It looks like the Real Housewives Bravo TV franchise is coming to San Diego, and for more than just the great weather. The company making the TV show – Asylum Entertainment – has a casting call out right now looking for women who live in the area.
The producers are looking for upscale, women who live fabulous, glamorous lives along with their busy social calendars. They say they are looking for the best and brightest, so to speak, when it comes to wealth, glamour, and if you’ve seen the shows, a certain amount of panache and drama.
A series of 50 Tweets sent by the casting agents this week said they were focusing on the La Jolla and Rancho Sante Fe areas.
If banks aren’t going to at least threaten to foreclose on the non-payers, then no surprise that more are testing the system – fromHW:
Mortgage defaults increased nationwide in the fourth quarter as more Americans began to default on all types of consumer debt.
The S&P Dow Jones/Experian credit default indices made this alarming trend more transparent in data released Tuesday.
The indices national composite, which measures all consumer defaults, increased for three consecutive months in a row, reaching a 1.72% default rate in December. This compares to a default rate of 1.64% in November and a much lower rate of 1.55% in October.
The first-mortgage default rate followed the same pattern, increasing from 1.47% in October to 1.58% in November, and then edging up again to 1.68% last month.
“The national composite rate was 1.72% in December, eight basis points above the November rate and 26 basis points above September’s post-recession low,” said David M. Blitzer, managing director and chairman of the index committee for S&P Dow Jones Indices. “It was primarily driven by the first mortgage rate at 1.68% in December, ten basis points above the previous month’s rate and 32 basis points above September’s post-recession low.”
From its historic low of 0.62% posted last month, the second-mortgage default rate reached 0.69% in December.
The surge in mortgage default rates mirrors a trend already occuring in the national composite of all consumer defaults. While all five cities covered by the report showed increases in their overall default rates in December, all five cities also remain below default rates posted a year ago in December 2011, said Blitzer.
The median asking price for homes in San Diego peaked in June 2006 at $539,225 and is now $147,225 (27.3%) lower. From a low of $336,250 in March 2012, the median asking price in San Diego has increased by $55,750 (16.6%).
This graph from HousingTracker shows the median asking prices split into three tiers – it looks like the upper 75% tier has been responsible for almost the entire gain.
The median price of the 75% group increased from roughly $600,000 at the beginning of last year, to around $700,000 this year:
Have selling prices followed?
Let’s use NSDCC detached-homes to represent the upper tier.
Here are the December year-over-year sales statistics:
Year
#Sales
Average SP
Avg. $/sf
Median SP
Median $/sf
2010
205
$1,230,348
$388/sf
$835,000
$323/sf
2011
220
$1,080,222
$350/sf
$800,000
$306/sf
2012
290
$1,196,270
$399/sf
$849,500
$323/sf
11vs12
+32%
+10.7%
+14%
+6.2%
+5.6%
The average of those four pricing changes is +9.125%. The buyers have responded favorably, but there appears that we’ve just gotten back to about where we were in 2010.
Would considering 2010 comps in your valuations be prudent? In areas where you have to go back 24 months to find enough sales, it looks like they could be applicable.
Maggie Medved was stuck with her Phoenix house for two years after the market crash wiped out the equity in the property. Last year, as prices in the area rose by the most in the U.S., she and her partner were finally able to sell the 3-bedroom 1950’s style home and move to a larger place.
“We were counting the days for when we could move,” said Medved, 40, who trains employees for weight loss company Jenny Craig Inc. “We definitely knew it was a waiting game because it would’ve been financial suicide if we had sold earlier.”
Medved was among the 12 million borrowers in the U.S. who at the peak of the real-estate downturn owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth, blocking them from moving or saving money by taking advantage of the lowest borrowing costs on record to refinance. As prices recovered, the number of underwater borrowers fell by almost 4 million last year to 7 million, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. , and could drop to 4 million within 2 years.
The housing market is rebounding faster than anyone thought possible, according to Blackstone Group LP ’s global head of real estate Jonathan Gray, as the Federal Reserve buys mortgage bonds to keep rates near record lows and investors sop up a diminishing supply of properties for sale. Housing construction could boost U.S. gross domestic product by 0.4 percentage point and home price appreciation may add another 0.2 percentage point, Bank of America’s senior economist Michelle Meyer forecasts.
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Rob and Julia Israch won a fierce bidding war for a three-bedroom townhouse in Mountain View, Calif., late last year even though their $750,000 offer—while $92,000 above the asking price—was topped by 11 rivals and was several thousand dollars below the highest bid.
A key reason: The seller, software engineer Lev Stesin, was moved by a letter in which the Israchs said they worked in the technology industry and explained how the home’s spacious layout would be perfect given the imminent arrival of their first child. Among other things, the townhouse has three bathrooms, a wood-burning fireplace and a roomy backyard.
“I felt very comfortable with these people,” said Mr. Stesin, himself the father of a toddler. “I really wanted this place to go to somebody in a similar situation.”
In an echo of the last housing boom, ardent pitch letters from eager home buyers are popping up again in hot U.S. real-estate markets like Silicon Valley, Seattle, San Diego, suburban Chicago and Washington, D.C., housing economists and real-estate brokers say.
The heartfelt missives, often accompanied by personal photos, aim to create an emotional bond that can give their writers an edge—especially in situations where multiple bidders are vying for the same house. And the reappearance of buyer pitches, also known as love letters, offers further evidence that the housing market is rebounding after a five-year slump.
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Are the kids so attached to video games that smaller yards are preferred?
This yard is dwarfed by the super-sized house, but it backs to open space and might be tolerable for buyers who like the idea of a low-maintenance yard:
Let’s split the SD north County Coastal area in two regions, north and south. The south region is our high-enders – La Jolla, Del Mar, Rancho Santa Fe, Solana Beach, and Carmel Valley, and it’s where the real action has been – both sales and pricing in 4Q12 increased sharply compared to the last two years, and bear some resemblance to the peak era:
Detached-home 4Q Sales in NSDCC, South Region
4Q Year
# of Sales
Avg $/sf
2003
410
$451/sf
2004
341
$458/sf
2005
257
$611/sf
2006
263
$563/sf
2007
212
$574/sf
2008
170
$544/sf
2009
284
$527/sf
2010
246
$472/sf
2011
262
$455/sf
2012
347
$527/sf
You could say that we’re just getting back to 2009 pricing (which was identical) and shrug it off to ‘bouncing along the bottom’. But the number of sales looked more like those in 2004!
The south region has 447 active detached listings, whose list prices are averaging $830/sf – leaving room for prices to possibly go higher?
It could happen – somebody ratted me out to the listing agent of the $900,000 Carmel Valley house that was featured in the video here over the weekend (since deleted), which looked 5% to 10% too high on price:
He mentioned, “We already had an offer on this property before we even hit the market that was very close to the sellers desired price”.
It’s been hot in Orange County too – hat tip to daytrip for sending in this report from the OCR – LINK:
If banks aren’t going to at least threaten to foreclose on the non-payers, then no surprise that more are testing the system – from 
