Los Angeles and California Are Cooling Quickly

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Inman News reports on a cooling trend in California real estate:

"There is no justification for the prices we're seeing now," Christopher Thornberg, chief economist at UCLA's Anderson School of Business, said when issuing the school's gloomy quarterly economic forecast last week.

Thornberg predicts that the downturn now under way will cost the state a staggering 200,000 jobs in the real estate and construction industries alone. And though he foresees a modest 6 percent gain in statewide home prices for this year, he also says they'll flatten in 2007.

Many Realtors say the spreads between asking and offering prices have already widened dramatically.

"Some sellers in markets that have had rapid appreciation are listing the price of their home too high, but those homes are just languishing on the market," says Thomas M. Stevens, senior vice president of brokerage giant NRT Inc. and president of the National Association of Realtors.

-- The Boy in the Big Housing Bubble/Los Angeles and Beyond