September 2025 Hi-Desert Real Estate Market Update

Greetings Fans,

Before I get into this month’s Update, let’s take a look at this article in Newsweek–https://www.newsweek.com/california-home-loses-third-value-three-years-2120759. To be honest, I hate it when we make bad national press. In my opinion, the true story is, in our communities, high priced homes have major price swings and some declines. Since mid-2022, homes sold under $400,000 represent approximately 70% of our sales. Before I continue, sales are very slow. The more numbers we have to work with, the better the data. With low sales, many months have big swings because there is not enough data for averages to work correctly. We see this frequently in Joshua Tree. With sales between 15 and 20 homes a month, the swings in averages can be huge. Since Yucca Valley tends to have more sales than our other communities (and since this was the focus of the Newsweek article) we will focus on just that community.

Let’s dive in. In this Update for August 2025, we see the average price of a home in Yucca Valley sold for $414,600. In the same community in 2024 the average price was $376,698. In 2023 the average was $350,154. And finally in 2022 the average price was $382,238. As you can see, over the last three years the true data shows a nice increase in value over the last three years. Remember, don’t believe everything you read. The fact is that many in our communities cannot afford the average priced home. They really can’t afford our higher priced homes. Those are the homes that struggle with declining value. Until we offer living wage jobs in our communities, this will remain true. In Yucca Valley, instead of arguing over our animal control, we should be pushing the Town for more economic development. Animal control affects a very small portion of our constituents. Economic development affects us all.

A few items stuck out in this month’s Update. As I forecasted, inventory has dropped from a high in May of over 900 listings to 700 I note in this Update to 690 at this writing. It is clear that the drop can be attributed to sellers’ listings expiring or cancelled all together. Many of us believe this is because so many homes are sitting on the market with no buyers even looking. Sellers have gotten tired of keeping the house “show ready” and have moved to the sidelines to watch for a rebound in the market. Our vacant land market is depressing. In this Update you can see we have 1,177 active vacant land listing but only 15 sales in August. A whopping 78+ months of inventory. Add to this the ever-changing Joshua Tree classification and you can see buyers are not interested in investing in our vacant land.

I hope you learn from this month’s Update. As always, we can help anyone accomplish their real estate goals. If you have a friend or family member that needs our help, please share our information with them.

Sincerely,

Bob Armstrong
(760) 221-2999
DRE #01275801
GREEN Real Estate Group