Earlier this month, Utah’s Deseret News did a stellar job of capturing the seemingly contradictory jumble of signals emanating from the nation’s housing market. At first, K. McKellar’s commentary seemed to be about a 9% drop in Zillow’s stock price. Costa Mesa housing market observers might have leaped to a conclusion that such a falloff might have clear local implications—but that wasn’t the case. Rather than being due to any steep dive in activity, it was chalked up to “uncertainty” in the company forecast.

Like all investors, housing market investors don’t like uncertainty. Sometimes it reflects internal management strife—although that wasn’t the case in this instance. It was the contradictory signals from the market that made any forecast…

1510 Views, 0 Comments

Read Full Post

“You May Want to Invest in Real Estate While You Still Can” was Yahoo!finance’s doubletake-inducing lead article last Friday—although would-be Costa Mesa real estate investors weren’t immediately seen scrambling to closings in response. Local investors are a sophisticated bunch who tend to take high-pressure warnings with a grain of salt, anyway—and given the recent glut of dire prognostications on many fronts, Yahoo’s hint of an impending end for area real estate investment opportunities wasn’t likely to be taken very seriously.

Still…they did have a point.

There is renewed evidence that the incursion of large institutional players into the single-family and small multifamily realms is gaining steam. Their buying activity so far this year…

475 Views, 0 Comments

Read Full Post

CNBC.com’s producers know how to get your attention—it’s ‘what they do.’ Last week, they found an angle certain to snag readers for an otherwise ho-hum technical article about preparations for buying Costa Mesa homes—promising one move that “can end up saving you hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Most soon-to-be Costa Mesa homebuyers were probably skeptical that such a six-figure bonanza exists (it doesn’t). Even so, they’d probably have read on to be reminded of something they already knew: the identity of the potential savings bonanza. Individuals may be powerless to influence the forces that shape today’s marketplace, but one aspect remains “in their control”: their own credit score.

According to the article, the promised windfalls can be…

557 Views, 0 Comments

Read Full Post

Realtor® Magazine says that history shows that this is the week when “Homeowners looking for the greatest price premiums may find the best opportunities.” That would certainly be edifying for area homeowners who have already listed their Costa Mesa properties. And for those who’ve been on the fence, the just-released report by the ATTOM analysts might well serve as a reason to join them sooner rather than later.

ATTOM is the self-described “leading curator of real estate data” from throughout the U.S. Their multi-sourced records cover 99% of the nation’s population. For readers who are familiar with spreadsheets, the scope is impressive—their 20 terabytes of data fill nearly 30 billion rows of transaction-level data, further broken out into 9,000…

464 Views, 0 Comments

Read Full Post

The direction of Costa Mesa home loan interest rates has been spurring concern among this spring’s house hunters. Last week the trend continued as U.S. rates spawned headlines dotted with phrases like “highest in 13 years” and “Fed hits housing market.” Even for industry reporters at The Mortgage Reports—scribes who tend to emphasize the bright side—the best anyone could come up with on Thursday was, “Rates steady-ish today.” Fox Business struggled to find some positive spin, but settled for “Refinance Rates Plunge to 3-Week Low” (refi rates “plunged” from 5.37% to 5.125%).

Still, for those of us who choose to follow Louis Armstrong’s advice to “just direct your feet/to the sunny side of the street,” there were some optimism-tinged media reports:

…

751 Views, 0 Comments

Read Full Post

For homeowners preparing to add their own properties to the Costa Mesa listings, data from the most recent U.S. activity was heartening—although it might not have seemed so given the way it was presented in some news outlets. Examples:

  • From foxbusiness.com: “Housing industry getting hit by ‘perfect storm,’ billionaire real estate developer warns” (but the ‘perfect storm’ turns out to be “a real estate boom like we haven’t seen in the past.”)
  • From thehill.com: “Is the U.S. housing market headed for a price correction?” (the pace of sales eased somewhat, but only because of the shortage of listings—while the latest analysis “suggested that around 54% of homes still sold above their list price.”)
  • From fortune.com: “The odds of a home price…

530 Views, 0 Comments

Read Full Post