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Del Mar Heights Update

by | Sep 26, 2020 | Bubbleinfo TV, Del Mar, Jim's Take on the Market | 0 comments

For those of us who were pushing hard to find the bottom of the retail range in Del Mar’s 92014 zip code, this was the listing that toppled over everyone’s dominoes.

This house is six doors down from the one I sold earlier this year for $2,157,000, so the value-range pricing of $1,300,000 – $1,399,000 seemed extremely aggressive at the time. Heck, when they listed, I had a 1,518sf active listing over the crest of the hill with freeway noise priced at $1,495,000!

I expected the house to be a disaster, but it looked like the typical old funky Del Mar Heights professor home that were sprinkled throughout the area.  When this was built in 1977, it was probably a fine example of a custom design of the era.

It did close for $1,475,000:

‘Swamp the Boat’ Offer

by | Sep 25, 2020 | Bidding Wars, Bubbleinfo TV, Jim's Take on the Market, Realtor, Realtor Training, Why You Should List With Jim | 9 comments

Here’s how I handle a hot one when I’m the listing agent.

My listing of 7206 Durango in Carlsbad was appropriately priced at $999,000, given what we were selling and the homeowners’ desire to move sooner, not later. What do I mean when I say ‘appropriately priced”?

Sure, it was 2,699sf but it wasn’t a standard tract house.

We had twelve showings in two days, and for those who had been used to seeing other similar-sized homes nearby in Aviara and La Costa Valley and expected the same….well, you could tell by the look on their face – even with a mask on!  They were stunned, and had trouble comprehending what they just saw.

It was because the house was a funky combination of a 1970s-built 1,517sf house with a pseudo-granny flat added on.

The challenges:

  • The original house was in decent shape, but not a full remodel like the last two comps.
  • The granny flat was one bedroom/one bath, and both were upstairs.
  • The granny flat had an unpermitted kitchen.
  • The granny flat was too big to be permitted as an ADU today.
  • The backyard was 15-20ft of concrete, then a slope that went up about 40 feet.

I knew from the beginning that the buyer pool for this combo was going to be much smaller than it was for the last two comps that both closed for $1,115,000.  They were both fully-remodeled one-story homes on culdesacs, and we were the opposite.

One of the showings on Day Two was a single guy who came with his mom and an older-guy agent.  The agent had only been licensed for four years (his license number on his card was over 2000000), and because they had sincere interest, he asked me what would it take to buy the property.

This is where I differ greatly from virtually all other agents.

Most agents will make some vague reference to how hot the property has been based on the number of showings, and tell you to do your best. If you ask about their rules of engagement, it gets more vague because they usually don’t have a strategy, other than spreading out all the offers on the dining-room table and telling the seller to pick one.

I gave the buyer, his mom, and his agent a couple of ideas. I told them that I had received an offer of $1,000,000 on the first day, and two other parties told me they would be writing offers too.

Then I described his two choices:

Idea #1: Either you can write an initial offer around list price or higher, and I will conduct a highest-and-best round.  You can probably expect that there will be at least one buyer who will pay 5% over list, so it you offer that much or a little more, you might win.

Idea #2:  You can swamp the boat. Make an offer so outrageously high that no one else will touch it.

An hour later, I received his offer for $1,125,000, with no appraisal! On a $999,000 list price!

I shopped the price around with the other three contenders, but nobody wanted a piece of that.

It was a fair and transparent process where everyone had a chance to buy the property.  It’s what is best for the sellers, plus none of the buyers thought they were robbed – they had a fair chance to buy it.

Bubbleinfo.com, The First 15 Years

by | Sep 25, 2020 | About Kayla, About the author, Bubbleinfo Readers, Jim's Take on the Market | 4 comments

Bubbleinfo.com has been in existence for 15 years!  The peak audience here was at the bottom of the market (~11k), but having 5.6k users over the last 28 days is fantastic – thanks for being here!

Over the last 15 years:

Total number of Blog Posts: 9,820 (plus a few hundred more on the previous Squarespace format)

Blog comments: 64,524 (of which 6,587 were mine)

Twitter: 11,200 tweets

Instagram: 482 posts, 1,087 followers (Natalie is running it)

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The big news this week is that Kayla is going solo!

You’re never going to be comfortable and ready to go on your own, so at some point, every agent has to take the plunge.  She is going to keep working at Douglas Elliman in their midtown Manhattan office, and she has pledged to have her new blog up and running by October 1st!

Market Forecasts

by | Sep 25, 2020 | Forecasts, Jim's Take on the Market, Market Buzz | 0 comments

With the nation’s economy climbing out of a COVID-19 hole, home sales continue at a record pace. Total existing-home sales rose 2.4% from July to a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 6 million in August. Sales were up 10.5% from a year ago.

After plummeting in March, home-buying demand continues to take steps towards recovery. On average, newly listed properties remained on the market for 22 days in August, down from 31 days in August 2019. Sixty-nine percent of homes sold in August 2020 were on the market for less than a month.

“The demand for houses is easily eclipsing the available inventory in metro areas across the country,” said Adam Contos, CEO of real estate brokerage RE/MAX Holdings. “Buyers are moving forward in record numbers, unfazed by inventory challenges and consistently higher prices. Homeowners in a position to sell are seizing the opportunity and benefiting from the one-two combination of enthusiastic, competitive buyers.”

The number of homes for sale continues to lag. Housing inventory totaled 1.49 million units at the end of August, down 0.7% from July and 18.6% from one year ago. Unsold inventory sits at a three-month supply at the current sales pace, down from the four-month figure recorded in August 2019. Six-months of supply is considered healthy.

