How Buyers and Sellers Can Take Advantage of a Real Estate Market With High Sales and High Inventory. Prices have leveled off somewhat and inventory is abundant. The best time to buy is now, because negotiation is acceptable and deals can be found - this was unheard of last year! You can sell now if you like, but real estate is a long-term investment, it's not an equity product. Keep that in mind. Holding it long-term is the best strategy, unless you have some sort of Trump-like designs on it, and plan on re-development of a property or developing new. In that case, it is best to hold it short-term and sell quickly for a profit. Otherwise, buy, rent it out, and sell it later for a profit. Click here to read more.
The bid whisperers. It's no secret. Under a new rule, Realtors must tell their clients that their offers might be leaked to other buyers. Effective Jan. 1 of this year, buyers' agents in all member states, including California, are required to inform clients that their offers might not be kept confidential. Although many home buyers may not realize it, the terms of the offers they make may be revealed to other clients in a practice that the real estate industry commonly refers to as "shopping offers." And although many Realtors purport to find the practice distasteful or even unethical, others point out that negotiation styles and markets differ. Click here to read more.
What people are saying about Palm Springs? Canada's National Post earlier this month proclaimed, "Twentynine Palms may be the next Palm Springs," citing 360 days of sunshine, a booming real estate market with values that have shot up an average of 105 percent and a location that makes it too far for LA commuters but close enough for easy weekend getaways to the coast. Click here to read more.
REALTY MAILBAG: Paint the house inside and out and sell it `as is' When a home is sold ''as is,'' that means the seller must disclose all known defects (such as a leaking roof) but the seller won't pay for any repairs. However, if an obvious defect can be repaired at minimal expense, such as a dripping faucet, get it fixed. After the house is painted and ready to sell, I suggest you interview at least two more realty agents. You need to compare their evaluations, especially their CMAs (comparative market analysis). These forms will show you recent sales prices of comparable nearby homes, asking prices of neighborhood homes currently listed for sale (your competition), and even the asking prices of recently expired similar home listings. Then you can correctly set your asking price. Click here to read more.
New shopping center in Palm Springs may break ground by summer. A major national arts and crafts retailer will soon be located at an 18-acre destination shopping center that could break ground in about three months at the corner of Barona Road and East Palm Canyon Drive. Click here to read more.
Consumer Action: Buying in a Cooling Market. BUYING A HOME IS always nerve-wracking. After all, it's the largest purchase most folks will ever make. But it becomes downright ulcer-inducing when water cooler talk shifts from skyrocketing home values to grim speculations about real estate bubbles. It doesn't help matters that home sales numbers are as moody as a celebrity marriage. According to data released by the Commerce Department Friday, sales of new single-family homes fell 10.5% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.08 million since January. At the same time, a report on existing home sales data for February released a day earlier by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) showed a 5.2% increase in sales over January. So is the market cooling, or is it picking back up? According to experts, it's moving from a full-on boil to a simmer. Click here to read more.
Bubble, schmubble: Market still hot, hot, hot in desert. Houses, however, are vastly different. Not only are they physically anchored to a particular piece of ground, but they come in different sizes, designs, amenities, heights, shapes and are built from a variety of materials. Houses really can't be bought and sold in seconds. The typical transaction is more like weeks to months to get in and out of an escrow. You also can have input into how the houses around yours are maintained and used. That just simply doesn't happen with stock investments in companies run by others - unless of course, you control most of the stock. For statistical and comparable reasons, we often lump many small housing markets together and call those larger regional or statewide pieces a housing market. Nationally, we add everything together and call is a national housing market. But in truth, those are really just smaller individual sectors acting independently. Markets do ebb and flow; and sometimes that ebb and flow can look a lot more like a flood. Housing values and sales activity cycles - just like any business. If they didn't, we would not call them business "cycles" - we would call them business "flats." Click here to read more.
The Land of the Open House: Merced, once the state's hottest housing market, is headed back to being, well, Merced again. Last year, this Central Valley city enjoyed the state's hottest real estate market. After five increasingly wild years, the great real estate boom appears to be coming to a close. The Commerce Department reported Friday that sales of new homes nationwide plunged 10.5% in February, about five times the drop analysts predicted. In places such as Los Angeles, which have diverse economies, the consequences could be mild. In other communities, where prices became untethered from reality long ago and real estate not only drove the economy but virtually became the economy, the fallout could be much more turbulent. Merced — a farming town once known, if known at all, as a place campers turned off California 99 on their way to Yosemite National Park — is falling into the latter category. The good times have already ended here, in the same way slamming into a wall reduces your speed. A house will fetch 20% less today than it did last summer, brokers say, assuming it finds a buyer at all. Just a little while ago, Merced was an investor's dream. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight reported this month that prices in the city and surrounding area increased 31% in 2005. The housing agency ranked Merced first in price appreciation in California and ninth in the nation. Click here to read more.
New-Home Sales Rise in Region: While the U.S. posts a 10.5% month-to-month fall, Southern California records a 9.5% gain. The latest evidence came Friday when the Commerce Department reported that the number of new single-family homes sold nationwide fell 10.5% last month from the month before, to an annual rate of 1.08 million units, marking the biggest drop in new-home sales in nearly nine years. The drop pushed a gauge of the volume of unsold new homes to its highest level in more than a decade. In February, 548,000 new homes went unsold, representing a 6.3-month supply — meaning it would take that long to sell them at current sales rates. In January, there was a 5.3-month supply. In the West, which includes California, the sales plunge was even worse: down 29.4%, partly reflecting stalling sales in Sacramento and the Central Valley and in other Western states such as Arizona. Yet in Southern California, sales of new single-family houses and condominiums saw their strongest February since 1988, according to statistics compiled by real estate research firm DataQuick Information Systems. Last month, sales rose 9.5% to 4,980 from January's 4,550, and were up 19% from the year before. Click here to read more.
~Tina Jan~
Coldwell Banker Kivett-Teeters
1655 E. Sixth St.
Beaumont, CA 92223
Work: 951-845-5520 Ext. 105
Fax: 951-845-4916
Cell: 909-446-2666
Toll-Free: 1-877-TINAJAN
tina.jan@coldwellbanker.com
www.tinajan.com
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