We aren’t quite that hot, but there was some good action last month:
NSDCC Houses Sold Over List Price: 20%
NSDCC Houses Sold At LP: 13%
In May, 33% of the NSDCC detached-home sales close for list price or higher! For those on range pricing, I used the high-end of the range, and I didn’t include any that were on the ‘auctions’. Of the 100 houses that sold over $1,500,000, there were eleven that closed above their list price.
But sales are struggling:
Year
# of May Sales
Avg. Cost-per-SF
Median SP
Median DOM
2013
362
$416/sf
$943,500
16
2014
269
$465/sf
$950,000
20
2015
297
$492/sf
$1,125,000
22
2016
334
$498/sf
$1,216,250
24
2017
343
$517/sf
$1,220,000
16
2018
269
$593/sf
$1,325,000
18
Prices were way up, but there were 22% fewer sales last month, YoY!
Here are the NSDCC closed sales for January through May:
2013: 1,337
2014: 1,108
2015: 1,213
2016: 1,212
2017: 1,226
2018: 1,113
Year-to-date sales are 9% fewer than last year (through May).
The City of Carlsbad will hold a public meeting to discuss how city officials and the community can work together to influence the future of McClellan-Palomar Airport, which is owned and operated by the County of San Diego and largely under the jurisdiction of the Federal Aviation Administration.
McLellan-Palomar Airport Meeting Tuesday, June 19
6 to 9 p.m.
City of Carlsbad
Faraday Administration Center
1635 Faraday Ave.
After receiving input during the county’s recent public review process for its draft airport master plan, the City Council directed staff at its April 10 meeting to:
Enter into discussions with the County of San Diego over future airport operations and facilities.
Initiate a stakeholder dialogue to identify and understand community concerns and priorities about airport operations and facilities.
Develop and implement an action plan to guide the city’s approach related to the airport in the future.
The master plan is a blueprint for future development of the airport, which includes adding safety features at the west end of the runway, extending the runway to the east of the property and reconfiguring the tarmac and taxiway areas for better operational efficiency.
A recent client who moved to the Bay Area asked for advice on finding a good agent for assistance in buying a home in a hotly-contested area. My thoughts:
Zillow is your best tool – it shows every agent’s sales over the last 12 months. Lately a realtor’s goal is to build a big team of agents which helps to boost the number of sales and reviews on Zillow, so having the most sales & reviews isn’t necessarily the best for a buyer.
Here are my tips for homebuyers:
1. It helps if you know the area where you want to purchase, and get an agent who has recent buyer-side sales in that area and price point.
2. Anyone who is reporting more than 50 sales has a team of agents working under them. You will be passed off to one of the less-experienced buyer’s agents, so go through the reviews to see if you can get a read on the underlings.
3. Any agent who has less than 12 sales doesn’t have as much to offer, and may get snuffed out in a bidding war. But you will get their full attention.
4. Agents who have the bulk of their sales on the lower-end aren’t as much help to buyers in the middle-to-higher end.
5. The Zillow reviews are always 5-star amazing because agents determine which clients get featured there.
6. An agent who has a mix of buyer and seller sales is well-rounded.
7. In San Diego, Zillow doesn’t include pending listings under the listing agent any more. Some areas do, some don’t.
8. Bigger teams who have many listings in your area could slip you an insider deal before it hits the open market.
9. Big realtor teams have hundreds of buyers – you will compete for the agent’s attention, so at least pre-qual with their lender, and be pro-active (kiss butt).
10. You need to keep looking for homes for sale, and bring them to your agent’s attention. They will be using auto-notification systems, and usually not screening/evaluating the new listings as much.
11. Make quick decisions on houses you see, and give your agent feedback on what features you don’t like.
12. Prepare your ‘love letter’ in advance, and the sappier, the better. Specifically mention the features of this house and why it is such a good match for you. Include a family photo with a dog – even if you don’t have one. The agent should have copies of other love letters that worked in the past.
13. Your agent should be able to tell you how much to offer on each house, based on personal knowledge of comps and market time. If an agent recommends, “well it’s up to you”, it’s because they don’t know the market – get a new agent.
14. A tricky question for a good agent is, “What’s it worth?”, because most houses don’t have a boatload of comps to make an easy and obvious valuation, plus we know sellers are always pushing for a price that’s higher than comps. Can the agent at least make a decent case on valuation?
15. A fresh new listing on the market becomes more about winning and losing, than buying at the right price. If getting a ‘deal’ is more important, then spend your time trolling the older listings.
16. Will your agent make a compelling case on your behalf when submitting your offer? Most agents just email the signed forms to the listing agent with little, if any, introduction – let alone a sales pitch.
17. Does your agent evaluate the condition of the home while you are there? This is a big problem with Redfin – they pay their new agents $50 to open the door, and learn on the job. With them and many others, you have to do your own on-site assessment of the condition of the home, and assign repairs costs.
18. Will the agent go to bat for you on repair requests? Ask them how they’ve done on the last few deals. I usually find a way to get $5,000 to $10,000 in seller credits for my buyers.
