Hope is alive in housing market

Kerry Vandell expects to see plenty of new home buyers in Newport Beach in the coming years — as well as new accents, new surnames and new passports.

The director of UCI’s Center for Real Estate agrees with many who believe home sales will improve soon as prices continue to drop.

He doesn’t believe, though, that all the purchasers will relocate from elsewhere in Orange County. With the combination of the falling prices and the weakening value of the dollar, Vandell said, coastal areas such as Newport may become increasingly attractive to the foreign market.

“You’re going to see Asian investors with money, European investors with money, Middle Eastern, too,” he said. “I believe that’s going to result in an increasing presence of wealthy foreign purchasers with money.”

Some, like Vandell, see a bright future for the Newport-Mesa housing market, which they expect to rebound after months of slow going.

Throughout the region, many Realtors and lenders said they had seen a leap in customers as housing costs fell and buyers who had been priced out of the market were finally able to close.

The numbers for March, though, show another bleak month for the home industry in Southern California.

The research firm DataQuick, which has compiled home statistics since 1988, declared Tuesday that Southland home sales were slower last month than in any March in the last two decades.

The number of homes sold dropped 41.4% across the region and 46.9% in Orange County from the same month a year ago.

Newport-Mesa, for the most part, was no exception. In four of the eight ZIP codes in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, sales fell even more steeply from a year ago than the Orange County average.

“You’ve got everyone that’s reading the news and everyone’s freaked out,” said Steve Jones, a Westside developer who has tried for months to sell the last two condominiums in his 1.7 Ocean complex. “What I keep telling people is that this is when you can get a deal. This is when people are willing to negotiate.”

However, Galel Fajardo, a certified mortgage planner for the Coast Mortgage Group in Costa Mesa, thinks that time has come for many home buyers.

His office, he said, has gotten a flurry of activity in recent weeks, and he expects sales to surge in the area by the time summer rolls around.

“What those numbers don’t show, and it’s impossible to see, is how many buyers there are out there,” he said. “They are out there in droves looking right now. People who were on the fence are no longer on the fence.”

Costa Mesa Realtor Larry Weichman said a number of homes in his area had gotten multiple offers in the last few weeks.

One, a Mesa Verde home that had gone into foreclosure, netted 30 offers before a buyer finally closed on it.

“The market under $500,000 in Costa Mesa is on fire,” Weichman said. “People are lined up to go into these houses.”

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected].