Housing indicators for the six counties of Southern California. Data sources include federal agencies and verified primary market data providers. Original sources are identified beneath every chart. CMN provides the interpretation.
Price, supply, and demand across all six counties. Select an indicator.
CMN Interpretation. Listing price is what sellers are asking, not what buyers are paying, and it tends to move before sale prices do. The spread between counties is one useful measure of where demand is concentrated: coastal Orange and San Diego sit well above the Inland Empire. When read alongside income, that gap can suggest the shape of the region's affordability divide. What this does not prove: a county median conceals wide variation between submarkets, and an asking price is not a transaction.
CMN Interpretation. Active listings are the supply side of the market and an important indicator of whether buyers have negotiating room. Southern California's shortage is structural rather than seasonal, so a sustained rise in listings can suggest a genuine shift in bargaining power. Los Angeles carries the largest raw count simply because it is the largest county, so each line is best read against its own history rather than against the others. What this does not prove: listing counts say nothing about price, quality, or where within a county the supply sits.
CMN Interpretation. Days on market is one useful read on demand. Prices tend to be sticky because sellers resist cutting them, so softening demand can show up first as homes sitting longer and only later as prices adjusting. When these lines rise while prices hold flat, that pattern can suggest the market has moved before the price has. What this does not prove: market time is affected by pricing strategy, seasonality, and property condition, not demand alone.
Median household income, all six counties. Read this against the listing prices above — the distance between the two is the affordability gap.
CMN Interpretation. Affordability is a ratio, and income is its denominator. Incomes across Southern California have risen steadily but not at the pace of prices, which means the distance between the two lines matters more than either line alone. For an agency modelling housing need, that divergence is the more informative figure. What this does not prove: a median income conceals enormous variation, and it says nothing about accumulated wealth, existing equity, or households that already own.
How many years of a county's median household income it takes to buy its median home. This is CMN's own calculation, computed live from U.S. Census data. It is the number the price and income charts above cannot show on their own.
30-year fixed mortgage rate, United States average.
CMN Interpretation. Rates are an important driver of affordability, often more so than price. In a market where the median home exceeds a million dollars, a one point move in the rate can change the monthly payment more than most negotiated price reductions. This can suggest why a buyer waiting for prices to fall may not end up better off. What this does not prove: this is the national average rate. The rate an individual household is offered depends on credit, down payment, and loan type, and can differ materially.
New private housing structures authorized by building permits, all six counties.
CMN Interpretation. Permits are an early signal of future supply, typically leading completions by a year or more. Riverside and San Bernardino have consistently authorised more construction than the coastal counties, which can suggest where much of the region's new housing is actually being built. Read alongside price and inventory, permit trends help indicate whether supply is responding to demand. What this does not prove: a permit is not a finished home. Permits are abandoned, delayed, and repriced, so this is best read as intent rather than delivery.
Unemployment rate, all six Southern California counties.
CMN Interpretation. Housing rests on payrolls. Employment is what qualifies a buyer for a loan and what keeps an existing owner in the house, so unemployment is an important indicator for housing demand. The persistent gap between the coastal counties and the Inland Empire is one reason those housing markets behave differently. What this does not prove: a county unemployment rate says nothing about which industries are gaining or losing, about wage quality, or about underemployment.
Dashboard methodology and sources. Data sources include federal agencies and verified primary market data providers. Original sources are identified beneath every chart, together with the dataset, series identifier, frequency, geographic coverage and known limitations. CMN provides the interpretation, which is labelled as such and kept separate from the source data. Charts are retrieved live and are current as of each source's most recent release. All figures are subject to revision by the publisher. No single indicator explains a housing market: price indicates what sellers are asking, inventory and days on market indicate whether they are likely to get it, rates indicate what a buyer can carry, and employment indicates whether that demand holds. They are best read together. CMN Realty Group is an independent housing intelligence and real estate advisory company, not a government agency. This dashboard is general information and education. It is not a valuation, an appraisal, or advice on a specific property or transaction.
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