Alex Veiga reports at AP:

The median price in a six-county area of Southern California fell to $408,000 – the lowest level since October 2004, when it was $402,500. That median is 19.2 percent below the region's peak price of $505,000 last summer, and it's 1.7 percent below January's median, the firm said.

In the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area, the median price fell 11.6 percent to $548,000 compared to a year earlier and 17.6 percent from the region's peak median price of $665,000 last summer. Bay Area prices were essentially flat from January.

What happened in a nutshell: California prices were propped up because of migration from the rest of the US—and immigration from other parts of the world. Now, Americans are leaving California faster than they are coming—and the productivity of the newcomers isn't enough to support the insane values of California real estate.

The California of today is has become more like Mexico—and more like Hong Kong—but mostly more like Mexico. That means more corrupt and poorer services. We are even seeing shanty towns emerge in Socal—and many of the residents don't appear to be recent immigrants.