After my blog post yesterday publicizing the confidence Zillow has in our local markets, guess what arrived today. Yep, their first installment of their next round (it usually takes 2-3 weeks to receive the full set): At the end of July, their prediction for Carmel Valley was for a 12.9% increase in values over the […more]
I think we can say that summer is over, and the off-season is here. How will the rest of 2022 play out, and what will be the effect on the 2023 Selling Season? We know that the local NSDCC sales counts will be low for the rest of 2022. Last year we had 136 closings […more]
The latest Zillow 1-Year Forecasted Values are still expecting a fairly strong appreciation rate over the next year – these estimates are the same or higher than last month! I can see a path to how this could happen. The Spring Selling Season gets frenzied up for 3-4 months where buyers and sellers all jump […more]
The reason for breaking down the active and pending listings by zip code is to give the readers a closer look at their neighborhood stats. We’ve considered a 2:1 ratio of actives-to-pendings to be a healthy market. Most areas today have the same or better stats as they did last month. The number of active […more]
Yesterday was the Compass 2Q earnings call (transcript here) and as usual, the headlines focused on the net loss of $101.2 million – more than half of which was stock-based compensation for agents. Compass has been very generous in their support of agents nationwide, and management is finding ways to effectively scale it back a […more]
It’s probably true that seniors are leading healthier, longer lives and will prefer to age-in-place – which will keep a limit on the number of homes for sale and temper any downdraft in pricing. What is worse is that the resulting back-up will cause others to stay in their current home forever too! It was […more]
Here is a wider look at the fire map for Encinitas/Carlsbad. The blue dot is the location of my listing in La Costa Oaks; a neighborhood of 820 homes built in 2005-2013 (long after the Harmony Fire of 1996). The newer homes were built on the outskirts of town, so if you prefer a recently-built […more]
For home buyers, it’s hard to tell if you are on red alert hunting for houses, or sitting on the sidelines because it feels the same. Either way, there aren’t many homes to consider – you can go weeks without seeing anything worth a look – so it’s hard to keep your chops up. Then […more]
What if you convert a vacation home to your primary residence, live there for at least two years and then sell it? Can you qualify for the full $250,000/$500,000 capital gains tax exclusion? No. If you sell a main home that you previously used as a vacation home, some or all of the gain is […more]
With the number of sales taking a dive for the next few months – which could turn out to be a few years – we really don’t need as many realtors. Older agents who have been looking for a reason to retire sure have one now, especially if they believe all the gloom-and-doom: In 2000, […more]