Homeowners in San Diego County may not feel it, but a housing crisis is underway in the region, and the middle class is especially hard squeezed.
Longtime Escondido resident Guy Chandler faced a situation that may be all too familiar to many San Diego families. He described what happened at a recent San Diego County Board of Supervisors’ meeting.
“Probably the worst day of my life was in June 2015,” Chandler said. “My daughter, Jenelle, 37 years old, came to me and told me, ‘Dad, sit down. There’s something you’re not going to like. We have to move out of San Diego County.’”
Chandler’s daughter told him she was planning to take her family and move to another state because she couldn’t find a house in San Diego where she could afford to raise her kids.
“The next two days a lot of hand-wringing and crying went on,” Chandler said.
He now communicates with his grandchildren on the web via FaceTime.
“What’s my point?” he asked the board. “My point is, droves of young families are leaving the state of California because they can’t afford to live here.”
This beach house couldn’t get any closer to the water even if it wanted to. Located near Cape Town, South Africa, this house was designed to create an extraordinary living experience.
The home was built using a minimal steel framed box with a hull-shaped roof, clad in hardwood.
All of the external walls are made up of frameless sliding folding glass doors, with privacy and security added with slatted hardwood shutters, which open hydraulically to become verandas when open and a continuous secure screen when closed.
The living and sleeping areas are separated by sliding ash clad doors which slide away during daytime hours to create a single large living space.
While we are poking holes in the Realtor Code of Ethics, let’s don’t forget the old 3-10, which is hard to dispute.
Agents have a fiduciary duty to do what is best for the client. Listing agents who sell their properties without exposing them to the open market via the MLS would seem to be in direct violation here, but instead the practice is encouraged in offices around the country:
Standard of Practice 3-10
The duty to cooperate established in Article 3 relates to the obligation to share information on listed property, and to make property available to other brokers for showing to prospective purchasers/tenants when it is in the best interests of sellers/landlords. (Adopted 1/11)
The Code of Ethics says listing agents are obligated to ‘make property available to other brokers’, which is also part of the agreement for agents to join the local Association of Realtors. I share my listings with you, and you share yours with me.
Of the NSDCC closed sales this year, 4% have a days-on-market of zero, which doesn’t automatically mean that they weren’t on the open market, but the vast majority have remarks like “sold before processing’, a blatant message that this listing wasn’t made available to other brokers.
Though only 4% are successful, I’d guess that 30% to 40% of all listings try some sort of ‘Coming Soon’ pre-market activity. And how many other deals are put together ahead of time by the listing agent, who then let the new listing sit on the MLS for a day or two just for posterity?
I don’t care which way the game is played, or if there are any rules at all – which, in reality, there aren’t any when commissions are on the line. I just wish N.A.R. would stop pushing how ethical agents are just because we have a Code of Ethics.
In the best way possible, Stanford professor Mark Jacobson‘s new house is like a giant Erector Set, snapped together in less than a week on an irregular, pie-shaped lot near the university. It’s a 3,200 square foot modular home, and the frame is made entirely of steel.
Dr. Jacobson, head of Stanford’s Atmosphere and Energy Program, says he didn’t want to build a new house, but nothing on the market right now was quite up to his standards insofar as green building goes. So he called BONE Structure, a Canadian prefab homes company that opened a San Francisco office last year, to see if they could do better.
The house, reportedly costing an estimated $1.5 million, is designed with zero emissions, operating off of solar panels on the roof and storing juice in an enormous lithium battery designed by Tesla Motors. If it works right, it will use no consumer electricity at all, making it a passive house.
The steel frame is made from 89 percent recycled material. BONE’s sales pitch is that, although the parts are all manufactured in Canada (delivery takes five or six weeks), the clip-together design means that you can customize the size and layout of the house, rather than picking from prefabricated rooms.
The new listings coming to market finally saw some seasonal slowing this week, dropping from 103 in the previous week to just 77 new listings over the last seven days. The new pendings increased from 63 to 65!
Last year at this time it didn’t slow down much though. Between mid-August and mid-September of 2015, the active inventory only dropped 2%.
