Hardwood Floors 2015
A great review of the latest in hardwood floors:
Buubleinfo’s 10th Anniversary
September 24, 2005 was a Saturday, and early that morning I started a free account on Squarespace to begin this blog.
At the time, Arnold Schwarzenegger was our governor, Kayla had just started her freshman year of high school, and I had more hair!
I had already been warning sellers that this party wasn’t going to last, and I thought that if I could produce a steady stream of data to make my case, they might be more inclined to believe it, and take the appropriate action.
Boy, was I wrong.
But home buyers were interested in the locally-based data, and thanks to a few breaks from Rich Toscano and Bill McBride, the audience began to grow.
Ten years later, here we are!
Join us on the evening of September 24, 2015 to talk about the good old days! I will practice on Google Hangouts between now and then, and we’ll do a live broadcast to discuss the last ten years.
Have a specific topic you’d like to cover? Favorite moments? Video clips?
Leave your ideas here in the comment section, and we’ll build a show – and hopefully have some special guests too!
Turn Key
Fallbrook isn’t on our regular route here on the blog, but seeing houses like this can keep pricing in perspective. I’m also hoping to demonstrate that I can sell any house, any price, any where – let me help you!
Mid-Summer $1M Market
The OC Register is reporting that million-dollar sales in Orange County are down 12% this mid-summer. We’re watching the sales counts closely, because we know that is the leading indicator for the market.
How about our north county coastal region?
The OCR only looked at zip codes that had a $1,000,000 median sales price, which in our case, excludes all four zips in Carlsbad.
Here are the stats on the Encinitas-to-La Jolla sales over $1,000,000 (where 91% of the active listings today are over $1M) between July 13th and August 11th:
| Year | |||||
| 2013 | |||||
| 2014 | |||||
| 2015 |
Our $1M sales count was up 9% YoY, instead of down – yippee! But nobody in this market should get giddy about pricing in general – it is flat, at best.
Get It Done
A simple fix is needed, and it’s a long way to Tipperary.
What does JtR do?
Boomer Liquidation Sale On Hold
The baby boomer liquidation sale has failed to materialize….so far. Boomers are holding onto their old homes longer, and living the good life instead:
Baby boomers are not leaving the homes they own to settle into apartments, as housing economists had predicted.
A new edition of Fannie Mae Housing Insights says that boomers are not responsible for a recent surge in the apartment market. But when they do finally downsize, the very size of the generation will be enough to “move markets.”
Predictions were that boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1965 (some sources say 1964), would begin downsizing naturally as they became older and more frail. “The research showed that the likelihood of Baby Boomers occupying single-family homes has changed little in recent years, despite the factor that boomers are experiencing major life changes that might be expected to cause a downshift in their housing consumption,” the Fannie Mae article said.
Instead, through 2013, boomers had not significantly reduced the rate at which they live in single-family, detached houses, the agency said. And although the number of rooms in those houses has decreased in recent years, “boomer home size has increased since then, suggesting the boomers are not trading down to smaller single-family homes, either.”
The article added that the “number of boomer apartment dwellers has not budged in recent years, whereas the number of millennials in multifamily rental units has grown by nearly half a million annually.”
That’s a significant finding with big implications for the housing market, because “boomers have an enormous residential footprint.” Some 40 percent of the nation’s homes are occupied by boomers, who have “half of the nation’s housing wealth,” Fannie Mae said.
As baby boomers move into their retirement years, they’re having a major impact in other ways, too.
“After working most of their lives, Baby Boomers want it all in retirement: travel, dining out, owning two cars and multiple homes. And they want to do this off of income generated by their investments,” said a recent article in Wall Street Daily. “Yet you’d be amazed how many people go to see an advisor with far too little in savings or investments to enjoy that sort of retirement. Even those people who have enough assets often have them allocated extremely poorly.”
Some boomers have accumulated no savings for retirement, the article said.
Read full article here:
Inventory Watch
No big drop off in inventory yet – just four fewer listings today than there was a month ago. It happened like that last year too, just a 1% drop between the end of July and the end of August.
In 2014, the inventory was steady through September, and then only declined 6% by the end of October.
Click on the link below for the complete NSDCC active-inventory data:
Sandicor Sanctions
This was included in the NSDCAR weekly update today:
MLS Rule Sanctions are on the Rise – Avoid Being Sanctioned by Sandicor
Below are just a few of the most common rules that MLS subscribers are sited with.
- People and For Sale signs are not allowed to be shown in pictures
- Photos should be from the subject property.
- Cancelled or withdrawn listings must wait 30 days before entering as new.
- Avoid disclaimers in the remarks section, such as “buyer to verify all information” or sold as is
But how many times have we heard that realtors adhere to a strict code of ethics? Not just a code of ethics, but a STRICT code of ethics?
Why would you need to warn agents about breaking the rules?
Chinese Buying to Accelerate?
Excerpted from an article in BI:
Chang’s client is one of the group of wealthy Chinese caught in between a rock and a hard place: Leave their assets in China to potentially weather additional market volatility and yuan devaluations — or put it in real estate that is now more expensive than just a few weeks earlier.
“Lots of my clients have been hit heavily by the equity market,” Chang, who was once a vice president at HSBC’s private bank, told Business Insider through a series of interviews. “But that only makes them more determined to diversify out of China.”
The chaos of the past few weeks is likely to lead to an acceleration in the rate of real-estate purchases by wealthy Chinese buyers in the US and elsewhere.
Chinese individuals are also being actively encouraged to buy abroad by the government.
Thus far, Chinese individuals have been allowed to convert $50,000 into other currencies annually — though there are ways to skirt the regulation.
That is about to change, with the Chinese government readying the launch of the Qualified Domestic Individual Investor program.
The QDII2 is an overseas-investment scheme that would allow Chinese citizens to invest overseas directly. Those with at least $160,000 in financial assets qualify.
The program is likely to launch this year and will bolster overseas real-estate purchases on the part of the Chinese.
“With QDII2 in mind, within five years we might look back and think of the current levels of Chinese cross-border investment as quaint,” Andrew Taylor, co-CEO of Juwai.com, a website that helps Chinese to buy properties abroad.
Read full article here:
Terramar
