Our first peek at April home-selling patterns from DataQuick shows that the spring shopping season looks a lot like what we saw this past winter: sluggish sales activity and a stagnant median sales price. Median prices are 1.4% above a year ago but 1.3% below June’s all-time high of $642,500. Sales volume runs 23% below the year-ago pace. If that holds this will be the 19th straight month that O.C. home shoppers bought fewer homes vs. the year-ago period. (For ZIP-by-ZIP results, CLICK HERE!) Here’s how key market slices fared in the 22 business days ended April 6:

* Includes single-family homes, condos and recently converted apartments

ï COMPARE: How did your community’s homes do? CLICK HERE

ï COMPARE: See how other O.C. home-price indexes have fared by CLICKING HERE

With many apologies to the good folks at Hanley Wood Market Intelligence in Costa Mesa, here’s the correct peek into conditions in the O.C. new-home market for February. Your blogger’s goof resulted in incorrect data being published earlier this week. Ponder the inventory for sale (finished properties for sale, plus residences under construction but not under contract) and the cancellation rate (deals buyers didn’t close as a share of all deals) …

*T-home=Townhomes, duplexes

If you mised my latest column for The Register, can you believe that Arizona regulators want to stop online real estate tracker Zillow.com from providing its free home price estimates in the state? My thesis …

In some ways, this is a silly regulatory debate over what Arizona defines as a legal appraisal of a property and who can legally do such home valuations. This smells like a regulatory body protecting its own flock. Doesn’t the Arizona Board of Appraisals have anything better to do amid that state’s ugly real estate slowdown?
More importantly, Arizona v. Zillow feels like a shot across the bow to the budding business of arming consumers nationwide with critical information they need to navigate the muddy waters of a housing market.

To read the rest, CLICK HERE

First-quarter stats from RealFacts show average rents at O.C.’s largest apartment complexes rising 6% in a year. That’s a slight drop from the 7% rate of the previous year. Interesting to note that the slowing rent hikes are across the board. Among the largest declines are the larger units, perhaps a sign of economic skittishness and/or competition from empty and unsold residences. Here’s a look at first-quarter average rents; change in a year; and change in 2005-06’s first quarter …

“It’s slowing. It definitely is slowing, and it’s happening nationwide,” USC professor Delores Conway tells the Register’s Jeff Collins. She says O.C. apartment demand has dropped off and occupancy is starting to decline slightly and there are some new apartments on the market, though not much. And, although apartments are being converted to condos, some of those units are being leased. “That gives you a new supply of rentals in that market.”