They say that everyone is fleeing the urban markets for the country, and this is a good example of how much further your money will go. It is fairly close to town too – you wouldn’t really need to change doctors, etc. and for those who need a top-notch granny flat, have I got a deal for you!
29780 Reza Ct., Vista, CA 92084
4 br/4.5 ba one-story house
2 br/1 ba guest house above the garage with kitchen and laundry
When we were involved with doing the concerts at Cal State Fullerton, our sound & lights crew were also the guys who worked the Van Halen tours. The band was rehearsing at a sound stage in Los Angeles getting ready for the US Festival, and I got to go along. Afterwards, I had trouble hearing for a week!
Here are highlights of that show, for which they were paid $1.5 million…..and got them into the Guinness Book of World Records for biggest rock payday at the time:
Eddie was a Chevy guy too. I’m not sure if he painted these cars like the guitars, or vice versa!
Here is the clip from when Valerie Bertinelli was hosting Saturday Night Live and Eddie was just tagging along. He was hanging out in the SNL-band room when they decided to whip up a tune to play together. Here’s how it turned out – and note that Valerie introduced them while wearing a 91X button!
Will ultra-low rates and more inventory cause it to be the Frenzy of All-Time? Or will a surge of home sellers – namely the baby-boomers – bring about a flood of homes for sale that swamp the market?
Frenzy, or Glut?
Or as the market transitions from one to the other, shall we call the combo a Frut?
We know pricing will be higher than it is today. It is inevitable that the 2021 sellers will add a little mustard to the comps; after all, this is their opportunity to hit the jackpot.
It will look like a frenzy, right up to the point where buyers back off because they see a few too many homes not selling. It won’t happen in February or March because it will be too early. But by April and May the unsold listings could start stacking up, and what looked like a frenzy could turn into a glut in a matter of a few days.
If sellers don’t flood the market in April and May, we should experience a full-blown frenzy straight through to summer….as long as pricing seems reasonable to buyers. But some areas, and maybe only a few, won’t have enough demand to soak up the April/May supply.
Buyers AND sellers will struggle to identify which is which.
Here’s a way to know.
It will be different for every neighborhood, but let’s say in a neighborhood of 100 homes, the current average length of ownership is 12 years. It means the number of sales should average around 8 homes per year, with them bunched up around the spring selling season. Let’s say 4-6 of those sales would happen between March and June.
You can also calculate how many homes sold in your neighborhood this year, and compare.
In either case, if you saw new listings hitting the market in early spring that would double the number of sales in either of the two measurements above, then you’ll know that something unusual is happening.
The demand has overwhelmed the supply this year, at least in the NSDCC Under-$2,000,000 category. We should survive, and probably thrive with additional supply. So it would take about double the number of homes for sale to make it obvious, and cause concern.
Buyers are known to stop on a dime, so the impact will likely be immediate.
For a precursor, track the number of new listings hitting the market, and whether they go pending in the critical first 7-10 days they are for sale.
It’s likely US health officials will know whether a Covid-19 vaccine is safe and effective as early as next month, Fauci said Monday. “I think comfortably around November or December, we’ll know whether or not the vaccine is safe and effective,” he said.
There are currently 10 Covid-19 vaccine candidates in late-stage, large clinical trials around the world, according to the World Health Organization. Several of those are in the US and at least two have been in Phase 3 trials since late July.
Once a vaccine is deemed safe and effective, it’s likely companies will already have doses to begin distributing, Fauci said.
“There will be vaccines available, likely, for some people, limited amount, by the end of this calendar year, the beginning of 2021,” Fauci predicted. Experts including Fauci say health care workers and people with underlying health conditions will likely take priority for vaccinations.
It didn’t make this article, but he also said that vaccines are already being manufactured, and they should be available for the masses by the middle of next year.
Just the thought of the pandemic coming to an end should be enough to goose the Spring Selling Season!
Even though the market is blazing, many soon-to-be home sellers are going to wait until the Spring Selling Season of 2021….and take their time getting their house ready. Because it will be hard to tell if it will be a frenzy or a glut until April or May, it won’t be a bad idea to prepare now, and be ready to go early in the season, just in case.
October would be a good time to clear out some stuff!
In the first edition of The Last Move, these were the two companies mentioned to help you:
If you need to donate your belongings to a good cause, then Rancho Coastal Humane Society is a good option because they will bring a big truck to your house and carry out most everything:
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Hauling the remainder, including mattresses, can be done by Junk King in Carlsbad.
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Here are a few others:
The San Diego Habitat for Humanity ReStores are home improvement discount stores with a simple premise: by selling new and gently used donated goods, we can fund the construction of new Habitat homes in San Diego County. Here is my article about their Carlsbad store:
We have had good luck with Facebook Marketplace too. You can either go onto the general page and take your chances, or get into one of the closed local groups where you can probably count on having a large audience of bargain shoppers nearby.
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We have a seller who has had great luck with the mobile app OfferUp, especially when giving away stuff for free. People respond within minutes, and come to your house to pick up stuff from your driveway:
The end of the month is usually the most popular time for closings, and last week was huge. There were 85 SFR escrows closed between La Jolla and Carlsbad since last Monday!
So the total-pendings count dropped a bit, but so did the actives.
