Real Estate Blog - August, 2022

Flippered Intruder Raises Costa Mesa Home Security Issue

Costa Mesa home security issues—and family safety as a whole—are always high priorities named by future homeowners. A recent Mortgage Professionals Association survey found safety and security to be “the most important” factors for homeowners deciding where to move.

That growing concern could be why last week’s dispatch from afar was picked up by many U.S. media outlets. Knowing that today’s homeowners are becoming increasingly edgy about the issue, they brought word from the far side of the globe of a threat that few had previously considered. The Guardian said it all with last week’s dramatic headline:

“Seal breaks into New Zealand home, traumatizes cat and hangs out on couch.”

Seldom has a headline packed so much detailed…

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Costa Mesa Home Prices: Expectations, Reality, and Emotion

Although you’d think that when a celebrated Yale economics professor is queried about home prices, he’d trot over to the whiteboard and start scribbling equations. If the prof in question is Robert Shiller—co-creator of the Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index—all the more so. The Index has become the benchmark reference tracking residential real estate prices. When it comes to American home prices, Shiller is The Man.

So when the vaunted economist seeks to examine the factors best explaining the latest dramatic changes in Costa Mesa home prices, you expect to hear a lot about the inflationary effects of trillion-dollar government expenditures, the bond market’s inverse reaction to Fed funds management, etc., etc. You expect formulas with…

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Costa Mesa Listing Prices in a Post-Bidding War Environment

Traditionally, the asking prices that headed Costa Mesa listings represented the seller’s idea of their property’s reasonable value—an acceptable amount that a buyer would (hopefully) consider to be fair. However, during much of the recent seller’s market conditions that prevailed across most of the U.S., it was not unusual to read eye-opening tales of bidding battles that resulted in closing prices that were significantly higher than the original asking price.

Costa Mesa listings may not always closely follow what’s going on throughout the rest of the nation, but they do tend to be influenced by major tidal shifts in the nation’s economic fortunes (as well as the public’s perceptions of them).

Lately, as reports of bidding battles have faded…

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Will Last Week’s Event Impact Your Costa Mesa Utility Bill?

Costa Mesa utility bills are headed upward—with nobody expecting them to head in any other direction. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that their Energy Index increased 32.9% for the year ending last month—and that was the good news, since June’s 12-month increase had been 41.6%! Costa Mesa utility bills didn’t need to match those pain-producing national averages for the writing on the wall to be evident: household utility bills are bound to become big news—with some predictable real estate repercussions.

There are also actions Costa Mesa homeowners can take—most of which are well-publicized (and common sense, anyway). But last Tuesday, an event took place that could rate refiguring the cost-benefit analysis in one…

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Despite Recession Talk, Costa Mesa Home Prices May Advance

As the week ended, anyone who switched on a TV or radio or checked in on one of the financial websites was greeted with a term that hadn’t been seen before: “housing recession.” CNBC.com’s “housing market slides into a recession” was typical, as was MarketWatch’s “America has entered a housing recession, builders and brokers say.” Even Realtor Magazine joined the chorus with “Home Sales Data Points to ‘Housing Recession.’”

For local homeowners whose moods have been greatly buoyed by sizeable gains in Costa Mesa home prices, it was hardly a heartening way to enter the weekend. Even for those who won’t list their own properties anytime soon, the banner advances have made welcome additions to their family net worth calculations. But that “housing…

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Selling Homeowners Unfazed by Adjectives

As a rule, those who have Costa Mesa homes for sale generally welcome real estate headlines that include words like “soars” and “surge.” On the other hand, words like “slowdown” are less likely to be well received. Last week’s residential real estate dispatches featured all of the above—although not always in the most welcome contexts.

The ‘soars’ came into play in Bloomberg.com’s review of U.S. home inventory levels. These were said to have expanded at a record rate in July. The authors cited realtor.com®’s tally of active listings nationwide, which jumped 31% from a year earlier. Even more notable was that this marked the third straight month of record increases. Such soaring inventory levels were clearly “good news for shoppers still in the…

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Will Speed Bumps Deter Any Future Costa Mesa Metaverse?

Every once in a while, it’s interesting to check in on the progress of Costa Mesa’s real estate doppelganger, the real estate metaverse, to see if it is becoming more popular (hence, real). It has definitely been progressing, but not in a uniformly positive direction—certainly as opined by controversial billionaire investor Mark Cuban.

At the beginning of this month, real estate news purveyor therealdeal.com published a less-than-encouraging update on the technological phenomenon’s progress. Its “reality check” revisited how the year began, as the “both simple and surreal” digital environs of the metaverse greatly benefitted from Facebook’s rebranding as “Meta Platforms, Inc..”

Since everyone knows that Facebook is a real thing, by “leaning into…

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Costa Mesa Real Estate Guidance: Best Avoid Market Timing

By the end of last week, Costa Mesa real estate observers were finding confirmation from across the nation of what the NAR’s chief economist had just told Forbes. July data reflected buyers who were “tightening their budgets” and sellers “responding with price reductions.” The seller’s market conditions that had been ruling the market might have largely vanished, but buyers who “expected to find a bargain” were likely to be disappointed. Nonetheless, “home shoppers who kept searching saw more available options.”

All in all, local Costa Mesa real estate watchers were left without a clear way to characterize the late-summer market. Nor were the experts particularly helpful—nowhere were the words ‘buyer’s market’ to be found. One 38-year real estate…

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