Home sales drop another 8.6%

Home sales and prices tumbled across most of California in October as the credit crisis continued to roil residential real estate markets, a trade association said Wednesday. Gregory J.Wilcox in the Daily News.

Last month sales plunged 40 percent statewide from October 2006 and the median house price declined 9.9 percent to $497,110, said the Los Angeles-based California Association of Realtors.

The association computes sales on an annualized basis, which means that if the market matched October's pace all year, 265,030 houses would change owners.