Click on the ‘Read More’ link below for the NSDCC active-inventory data:
Proposition 58, effective November 6, 1986, is a constitutional amendment approved by the voters of California which excludes from reassessment transfers of real property between parents and children. Proposition 58 is codified by section 63.1 of the Revenue and Taxation Code.
Proposition 193, effective March 27, 1996, is a constitutional amendment approved by the voters of California which excludes from reassessment transfers of real property from grandparents to grandchildren, providing that all the parents of the grandchildren who qualify as children of the grandparents are deceased as of the date of transfer. Proposition 193 is also codified by section 63.1 of the Revenue and Taxation Code.
In the State of California, real property is reassessed at market value if it is sold or transferred and property taxes can sometimes increase dramatically as a result.
However, if the sale or transfer is between parents and their children, or from grandparents to their grandchildren, under limited circumstances, the property will not be reassessed if certain conditions are met and the proper application is timely filed.
These propositions allow the new property owners to avoid property tax increases when acquiring property from their parents or children or from their grandparents. The new owner’s taxes are calculated on the established Proposition 13 factored base year value, instead of the current market value when the property is acquired.
Which transfers of real property are excluded from reassessment by Propositions 58 and 193?
Transfers of primary residences (no value limit).
Transfers of the first $1 million of real property other than the primary residences. The $1 million exclusion applies separately to each eligible transferor.
Transfers may be result of a sale, gift, or inheritance. A transfer via a trust also qualifies for this exclusion. For property tax purposes, we look through the trust to the present beneficial owner. When the present beneficial ownership passes from a parent to a child, this is a change in ownership that is eligible for the parent-child exclusion.
The Chargers are going to go through the motions of supporting a downtown stadium, but the way it unfolded probably tells the real story.
They stated their commitment to a downtown project on the same day that they secured an option to move to Los Angeles, which means if you don’t vote for their plan, they will leave.
Here is Dan Fouts narrating their sales pitch:
The funding plan for the project will go before voters in November. It calls for an increase in the city’s hotel room tax along with contributions from the Chargers and National Football League.
“This project would not impose any new taxes on San Diego citizens,” Fouts said in the narration.
“Instead, it would be paid for by tourists, convention-goers and out-of-town business people staying at local hotels,” he said. “What could be sweeter than Raiders, Broncos and Patriots fans all helping pay for the project when they pay their hotel bill?’
Because of the tax hike, the project will require the Chargers’ initiative to gain two-thirds voter support in the election.
“It’s been heartwarming to see how many people have embraced our vision for downtown,” team Chairman Dean Spanos said at the end of the video.
The new Mid-Coast Corridor Transit Project is underway, which is bringing the trolley from downtown San Diego to the UTC region – which should be beneficial for those wanting an alternative! It would be natural to follow the existing train tracks, but instead they are forging a new route.
Even in the hands of top broker Chris Cortazzo, Zare and Seda Baghdasarian’s architectural gem in one of the coast’s most coveted enclaves failed to sell — until he offered to buy it. Now, in a bitter lawsuit, they claim the Hollywood broker sabotaged their efforts with an eye on a profitable resale for himself all along.
Aman is weeping in a Malibu condo on the inland side of Pacific Coast Highway. “When my son found out that the house was sold for $15 million,” he says, tears streaming down his face as his wife rubs his back at his dining room table, “he goes, ‘Dad, one day I’m gonna make my own money and buy that house back. I promise you that!’ It was his childhood. It was our heaven. It was stolen.”
Whether the beachfront home was, in some sense, stolen now is a matter for a judge to decide. But no one would deny that its location along ultra-exclusive, paradisiacal Watkins Cove a few miles away is heavenly. Not this couple, Iranian immigrants Zare and Seda Baghdasarian, and not Chris Cortazzo, their former listing agent — and current defendant in a $3.3 million lawsuit they’ve filed alleging fraud. Cortazzo, a Malibu native turned Coldwell Banker real estate powerhouse known for his Hollywood profile, purchased the property from the Baghdasarians in 2012 after failing to find them another buyer, then sold it four years later — after a renovation — for $15 million, well over twice what he paid his clients.