There are FEWER houses for sale now than there were in the beginning of January!
Not only does the current level of showings make up for the dip we had at the beginning of the Covid-19 market, but the 7-day moving average was higher on Saturday than all but two days this year (now 225% higher than it was during the first week of 2020).
As long as mortgage rates are under 3%, people will be looking!
The pandemic is still raging, the President of the United States is in the hospital, the election is right around the corner, and so are the holidays. The frenzy has to slow down at some point, doesn’t it?
So I schedule for 11am, and show up to find today’s list of showings taped to the front door:
The listing agent happens to be there, so we discuss the current market conditions. She is a long-time independent broker like myself (who now also works @ Compass) and we agree that the environment is ripe to convert to single agency naturally, and buyer-agents being eliminated.
It’s not because it’s what best for everyone involved, because clearly it’s not good for buyers and sellers – except maybe for those sellers who live in the house being barraged by showings the first few days on the market. It doesn’t sound like much of a price to pay, but for homebodies, or those with little kids & pets, it can be a major inconvenience.
Zillow is the only entity who spends eight or nine figures per year on advertising, so they will control our destiny – and with them setting up brokerage units manned by employee-agents in all 50 states, you can get a feel for what’s ahead.
In the meantime, consider these developments.
Today’s listing agents are making it harder to show and sell their listings, they are lowering the buyer-agent commissions (and taking the difference), and some realtors are advertising guaranteed cash offers as the better way to sell your house.
As is the case throughout America, the truth doesn’t matter nearly as much as how loud you can scream.
The greed displayed by these listing agents feeds upon itself, because other agents witness these practices happening without any reprimands, and they start to believe it’s acceptable…..and then they do the same thing. The game is evolving into how to beat the buyer-agents out of their commission.
In the short-term, realtors can justify this revolution by pointing to the commercial brokers who have practiced their real estate like this all along. Heck, less competition will slow down the rapid price increases we are experiencing, and help to trim the over-population of realtors everywhere too….so you can say there are good things about it.
But it all plays into the hands of Zillow, and eventually they will be who processes your order.
Market conditions are subject to change! Hat tip to just some guy for sending in this article:
In five years as a San Francisco real estate agent, Emily Beaven has never experienced such a dry spell. She has several condos on the market right now that she’s representing and she has no offers and zero showings scheduled for them.
She decided it was time to get creative.
“We’re not even getting calls on things. It’s a bit of a ghost town. Then I started to see the incentive trend happening, ” Beaven said. “When you’re not in a super-strong seller’s market, when properties need that extra boost, that’s when [incentives] happen. We’re entering a period of desperation.”
Incentives are designed to entice the buyer or the buyer’s agent to get a property sold as soon as possible. Pre-pandemic, a higher commission for the buyer’s agent was a common incentive, as were restaurant gift cards, but when Beaven saw roundtrip tickets to Paris advertised recently as an agent incentive, she said they’d entered a new era.
As an incentive to purchase one of the SoMa studios she has on the market, Beaven is throwing in a session with a home organizer to help the prospective buyer maximize the small space.
Active listings for San Francisco condos are up 114% year over year, according to Compass, and while condo listings typically exceed single-family home listings, there are now two condo listings for every single-family home listing. With supply at an all-time high, the average price per square foot has decreased 4% since 2019 and the amount of buyers overbidding asking prices is considerably diminished from levels seen in the past six years.
While that doesn’t mean we’re in a buyer’s market yet, that could change within a few months. Typically a buyer’s market exists at eight or more months of inventory. San Francisco is at six months right now.
Natalie Rome and Derek Chin had a condo listing in Hayes Valley that hadn’t received much interest in two weeks. That’s when the two started to talk about new ways to incentivize buyers and remembered that the garage space could only fit a subcompact car. Rome and Chin approached the current owners, who had purchased a Fiat 500 when they moved in, about including it in the sale for the right offer. They said yes.
“I think we’re going to see more creative incentives in the short term,” Chin said. “A lot of condos are vying for attention. Money talks for sure. A consultation for an interior designer, gift cards to home furnishings stores. I heard once an agent paid for flower delivery for every week of a year.”
For agent Rick Teed, that meant something you can’t get just anywhere. On a recent listing for condos in Russian Hill, he said one lucky buyer’s agent would win $500 in Bitcoin when they came to view the property. “I just feel like people always do the same things, 3% commission and an airline pass. I don’t see that working right now,” Teed said. “You have to look ahead at what’s happening in technology. You want to give them something they don’t have that piques their curiosity.”
We’re only three days into October so there will still be more reporting in the coming days….but September sales are pouring in! We had 52% more sales than we had last year in the La Jolla-to-Carlsbad market!
NSDCC Detached-Home Sales, September:
Year
Sept. # Sales
Med SP
Med $/sf
2016
271
$1,175,000
$417/sf
2017
271
$1,237,500
$448/sf
2018
220
$1,312,500
$493/sf
2019
234
$1,361,500
$488/sf
2020
355
$1,475,000
$518/sf
Until recently, you could expect that $10 million would buy you an oceanfront home in La Jolla.
But just in the last 30 days there were oceanfront sales of $14,000,000, $16,000,000, and this one in Bird Rock just north of Pacific Beach that sold for $19,250,000:
