This was the title of a major Wall Street Journal article this week.

The sub-title was “Three essential clues may signal if better times are ahead”.

I was curious – what were the clues? From a twist on the old “location, location, location”, the WSJ asked: What are the three most important things to consider when buying a house? Answer: Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.

I’ve never paid much attention to employment numbers for Ventura County, but I dug into it this week and was surprised to see that unemployment in Ventura County (9.5%) is substantially lower than California (11.4%) as a whole – and the trend line shows down for unemployment. That is a leading indicator of Ventura’s relative jobs growth.

The second clue: Rents. Specifically, the rent-to-buy multiplier of 15 times annual rent to average purchase price of a comparable home. If prices are more than 15 times annual rent, then the market favors renters; under 15 times, buyers.

So if rents are $2,000 a month for a typical 3+2 home ($24,000/year), that equals $360,000. Could you buy that home at that number? Maybe, maybe not – it may be closer to the high 3’s or low 4’s. But it’s close. And that’s considering that living on the coast in southern California has never been “cheap”.

The final clue: Foreclosures. Obviously, our market is saturated with distressed (short sales and bank owned) real estate, but the trend line is slowly coming down for foreclosures in our county.