HOME SALES ROLLER-COASTER RIDE IS OVER.

Byline: GREGORY J. WILCOX

It's over.

And it's been a ride like no other.

For the past 10 years, the San Fernando Valley's residential real estate market has been fascinating to watch.

Lucrative for buyers in the late 1990s and early 2000s who have not maxed out their equity and now have a nest egg.

The yoke probably won't be on them.

Those who jumped in this time last year might be getting jittery.

Likewise for anyone holding a teaser rate loan with a mortgage payment that's going to rise come adjustment day.

Gravity is working again and no one knows what toll it will take. Since this decade started, prices and sales rose ever higher and just got to a point that was no longer sustainable.

Some market watchers have been looking for this turn for two years.

Here's how the Valley market shakes out through the year's first seven months: Since January, 5,663 previously owned houses changed owners, according to the Van Nuys-based Southland Regional Association of Realtors. That's a 24.6 percent drop from the same period last year.

It's also the fewest sales since the first seven months of 1993, when there were 4,754 transactions.

And this year is the first since 1996 that sales so far have failed to break the 1,000 mark in any month.

July's median price moved up by just 1.2 percent, the smallest year-over-year gain since the bulls began running 144 months ago.

That predicted soft landing?

Maybe it's not so soft after all.

``I've never seen a soft landing in 53 years,'' Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo R. Mozilo was quoted as saying during an analyst conference call last month in addressing the issue of housing prices. ``How low are they going to go? It's hard to tell, but the trend is down.''

The temptation now is to look back to the beginning of the 1990s, which morphed into the Last Great Market Meltdown.

That's probably not a good idea, though.

``The future is not a fact. People want to treat the future like the past,'' explained Michael Carney, executive director of the Real Estate Research Council at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Carney knows two things about this current market are true, both in the Valley and Los Angeles County.

Sales are down.

Prices are not falling.

Yet.

For example, on Friday, Carney analyzed numbers from DataQuick Information Systems and found that for the county:

In 2005, sales of all new and previously owned houses and condominiums fell an annual 14 percent in the second quarter, 11 percent in the third quarter and 4 percent in the fourth quarter.

``I've become a bit more pessimistic,'' Carney said. ``We've seen a much bigger decline in sales than we have been seeing for a while. The slowdown has become more strong.''

In the second quarter, the median price paid for all kinds of housing in the county rose an annual 11 percent, to $512,993. The new-home median increased 6 percent, to $477,355, and the condo median median ticked up 8 percent, to $412,879.

``Through the second quarter, you certainly don't see any decline in home prices,'' Carney said.

He notes that in some areas, like the Valley in July, the annual appreciation rate is close to zero. In the coming months, appreciation could bounce up and down from negative to positive compared with the year-ago price.

Carney has traced housing prices back to the mid-1940s and they rise more than they fall. And an extended run of depressed prices, like the one from 1990 to 1996, is unusual.

During that time, when the local economy was enduring a historic upheaval, the biggest price decline in the Valley was 9.9 percent in 1994 as the median fell to $178,417 from $196,117.

This market is rebalancing, but early `90s price points are probably not on the horizon.

For example, if we had a 10 percent decline in July's median of $607,000, the price would be $546,300.

That's still an expensive home.

``Economic fundamentals don't suggest any collapse,'' Carney said.

It's going to take a while to find out if he's right.

greg.wilcox(at)dailynews.com

[phone]