Although he primarily lives in San Francisco, entrepreneur and investor Justin Yoshimura focused on Southern California when it came time to buy property, with the aim of making it his home away from home.
In December, he paid $2.04 million for a three-bedroom, three-bathroom home in Santa Monica for $250,000 below listing. Every few days, the 25-year-old flies north for the workweek, returning to Santa Monica on weekends.
“Compared to San Francisco in particular, it’s very cheap,” said Yoshimura, who founded and later sold a loyalty platform for retailers called 500friends. “Santa Monica is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in L.A. and I have a yard with a pool and a beautiful home for less than what I would pay for an equivalent-sized condo in San Francisco.”
Tami Pardee, a real estate agent specializing in West L.A., is representing several tech buyers from up north. She estimated that 10% of current clients live in Silicon Valley, including engineers from Facebook and several venture capitalists. The budgets are high: anywhere from $2 million to $5 million for a home.
“They’re buying second homes — or third or fourth homes,” she said. “We’re seeing it a lot.”
In general, Pardee said, the potential buyers are more savvy than usual, having done extensive research online before traveling down to view properties. They have specific requirements: A lot of people don’t want to be north of Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, preferring to live further south, closer to the hub of tech activity. Many say they’d like a walkable neighborhood and a home with a “refined, finished” design.
A year and a half ago, Skye van Merkensteijn was shooting hoops with a friend who lives at the Aldyn, a condominium-rental hybrid on Riverside Boulevard with its own indoor basketball court, climbing wall and bowling alley.
Thirteen-year-old Skye was impressed — and envious. Well, his worldly pal told him, he just happened to know of an apartment for sale on the 21st floor.
Skye went home, jumped online and called up a video of the property in question — a 12-room spread with a hot tub and private 37-by-15-foot outdoor pool.
“When my husband, John, came home,” said Skye’s mother, Elizabeth van Merkensteijn, “Skye announced: ‘We’re moving and this is the place we’re moving to.’ ”
Here I describe some of the details of how the sale went down on Glenmont in Solana Beach, which listed for $1,499,000 on January 8th. Not every agent operates this way – many will just grab a cash offer and go for the easy close. But I prefer to go all out:
Here is a tour of my new listing in one of Carlsbad’s most popular neighborhoods – Bressi Ranch. The nearby Village Center features Trader Joe’s, Peet’s Coffee, Tommy V’s and others, plus the new Pizza Port is right down the street. From this house, you can walk to the private Pacific Ridge School:
We keep thinking that higher prices will lure more sellers into the game, but the trend continues. Though we are at new-peak prices virtually everywhere in North San Diego Couty’s coastal region, folks are staying put. Here are the number of new listings that hit the MLS between January 1st and March 15th:
Year
# of New Listings
Median List Price
2012
1,039
$956,990
2013
1,042
$1,149,000
2014
1,029
$1,295,000
2015
1,011
$1,329,000
If greed won’t get people to sell, what will? It appears that we have refined our relationship with real estate – that our house is more important than money.
This article discusses the potential pitfalls of working with a friend-agent, but whether they are a friend or not, verify that they are good at what they do. The easiest and most-effective gauge is to check their Zillow page to see if they average at least one sale per month.
As the spring house-hunting season approaches, many Americans will be buying or selling a home – and some will enlist the help of a friend or relative who happens to work in real estate. But experts caution that hiring a friend as your real estate agent could backfire.
“Realtors tend to be a social bunch,” says Jon Sterling, who manages a team of agents for Keller Williams Realty and specializes in working with real estate investors. “I can’t say never hire a friend, but you shouldn’t hire them because you’re a friend. You shouldn’t do it as a favor – you should do it because they’re good at what they do.”
In some cases, people find that it’s easier to hire a friend rather than invest time interviewing several agents. In fact, a 2014 survey of nearly 300 sellers from the Redfin Research Center found that over a third evaluated only one agent before choosing one to list their home.
Before you hire a friend as your agent, here’s a look at potential pitfalls to consider.
1. Your friend may not know the neighborhoods that you want. Whether you’re buying or selling a home, you need an agent with intimate knowledge of the market in that specific geographic area. “I always get calls from cousins saying ‘Oh, you live in Florida, I’m thinking about buying a property in West Palm Beach,’” says Karyn Glubis, a real estate agent based in Tampa, Florida. “They assume that you know everything, and even if you live in a certain city, there’s several different areas of the city. I live in a certain ZIP code that I know with my eyes closed. If you ask me to go away from Tampa to [St. Petersburg], I don’t know that area.”
According to Mia Simon, a Redfin real agent based in Silicon Valley, it’s important for buyers or sellers to instead look for “someone who really has the local knowledge, the relationships with the main players and a really good grasp of the inventory.”
2. Your friend may think she knows what’s best for you. If you want a downtown loft and your friend pictures you in a suburban bungalow, it’s bound to create tension. Glubis ran into this issue when she helped her father shop for a three-bedroom townhome and he wanted a move-in ready property, while she showed him fixer-uppers. “He’s like, ‘I am 68 years old. I don’t want to fix up a house,’” she remembers. “People think they know what you deserve or what you want. A friend doesn’t have the boundaries that a client would have.”
Glubis has her clients fill in a “needs and wants” list (for instance, “I want an oak tree in the backyard, but I’m not crazy about hilly lots”). However, she didn’t take that step for her father because she assumed she already understood his needs and wants.
Another potential pitfall is if you’re buying an investment property and your Realtor friend doesn’t educate you on the responsibilities of a landlord because she assumes you’ve already researched it.
3. Your friend may put in less time. A friend helping you house hunt may not want to spend every weekend driving you around instead of working with other clients. That would put the onus on you to search listings and do the legwork. “You’re on Zillow and Trulia doing all your own research,” Glubis says. “You’re telling your friend what you need. The friend is more casual in their searching, making you do all the work.”
4. Your friend may not give you a reality check. You may not like hearing that the list price you want on your home is too high or your offer on a property is too low, but it’s your agent’s responsibility to give you the honest truth and serve as an objective outsider. “The competition [in Silicon Valley] is so fierce that you’re having to waive all contingencies and go way above list price. Having to advise a friend to do that could jeopardize a friendship” says Simon, who has never represented friends but will refer them to another agent on her team.
Discussions about your housing budget or the amount you’re willing to accept for your home might be more comfortable with someone you see strictly as a professional, not as a neighbor or yoga buddy.
5. Disagreements could sour the friendship. “When things go bad it really gets ugly, so Thanksgiving dinner could get weird if you’re in the middle of a really tough transaction with friends or family members, and the lines start to blur between your personal life and your professional life,” Sterling says. “I don’t ever want to put my friendships at risk because of a business transaction.” Like Simon, he’ll refer friends in the market to other agents he trusts who could better fit their needs.
Another sore spot for real estate agents is when they handle a transaction for a friend and that friend asks for the commission back, which Glubis says can make things uncomfortable.
That said, there may be situations when a friend-real estate agent arrangement works out. “If the friend is experienced and treats you like a client, if they take their job seriously and know the market you’re shopping in,” Glubis says, then it could be the right fit.
Home buyers are concerned about getting a suitable home for their pets, and it’s understandable – pets are part of the family. But those dogs and cats may be more adaptable than you think. How do I know?
We live in an affluent area. For houses listed for sale between La Jolla and Carlsbad, today the median list price is $1,995,000 – and the average is over $3 million! But the average LP/sf has been fairly steady.
Click on the link below for the complete NSDCC active-inventory data:
