Natalie (who is doing a stellar job as marketing director!) suggested that some people might want to hear thoughts on the market conditions in a longer podcast-type format, so here’s my six minutes:
The real estate business is fast moving and sellers and buyers are making snap decisions. You want an adviser who knows the market and can deliver advice extemporaneously!
The greatest rock’n’roll band in the world was in town this week, and played two shows at SoFi Stadium. Their entire show was uploaded today at this LINK.
But they seem like prancing 80-year-olds to me. This is better, thanks to Fergie – recorded at Madison Square Garden, October 30th 2009 at the 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert:
Sometimes it’s easy for homeowners to make the decision to move, and for others it takes careful deliberation to come to the right conclusion – and it’s relative to how much they love their home, and if they can do better. It took months of discussion to decide to let this one go – it’s a trophy property!
1463 Paseo De Las Flores, Encinitas 92024
4 br + den/4.5 ba, 4,318sf
YB: 2003
$3,395,000
Breathtaking ocean & golf course views from this former model home that has been extensively remodeled and upgraded! Newer kitchen has polished quartzite counters, Wolf appliances, built-in Sub-Zero fridge and dual dishwashers too! Gorgeous bleached-oak hardwood floors throughout the home, including the four en-suite bedrooms plus office and theater room – and just wait until you see the richly appointed primary suite! Live the coastal lifestyle right on the golf course!
https://www.compass.com/listing/1463-paseo-de-las-flores-encinitas-ca-92024/897812950230112937/
Open house this weekend, 12-3pm!
https://journal.firsttuesday.us/san-diego-housing-indicators-2/29246/
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With the supply and demand so out of balance on the lower-end, it’s incredible to see that the high-end is out-performing with faster appreciation. It looks like big money is throwing its weight around!
Note this guy’s negativity in the second paragraph.
I guarantee you that he is going to be wrong, wrong, wrong.
We keep hearing people say that the inventory is rising………..but is it?
Bill’s chart shows how different the San Diego inventory is compared to all the others:
Ten of his 22 metros did have increases in their inventories, month-over-month! But MOST had declines, with San Diego being the leader – by far.
The San Diego inventory plunged almost 19% month-over-month (second only to Albuquerque) and was the decisive #1 metro winner with the 49.3% decline, YoY.
We have half the inventory we had a year ago!
But it’s not affecting sales, because demand is overwhelming. The September sales were outstanding – higher than in recent years, except for the big rally in the second half of last year:
How will this play out next year?
Let’s assume that there is pent-up supply, and there is a surge of listings next year – is there precedent?
Yes, and let’s check the last time the inventory had been in decline. In early 2013, we got a boost of listings, and the waiting demand gobbled them up – and the frenzy was on:
Hopefully it will happen like that again in 2022, and it will be surge-proof. The more listings that come to market, the hotter the frenzy will be.
I’m on a morning call with 150 Compass agents around California. The leader said today that most agents have a 10:1 ratio of buyers to sellers. The demand is there!
But it could be fairly subdued next year, if nobody wants to sell.
Hat tip to GA for sending this in:
Zillow Group Inc. is taking a break from buying U.S. homes after the online real estate giant’s pivot into tech-powered house-flipping hit a snag.
Zillow, which acquired more than 3,800 homes in the second quarter, will stop pursuing new home purchases as it works through a backlog of properties already in its pipeline.
“We are beyond operational capacity in our Zillow Offers business and are not taking on additional contracts to purchase homes at this time,” a spokesperson for Zillow said in an email. “We continue to process the purchase of homes from sellers who are already under contract, as quickly as possible.”
Zillow is best known for publishing real estate listings online and calculating estimated home values – called Zestimates – that let users keep track of how much their home is worth. The popularity of the company’s apps and websites fuels profits in Zillow’s online marketing business.
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They are known for their marketing prowess, so if you’re like me, you probably wondered if they just cooked up a great excuse – and/or if was there any more to the story.
I know one homeowner who got a quote from ZO about a month ago that was around the retail value of the home. Two weeks later, ZO revised their quote downward by 5%, and claimed it was due to ‘market conditions’, not a pipeline backlog. But there’s no obligation for them to tell the same story everywhere.
Let’s check their market conditions.
These are the MLS stats for the broker from Corona who has 91 agents handling the bulk of the Zillow listings for Southern California:
Solds between April 18 – July 18th: 174
Average Days on Market: 14
Median Days on Market: 6
Solds between July 19 – Oct. 18th: 273
Average DOM: 26
Median DOM: 22
ACTIVE LISTINGS TODAY: 294
Average DOM: 29
Median DOM: 21
They were in love with the frenzy, and were able to sell half of their listings in the first 6 days on the market. But today, most of their active listings have been on the market for weeks, and are still unsold.
When their home isn’t selling, amateur sellers cancel their listing and wait for a ‘better market’.
Actives and pendings are plunging at about the same speed now.
You can’t buy what’s not for sale!
Today’s NSDCC median list price is $4,397,500, which is 16% higher than it was on June 7th – which is about when the frenzy seemed to lose some steam. As long as the inventory is so thin, the few homeowners willing to sell are going to enjoy a pricing bonanza!
