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DataQuick reports Million-dollar home sales plummet in Golden State

The number of California homes that sold for $1 million-plus declined for the fourth consecutive year in 2009, the result of buyer reticence, a difficult mortgage market and several years of price drops that tugged the value of many homes below the million-dollar threshold, a real estate information service reported.

A total of 18,621 Golden State homes sold for a million dollars or more last year. That was down 23.8 percent from 24,436 in 2008. In 2007 it was 42,506; in 2006 it was 50,010; and in 2005 it peaked at 54,773. Last year was the lowest sales count since 2002, when 15,703 were sold, according to San Diego-based MDA DataQuick.

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The median-sized million-dollar home was 2,646 sq.ft., with 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. The median price paid per square foot for all million-dollar homes was $605, down 10.1 percent from a revised $672 in 2008. For the overall market, the square-foot median declined 20.7 percent from $188 in 2008 to $149 last year, DataQuick reported.

Last year 4,925 Notices of Default, the first step of the formal foreclosure process, were recorded on homes that previously had sold for a million dollars or more. The number of Trustees Deeds, or the actual loss of a home to the foreclosure process, totaled 2,698 for those homes that previously sold for $1 million-plus.

Around 29 percent of the $1 million-plus buyers paid cash, up from 24 percent in 2008. In the over-$5 million category, two thirds of the purchases were cash. Of those who did finance their purchase, the median down payment was 39.4 percent of the purchase price. The lending institutions most willing to provide mortgage financing for $1 million-plus homes were Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Union Bank.