Scarce inventory has been problematic for the past few years, an issue that has worsened in the past month due to a steep surge in lumber prices and a dearth of lumber resulting from the massive wildfires devastating Western states.

Here are nine predictions from housing industry experts on what the rest of the year will spell for the nation’s housing demand. (The text has been lightly edited.)

https://money.com/housing-demand-forecasts/

My 2021 forecast?

More exuberant but lower-motivated sellers will enter the marketplace committed to not giving it away!  Their list prices will be 5% to 10% higher than today, causing some areas to be whipped into a frenzy, but in other areas, the unsolds stack up too quickly and become a glut. Buyers will determine which is which!

Record Levels

by | Sep 24, 2020 | Jim's Take on the Market, Market Buzz | 1 comment

From the LAT:

In the middle of a global pandemic, Southern California home prices keep setting records. The six-county region’s median price reached $600,000 in August, up 12.1% from a year earlier, according to data released Wednesday by DQNews.

That was the largest percentage increase since 2014 and the third consecutive month during which prices set a new all-time high. Sales rose 2.4% from a year earlier.

“We have had houses with 40 to 50 offers,” said Syd Leibovitch, president of Rodeo Realty, which has offices throughout the Los Angeles area. “It’s just bizarre.”

Although the price leaps may seem unlikely amid double-digit unemployment, analysts say the trend reflects the uneven effect of the coronavirus and its economic fallout.

Compared with low-wage workers, people who tend to have the financial ability to buy homes have been far less likely to lose their jobs, and in some ways, their ability to purchase a house has only expanded.

Interest rates have plunged, with the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage now below 3%. And many typical entertainment and recreational activities are still closed or operating at reduced capacity, leading some households to save more at the very time they realize they could use much more space.

“Where are you going to take your Zoom calls where you don’t interfere with one another?” said Kevin Tidwell, an agent with Rodeo Realty.

The desire for more space, coupled with historically low borrowing costs, has helped boost sales and prices across the country. But part of the sharp double-digit increase in the median is simply its definition.  The median is the point at which half the homes sold for more and half for less and thus reflects not only actual increases in value but also the types of homes selling at any given moment.

Jordan Levine, deputy chief economist at the California Assn. of Realtors, said a desire for larger homes could, in and of itself, push up the median. But more important is the uneven effects of the economic downturn.

Though many low-wage workers probably couldn’t have bought a home before the crisis, Levine said the country’s economic pain has been felt on a sliding scale, with middle-income households hit less than low-income households, but harder than the wealthy, factors that are causing a shift toward the luxury segment of the market.

For example, homes that sold for $1 million or more accounted for 22% of all homes sold in California last month, up from 16% in August 2019, the trade group’s data show. The share of homes that sold for less than $500,000 fell to 38% of all sales in August, down from 46% a year earlier.

Selma Hepp, deputy chief economist at CoreLogic, said the coronavirus is making the problem worse: Millennials are increasingly entering their prime home-buying years, but baby boomers who own large swaths of the housing stock are at heightened risk for complications from COVID-19.

“They don’t want to be moving right now,” she said of the older generation.

Link to Full Article

The Realtor Trojan Horse

by | Sep 23, 2020 | Jim's Take on the Market, Realtor, Zillow | 3 comments

This sounds like a document-processing center where trainees guide consumers through the paperwork and hope they don’t ask too many questions. Sound familiar? They are going to walk right in and take over while the industry stands by idly – and we’ll look up in a few years and wonder what happened, just like we did when they began.

Over the last several years, Zillow has been transitioning from a real estate search portal into a streamlined buying-and-selling entity that offers iBuying services through Zillow Offers, and mortgage, title and escrow services through Zillow Home Loans and Zillow Closing Services. Now, the company has taken a big step further by starting its own licensed brokerage: Zillow Homes.

Zillow Group’s Chief Industry Development Officer Errol Samuelson provided details about the new brokerage in a video:

According to Zillow, starting in January 2021, Zillow Offers customers in Atlanta, Phoenix and Tucson will be working directly with a licensed employee of Zillow Homes. In addition, any Zillow-owned homes in these three markets will be listed by Zillow Homes employees. Although the services will be limited to these three locations to start, the company says it plans to expand into additional markets later in 2021.

In the video, Samuelson emphasizes that Zillow Homes will not be recruiting agents from other companies, but instead will be licensing existing Zillow employees under the Zillow Homes entity.

“We’re excited to add another important link in the Zillow Offers transaction chain to offer our customers greater choice and convenience when considering a move,” said Jeremy Wacksman, president of Zillow, in a statement. “At Zillow, our mission is to give people the power to unlock life’s next chapter and we want to help them on their journey home through a range of services that meet their preferences—whether through Zillow Offers or through a trusted Zillow Premier Agent partner.”

Zillow Offers launched in 2018 and is now available in 25 markets. According to the company, Zillow Homes will be “the brokerage of record for Zillow Offers transactions.” The move also frees up the company from using “thousands of disparate data feeds,” allowing them instead to pull from “MLS Internet Data Exchange, or IDX feeds,” according to the video statement.

“We look forward to working more closely with our agents, industry and MLS partners to efficiently serve our mutual customers,” added Wacksman. “Together, we will push to keep the real estate industry moving forward, and adapt to changing consumer preferences and virtual technologies.”

Zillow says it has plans to join local real estate associations, as well as the National Association of REALTORS®. The company also says it will continue investing and expanding its Premier Agent business—through which buyers and sellers can get connected to Zillow Premier Agents—and added that it expects this to be the “preference of the majority of Zillow’s customers.”

https://rismedia.com/2020/09/23/from-portal-to-brokerage-zillow-takes-massive-next-step-into-all-in-one-real-estate-services/

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