we are awaiting employment increases.”

Some real estate agents were optimistic, however, that rising mortgage rates could push some hesitant buyers into the market.

“Buyers have an understanding that this really might be the time to step up because a half-point more [in a loan's interest rate] costs you so much more,” said Betty Graham, president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage of Greater Los Angeles. “So if they had been on the sidelines, and they can step up, I think that is happening.”

Historically low mortgage rates and low prices gave the Southland a sales boost in December over November, with sales rising 20.5% — though a sales gain is typical from November to December as home shoppers close deals for the year. Sales were down 12.5% compared with December 2009. A total of 19,528 new and previously owned houses and condominiums sold.

New home sales hit a record low for a December at 1,528, capping off the worst year for new home sales since DataQuick began keeping records in 1988.

“Looking back at 2010, it’s hard to ignore the ongoing slump in the Southland’s new-home market,” DataQuick President John Walsh said. “What happens next will hinge largely on the pace of the economic recovery and the manner in which lenders manage their inventories of distressed properties, which are competition for new homes.”

Sales of foreclosures accounted for 34.3% of the resale market last month, down from 35.2% in November and 39.6% in December 2009. Foreclosure resales peaked in February 2009, accounting for 56.7% of the market.

The key to a lasting recovery is buyers who are moving up to more expensive homes, economists said. Homes that sold for $500,000 or more accounted for 21.1% of all sales in the region last month, the same as the month prior but up from 20.7% in December 2009. Daniel Penrod, senior industry analyst with the California Credit Union League, saw that as an encouraging sign.

“We need the move-up home buyer,” Penrod said. “We saw a boost in the low end really moving the market, and now we are seeing the middle tier starting to gain some traction, and that is the tier that adds stability to the market.”

Separately, the National Assn. of Home Builders said its monthly reading of builders’ sentiment was unchanged in January at 16. The index has been stuck at that level since November. A reading below 50 shows negative sentiment about home sales.