19. Should you ask agents to fill out a questionnaire? Personally, I love clients who do it, though it is rare and most agents will think you are a pain and blow you off. But if you find one who will answer thoroughly, then you have found an analytical agent and someone who has something to say.
20. Here’s a blog post with an example of searching out an agent using Zillow:
Last week we saw that the current inventory ranges from 1.3 months’ worth on the lower-end, to more than 10 months on the high end.
Another gauge we’ve used is to compare the active listings to the pendings, which also shows a similar condition. It’s been red hot on the lower-end, and not so much on the high end.
In normal markets in the past, the active listings have out-numbered the pendings by a 2:1 ratio. Today, the mid-ranges look fairly normal:
Price Range
NSDCC Actives
Pendings
Actives/Pendings Ratio
$0-$1M
81
91
0.89 to 1
$1M-$1.5M
199
142
1.4 to 1
$1.5M-$2M
158
83
1.9 to 1
$2M+
502
99
5.1 to 1
Here’s another way to look at it:
More than half (55%) of the active inventory is listed over $2,000,000, and about three-quarters of the pendings (77%) are listed under $2 million!
Yesterday, we had the west coast premiere of Giorgio’s documentary film, ‘Owned: A Tale of Two Americas’ at the SF Doc Fest. Here are tidbits:
For those in the Bay Area, it is playing again at the Roxie on Wednesday night at 9:30pm, and will be at other film festivals too. Giorgio is hoping to have the film picked up by Netflix or similar entity, and possibly explore a series where he breaks out each piece of the film for further discovery.
The film turned out differently than expected. When Giorgio first started the project, he planned to document how suburbia fared during the mortgage crisis – that’s how I got involved. But as the filming progressed, the subject of the film turned dramatically.
In Owned, the bigger story revolves around a contrarian interpretation of the usually unassailable notion that home ownership is an essential element of the American dream.
“What the film is trying to say is that it’s this double-edged sword,” Angelini says. “Owning a home is great and it provides security, and if you do it the right way it builds strong communities. It dictates where you go to school and your propensity to move up socioeconomically. But at the same time, if you let capital interests invade this utopian ideal and run amok, it can quickly become commoditized to a point that it becomes dangerous for society.”
Through the stark sights of abandoned construction projects in sweeping vistas, Angelini posits that the housing industry is an insatiable beast that subsists on the back of an ultimately self-crippling economic culture.
“The idea of home had been reduced to the most efficient capitalistic desires,” Angelini says. “Instead of bushels of oranges, they decided the best land use was a collection of air-conditioned square feet. There was lack of human intention, where you could almost feel these [markets] printing out this landscape of homes.”
Owned is also a tale of two Americas. In the five years he spent making the film, Angelini expanded his view into other planned development communities and ran headlong into how racial and economic segregation is inextricably linked to middle-class suburbia after World War II.
“The original idea behind the film was rooted in the relationship between design and commoditization,” Angelini says. “It became very clear that I couldn’t tell that story without telling the other side.”
The film goes to hollowed-out neighborhoods in Baltimore to locate the contemporary effects of decades of discriminatory housing practices and policies.
“White flight didn’t happen by accident,” Angelini says. “It wasn’t a self-selecting, albeit racist, situation. It was very much encouraged by federal laws that were interpreted on the local level in particularly bad ways.”
Other video excerpts here – hopefully we’ll have a local showing before long:
Thanks to their sheer numbers, the baby boomers have shaped society, driving social change and the economic expansion since the 1970s. But now they’re influencing society in a new way — by holding on to their homes.
The oldest baby boomers are now in their early 70s, an age that in previous generations signaled a desire to downsize into condos and apartments. But economists are finding that boomers aren’t yet downsizing, at least not in the numbers that some of them had predicted.
That may be adding to the ongoing inventory crunch facing homebuyers, said Zillow senior economist Aaron Terrazas. Boomers are healthier and working longer than previous generations, which means they aren’t yet ready to sell their homes and strike out for retirement developments. And some may not want to sell their homes because they then must jump into the homebuyers’ market, which is suffering from low inventory and high prices.
“Several years ago there was an expectation that as baby boomers move into retirement, there wold be a surge of homes hitting the market,” Terrazas said. “That really hasn’t materialized.”
The standard knee-jerk response about pocket listings is to insist that some sellers don’t want to be on the open market for personal reasons, and that’s fine. In reality, those should be limited to major Hollywood icons who are unsure of how much their star-power adds to the price of a home, AND those who are flat-out bamboozling the buyer – like these sellers, who just sold this property off-market for $11,000,000. The buyer’s agent has been in the business for two years and this is his only sale ever on his Zillow profile!
Eight months ago, the sellers paid $7,195,000 for it after 1+ years on market:
If the sellers are fully aware that they are engaging in an off-market deal, then fine. But most are being duped into thinking they are on the open market, but then all of a sudden – whiz, bang, boom, whoosh – and there is an offer on the table that is good enough to get them on their way.
It moves so fast that they never realize they weren’t on the open market.
