Buy the Luxury Lifestyle

These package deals are getting insane.

Buy this 10 br/11 ba, 15,000sf townhouse in NYC and get three exotic super-cars, a live-in chef and butler for a year, rental of a 12,000sf house in the Hamptons for the summer, a million-dollar yacht, two courtside seats for the Brooklyn Nets for a whole season…..and two tickets to outer space!

This YouTube has almost a million views, and it might be because of the comment section!

Buyers Getting Shut Out

Where to move by color! Just find an affordable blue area that suits you.

From NPR:

Ten years after the housing collapse, a new and different housing crisis has emerged.

Back then, people were losing their homes as home values crashed and homeowners went underwater. Today, home values have rebounded, but people who want to buy a new home are often priced out of the market. There are too few homes and too many potential buyers.

Home construction per household is now at its lowest levels in nearly six decades, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. This isn’t just a problem in San Francisco or New York, where home prices and rents have gone sky-high. It is also a problem in midsized, fast-growing cities farther inland, like Des Moines, Iowa; Durham, N.C.; and Boise, Idaho. In Boise, an analysis by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development showed there is a demand for more than 10 times the number of homes being built right now.

(more…)

The End Is Near

Brokerages are finding new ways to convince sellers to do in-house deals – an excerpt:

According to Charles Williams, CEO of Buyside, “the software we supply to Metro Brokers unlocks the power of their buyer data for agents so they can win more listings, become more profitable and command greater control over their inventory.”

Buyside’s core products include Home Valuation landing pages, which combines multiple automated home valuations with visualizations of real-time buyer intent; Buyer Match™ dashboard, which intelligently pairs homebuyers and sellers within a brokerage; and Real-Time Buyside Market Analysis (BMA), which arms a brokerage’s agents with insights on buyer demand to help them close more listing presentations.

“Our affiliation with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate provides our firm with outstanding analytics and business intelligence tools that are the cornerstone of excellence in any leading real estate firm today,” says McClelland. “We have tremendous success marketing properties for sale and leveraging the Zap platform for maturing homebuyers. Today’s homebuyers are shopping for about 240 days before closing. When securing a new listing, our agents use Buyside to explain that the likely buyer for that property has already been working with a Metro Brokers agent for months. The value proposition of our firm’s listing presentation is not how we will find buyers, but the number of homebuyers that we have looking for their home today. We don’t believe that any other brokerage in Georgia has more home buyers than Metro Brokers.”

Link to Full Article

Still Time to Move!

The selling season is pretty much over – did you get ‘er done?  Or did summer slip away from you?

School starts in 40 days…..there is still time!

But when you include a couple of days for negotiating, and a couple of days for moving, you need to make a deal by Monday!

Lower rates have helped to keep our pending sales afloat, so don’t give up hope:

Get Good Help!

La Jolla Relaxed Coastal Design

This just closed for $7,250,000 cash – and for that money you get the quality upgrades like Calacatta Caldia White Marble Countertops (not quartz), Fleetwood Multi-Slide Pocket Doors & Windows in Foyer, Living Room and Kitchen/Family Room (Marvin windows/door throughout the Rest of House) and DaVinci EcoSlate Cool Roof (meets Title 24 Requirements for CA ENERGY STAR qualification):

Del Mar Flood Zone

The new flood map goes into effect in December, and it shows the ‘base flood elevation’ being six feet higher than it was on the previous map.  This article is about the city council meeting on Monday, where no action was taken but notes that the Coastal Commission is preparing their recommended changes to Del Mar’s Local Coastal Plan:

https://www.delmartimes.net/news/story/2019-07-17/del-mar-awaits-state-federal-coastal-actions

An excerpt:

Ongoing dialogue between the city and commission administrators has provoked fears among beach-area homeowners that the state body could impose onerous requirements in response to sea-level rise.

Of major concern is that the city adopted a sea-level rise adaptation plan that outlines various measures to cope with the rising sea. The plan, however, rejects the concept of “managed retreat,” in which property owners would have to relocate their homes and buildings to higher ground to avoid flooding.

City officials determined managed retreat is impractical for Del Mar, the county’s smallest city. The city analysis concluded there would be nowhere for buildings to be relocated and it would destroy property values in the millions and even tens of millions of dollars. The median home value in Del Mar is about $2.5 million, according to online sources, but beach front homes run much higher.

In contrast, Del Mar’s adaptation plan calls for measures such as sand replenishment and management, flood control measures such as dredging, and ongoing monitoring and analysis of the effects of the rising sea level.

A number of residents filed letters with the city before Monday’s meeting and many in attendance wore stickers with red “say no” bars over the term “trigger points.”

The sticker and comments were intended to express opposition to any commission attempt to establish thresholds that, when reached, would trigger required “managed retreat” responses by the city.

Also, city officials oppose the commission’s definition of existing development as structures that were built in the coastal zone before the commission’s establishment in 1977.

“Please listen to Del Mar residents. Say no to trigger points, say no to new definitions of existing development and say no to the California Coastal Commission,” urged Jerry Jacobs, president of the Del Mar Beach Preservation Coalition.

Reasons NOT To Sell

Baby boomers in full control of the market, and very few have a reason to sell. In fact, the list of reasons NOT to sell is so long that you can’t help but have a personal favorite that keeps you in limbo:

1. I don’t need the money.

2. The grandkids are here.

3. My low property taxes have me locked in.

4. My low mortgage-interest rate has me locked in.

5. Everything else is too expensive.

6. I don’t want to leave the city/state.

7. My parents might move in.

8. My kids might move in.

9. My kids need to inherit because they can’t afford a home.

10. I don’t want to pay capital-gains (on more than the $500K).

11. I got a reverse mortgage.

12. I love it here!

13. Waiting for the market to peak.

Yet we don’t have an inventory problem – heck, there are 1,005 houses for sale in North SD County’s coastal region (La Jolla to Carlsbad).

To buy one, you need to have some horsepower – the median list price is $2.25 million.  But at least it looks like higher-end pricing has slowed:

First-half stats for homes priced over $2,000,000:

Year
Jan-Jun # Listings
Median LP
Jan-Jun # Sold
Median SP
2013
628
$2,998,000
203
$2,620,000
2014
646
$3,197,438
218
$2,776,000
2015
712
$3,250,000
252
$2,820,500
2016
856
$3,092,500
257
$2,754,000
2017
805
$3,100,000
293
$2,749,000
2018
862
$3,098,000
312
$2,645,000
2019
898
$2,995,000
298
$2,694,000

Has the higher-end market peaked? Compare this year to 2013.

It could be that egos are causing homes that are really worth $1.7-$1.9M to slip up into the $2M+ range, which would skew the median prices lower. But the sales have leveled off over the last three years, in spite of more choices. More listings but fewer sales keeps the pressure on pricing.

Pin It on Pinterest