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More about our local water situation – an excerpt from nytimes.com:
LAKESIDE, Calif. — In many parts of California, reminders abound that the American West is running out of water. “Bathtub rings” mark the shrinking of the state’s biggest reservoirs to some of their lowest recorded levels. Fields lie fallow, as farmers grapple with an uncertain future. A bed-and-breakfast owner spends $5 whenever a tourist showers.
But not in San Diego County.
In this coastal desert metropolis, life has stayed mostly the same for residents already accustomed to conserving what they have long treated as a precious resource.
On a recent afternoon, boats sped over the silvery surface of San Vicente Reservoir, a key water storage site for the county about 25 miles northeast of downtown San Diego. It was about as full as usual, cutting a sharp contrast with the desiccated lake beds where state officials have appeared in recent months, pleading with Californians to save water. The San Diego County Water Authority estimated that it would have sustainable water supplies through 2045, even if dry conditions persisted for years.
Now, with San Diego facing the prospect of orders to use even less water, its relative water plenty has become a case study in the uneven ways that the Western drought is affecting the nation’s most populous state. And the county’s try-everything approach to getting water has emerged as a model for cities — including Denver and Albuquerque — where leaders are dealing with one of climate change’s most dire effects.
How about moving to the High Desert? It’s close enough to San Diego that you could re-visit when necessary, and once we get self-driving cars, you could commute! Here’s a link to the 67 homes for sale in Joshua Tree today:
Here’s a link to homes for sale under $620,000 in Yucca Valley, which is 27 miles north of Palm Springs and has a population of 22,000+ people at 3,369ft elevation:
Thanks to the latimes.com:
THE GREAT CALIFORNIA MIGRATION
Trading big city for high desert
YUCCA VALLEY, Calif. — Tyler Gaul strode across the sprawling backyard of his Yucca Valley home and surveyed the rocky hillside a few steps away from the pool and basketball court that sit atop his 2-acre property.
When he first moved to the desert from Los Angeles last fall, this jagged landscape granted him a sense of serenity as the crowded city he left behind grappled with a pandemic.
Gaul, who runs his own skin care company, knew it was time to move when he could no longer exercise outside his Echo Park apartment — his respite from stay-at-home orders — because of wildfire smoke polluting the air. Constant and worsening wildfires, paired with a public health crisis, proved to be too much.
“I have a lung condition, and I was like, ‘No, I can’t do this anymore,’ ” he recalled.
So he set out for the desert.
Like many other city dwellers who have fled urban sprawl over the last year and a half, Gaul sought shelter in a more isolated desert community in hopes of finding more space and clean air, and limiting his exposure to the coronavirus. Local real estate agents say that the migration is driven by a desire for affordable housing and large plots of land, a move further propelled by the nation’s sudden shift toward teleworking.
Until last year, Gaul hadn’t seen himself as the desert type or thought of making an escape from the city. But since moving, he and his girlfriend have hosted pool parties for their friends living in the city; they’ve learned how to tackle home repairs, like the time there was an irrigation leak; they stood in stillness during their first desert winter and listened as the sound of snow falling off trees pelted the craggy ground below.
“One day, we were in the pool and there was this huge owl, and it just like swept down and looked like a huge, silent airplane. It was just, like, so majestic,” Gaul, 35, said as he lifted a plastic cover to check for a tarantula that had recently been roaming the side of his home.
The high desert communities of Yucca Valley, Pioneertown and Joshua Tree about 130 miles east of Los Angeles have been inundated not only with new home buyers but also renters and city folk who come to work remotely at one of the many Airbnbs that have cropped up in recent years — sometimes to the chagrin of locals who could live without hearing the loud parties, or driving through the dust kicked up by Teslas plowing through dirt roads in a rush that those used to a slower pace of life have trouble understanding.
“It feels like the zeitgeist of the desert,” said Tom Murtagh, a Realtor in Twentynine Palms. “It’s a time of change. A lot of people here are having a tough time with it and I am very sympathetic. It’s a tough situation — gentrification reached the desert and it’s good and bad. There’s money to fix things, but it’s a double-edged sword.”
Although the pandemic accelerated migration to the high desert, the shift was gaining steam in the years before.
Jean Michel Alperin moved to Yucca Valley with his family in 2018. He and his wife, Sarah Scott Alperin, were disappointed with the lack of options in their price range in L.A. despite looking at homes in neighborhoods across the city. Jean Michel was on the brink of helping to revitalize and reopen Pioneertown’s Red Dog Saloon and had pondered making the commute to the desert a few days a week for work.
“While I was doing business here for a couple days I decided to see Realtors. We saw four places, and the fourth was the home that we bought. It was one of those dream homes. It seduced me in this very intimate way. Kind of like when you meet somebody, it was a romance,” Alperin, 40, said. “It was a total about-face. And it was tough, for sure. There’s a lot of differences moving from Echo Park to Yucca.”
Alperin said that he doesn’t necessarily miss the people he could meet in L.A. — he’s bonded with other transplants from Echo Park here in the desert — but he does miss the wealth of cafes filled with people poring over books.
“That’s kind of the feeling, that there’s just one place. You don’t have options,” he said. “But that’s part of coming out here. We’re all kind of frontier people.”
The developer sold these last five lots separately so buyers could build their dream home. Here’s a custom 2,143sf one-story house overlooking the lagoon that’s priced at $2,388,000. It fell out of escrow once, and went right back in – currently pending:
