LA JOLLA MARKET DATA
How we count every sale.
The numbers on this site are built, not quoted. This page documents every rule that turns raw closing records into the medians, price-per-square-foot figures, and neighborhood leaderboards we publish — so any figure here can be traced back to its source.
Where the closings come from
Every closing on this site comes from recorded deeds in ZIP 92037, pulled from MLS and title-company records against the San Diego County Assessor. Assessor records capture what actually closed: the recorded price, the address, the square footage, and the recording date. They do not capture Days on Market, list-to-sale ratios, or HOA dues — those require MLS data. If you need those on a specific property or block, the team runs that pull from MLS on request.
How a sale is counted once
Closing records arrive from two pipelines — MLS reports and title reports — and both can carry the same transaction. Before anything is charted, every report of the same closing is collapsed into one: identical normalized addresses within 180 days at the same price count once, and addresses that closed within 45 days within 8% (or $5,000, whichever is greater) of each other are treated as the same sale. When duplicates collapse, the most complete record wins, so square footage, bedrooms, and coordinates are never lost to a thinner duplicate.
What counts as a market sale
Not every recorded transfer is a sale. Transfers under $200,000 — partial-interest transfers, corrections, family quitclaims — are excluded from every statistic on the site. And a unit address is never counted as a single-family home: any closing carrying a unit or apartment designation stays in the attached-residential dataset, even if the record arrived in the single-family file.
How closings are mapped to neighborhoods
Each closing is assigned to a neighborhood by geography, not by spreadsheet labels. The team maintains a hand-curated polygon set covering La Jolla's micro-markets, and a closing's coordinates fall into exactly one polygon. Records whose labels disagree with the map are corrected in favor of the polygon. Closings whose coordinates fall outside any polygon — or that carry none — group as Other La Jolla and are excluded from neighborhood leaderboards.
Why single-family and condo/townhouse are never combined
A $5.5M oceanfront single-family home and a $1.4M Village condo are both 'La Jolla sales', but they are different markets. Every median, average, range, and $/sqft figure on this site is computed within one property type at a time. The market page, neighborhood pages, and community pages never blend the two segments — combining them would flatten both and mislead everyone.
How medians and price-per-square-foot are computed
Medians are the median of closed sale prices within a neighborhood and calendar year. Price per square foot is the median of the individual price-per-sqft ratios of the closings that report square footage — not the ratio of two medians — so a mix of small and large homes cannot distort it. Neighborhoods where square footage is missing on most records show '—' rather than a guess.
How year-over-year comparisons work
YoY compares the current year's median to the prior calendar year's median for the same neighborhood. La Jolla's micro-markets are small — some see 10–20 single-family sales in a year — so a single trophy property can swing the median meaningfully. Read YoY as directional, not exact.
How current the data is
The market page states its coverage date — the latest recorded closing across both the single-family and the condo/townhouse datasets. When new records are uploaded, the coverage date advances automatically; it is never a hand-typed label. New MLS and title records are pulled monthly, in the first week of each month. Mortgage rates pull live from the FRED API (Freddie Mac PMMS) on each page load.
What we do not publish
No unrecorded or off-market transactions, no commercial or land sales, no pocket listings, and no property-type blends. Statistics that depend on MLS-only fields (DOM, list-to-sale, HOA dues) are not charted from this data — ask the team for a live MLS pull instead.
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Every statistic on this site can be traced to its source records. If you want the underlying closings for your block or neighborhood, ask.
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