Real Estate Blog - September, 2022

Costa Mesa Luxury Homeowners Unfazed by Price Ranges

The past week brought a broad range of properties debuting on the luxury home market. For local owners of Costa Mesa luxury homes, two examples demonstrate that sellers are confident that buyers are out there for an extremely broad range of offerings.

From Manhattan, long a bastion of high-end real estate, comes the Journal’s report on “The Priciest Home in America.” It acknowledges that Manhattan real estate is a specialized market where participants are accustomed “to hefty price tags. A $25 million condo here. A $50 million mansion there….”

Even so, the newly listed triplex penthouse that spans the 129th through 131st floors of the new Central Park Tower sports an asking price that “might seem like a lot to spend on a home.” For some…

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Costa Mesa Closing Costs: a Quick Rundown

Veteran Costa Mesa homebuyers won’t need to spend much time reading the following—they’re already familiar with the stack of documents that accompany a closing. At closing, they had only to sign on the dotted lines (they aren’t actually dotted—but never mind). By then, their Realtor® (ideally, that’s me) has acquainted them with the sheaf of papers they are finalizing—so the following details haven’t come as news.

Usually, the bulk of the paperwork deals with creating the home loan: the closing costs. These can be either mostly inconsequential or head-swiveling (what-th????). For anyone about to embark on a home purchase for the first time, here’s a quick rundown of the closing costs you may encounter. Your veteran real estate professional will…

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What Group Has the Costa Mesa Homebuying Advantage?

Passenger's 'Let Her Go" is a song that only caught on years after it was first recorded— ultimately becoming a #1 hit in 22 nations. Costa Mesa FM and satellite stations are still playing it::

But you only need the light when it's burning low
Only miss the sun when it starts to snow

It's hard to argue with the way we humans validate those lines. It could easily apply to area homeowners who didn't take advantage of Costa Mesa homebuying and refinancing deals when borrowing rates were at sub-basement levels. Past generations often had only dim memories of distant decades' missed "wish I'd taken advantage back then" opportunities—but this turnaround has been so swift that it's much easier to appreciate what was available so recently.

With last…

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Autumn: a “Golden” Season for Selling a House in Costa Mesa

Spring and summer are usually the busiest seasons in real estate, so for area homeowners who, for whatever reason, have just decided to sell their Costa Mesa home, it might seem that they’ve missed their best window of opportunity. Depending on how convinced they are about the iron grip that springtime has on home sales, they may even come to the conclusion that they will have to hold off on listing until next year—even if they are actually prepared to list.

This year, the wait-until-spring notion seems more unnecessary than usual. It’s not just that the factors that affect buyer affordability show many signs of heading in the wrong direction, either. It’s also something that many experienced agents are convinced of: that autumn is the second best…

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Costa Mesa Open Houses May Not Face Climate Disruption

It's a stubborn fact that Costa Mesa open houses (and even agent-chaperoned showings) are somewhat at the mercy of the elements. When the weather turns nasty, it's hard for prospective buyers to imagine a property as it sparkles on a balmy spring day. In the gloomiest days of winter, at a minimum, it's a full-out lamps-on/drapes open drill.

For the future sellers who will be hosting this winter's Costa Mesa open houses, largely unnoticed was an August update of the government's climate.gov blog. It held important scientific news about the weather to come—although the non-climatologists among us would have had trouble wading through the details.

August's entry led off with the ominous warning: "La Niña continues! It's likely that the La Niña…

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The Costa Mesa Listings Include All the Homes for Sale—Almost

The Costa Mesa real estate listings are updated around the clock, providing everybody entrée into the Costa Mesa properties currently on the market or under contract. That makes the Costa Mesa listings a ‘live’ catalog—one vastly superior to what was available to the public up until the mid-1990s. Those MLS books resembled skinny black-and-white Sears catalogs. They were distributed to real estate offices every couple of weeks or so.

The old method provided the only option available to the public when they wished to assess the properties currently being offered. Now everyone with a smartphone or computer has instant access to a truly timely inventory of Costa Mesa homes now on the market. You don’t need a real estate handbook to know what “on the…

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Despite Costa Mesa Equity Dips, it’s Still a Good News Story

Local homeowners who had developed an agreeable habit of checking online for their home’s latest Costa Mesa home equity estimates are doing so less often lately. For years, as Costa Mesa home equity estimates rose steadily, thousands of dollars were (theoretically) being amassed by area residents at a dizzying clip. It may have run contrary to the maxims we’d all been given since childhood (“there’s no such thing as a free lunch;” “you don’t get something for nothing”)—there was evidence right there on the screen that something like that seemed to be happening. And it wasn’t imaginary, either: local comparables supported the mounting gains.

But that was then—‘way back in the spring. Now, checking into those online good news vendors is less pleasing…

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Costa Mesa House Hunters Could Face Less Competition

Last month ended with a continuation of the same housing market conditions that had held for most of the summer—adding only a glimmer of optimism for Costa Mesa house hunters. The big picture for the U.S. on Labor Day, 2022, was still a slowing of the volume of pending home sales everywhere except in the West (which notched a minuscule monthly gain). But slowing transaction totals didn’t seem to have created much market turmoil—certainly, sellers weren’t listing en masse.

Although many homeowners had relished checking into websites that showed estimates of their home’s value that leaped by thousands of dollars seemingly every month, many of those estimates were now coming down. Still, there was ample reason to suspect that this was merely a…

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Selling Costa Mesa Homes by Adding without Adding

Homeowners who are on the fence about selling their Costa Mesa home in the coming months find little guidance from the national and regional trends. Reports from the U.S. market have highlighted the minority of sellers who are dropping their asking prices—yet even so, closing prices are still significantly higher than those of a year ago. They also report an increase in the national inventory. More homes being listed is a boon for buyers—but also a mixed blessing for sellers who will need to secure their next home.

Regardless of how the national or local markets are performing, one way sellers maximize their bottom line is to boost their Costa Mesa property’s value without squandering an undue amount of time and capital. The first step is to assess…

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Costa Mesa Mortgage Interest Rates Make Decisions Harder

What a difference a year makes—at least where Costa Mesa home loans are concerned. For what seems like forever, the recommendations of experts, man-in-the-street consensus, and plain old common sense had all aligned to point to the same advice: take advantage of today’s home loan interest rates while you can!

The unanimity was comforting, especially since the decision to sign on the dotted line for a 30-year mortgage is a commitment that stretches decades into the future. But when everybody can agree that the entire history of homebuying verifies the wisdom of taking advantage of a loan offered at historically low interest rates, the only issue is whether the property being financed is reasonably priced.

But now, at the end of last week, Money…

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