When the experts make a point of advising that you remove the family photos as part of preparing your house for sale, they don’t mean to criticize your family. Even if Aunt Agatha’s scowl seems to be in every group portrait, it’s not that. It’s also not about the art of photography in general, either.

It’s about YOU.

That may not seem to be a very client-friendly sentiment, but no offense should be taken. Costa Mesa homeowners shouldn’t take offense. The overall goal of depersonalizing your home—that is, making the house as ownerless-seeming as possible—is an important part of helping house-hunters envision your property as their own. Removing the objects that reveal your family’s personality—things like awards, family portraits, and vacation…

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“Rich Dad Poor Dad” was a smash self-help hit book a few years back, selling more than 32 million copies. One of its major premises is that the odds for accelerating wealth creation are shortened for children of “rich dads” who grow up learning the difference between those who “go to work to make money” and those who “make money work for them.”

As yet, there is no best-selling non-fiction book titled “Good Debt Bad Debt”—but that phrase could make a fitting companion to Robert Kiyosaki’s hit. The concept behind it would be simple enough—but a distinction that’s increasingly valuable as worries proliferate about continuing inflation and possible recession.

It’s a distinction that can be lost in the clamor. For instance, CBSnews.com declared last…

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It’s a phrase that would-be home buyers had been hearing ever since seller’s market conditions had begun. But when “Submit your best and final bid” was recently advised by one Chicago area listing agent, the words were jolting, according to last week’s NPR Newswire report describing a new kind of bidding war.

The ‘best and final’ bid being solicited wasn’t from an eager homebuyer who’d be competing with others for their dream home. It was for a rental apartment. The bid under discussion was for the amount above the asking rent. The couple had lost out on another apartment, so they agreed to offer more.

The situation is now becoming routine—and not just in big cities, where historically scarce vacancies have pushed rents to new heights. Low…

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Summer finally becomes a reality on Tuesday—as opposed to Memorial Day weekend, which eager beavers in the media like to pretend was the kickoff to summer. Realists don’t agree—they believe that falling for the "unofficial start of summer" line means giving in to one of those unsavory impulses Mother warned us about (like shaking hidden birthday presents to guess what we're going to get, or eating cookie dough raw). Grownups learn to be patient, to wait our turn, take a number at the deli line, etc.

But Tuesday's arrival of true summer does raise the philosophical question, "What really makes summer summer?" This isn't some abstract mystical speculation now that research has clarified what really makes summer summer. Science has been at work,…

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For those who keep a close watch on the outlook for Costa Mesa real estate, finding the upside amidst last week’s raft of less-than-cheery economic news was a tall order. Let’s face it: after years of buoyant tidings and record-setting Costa Mesa real estate advances, few had doubted the certainty that some retrenching was certain to come about at some point—the storm warnings had been there.
Even so, nestled among the worrisome economic dispatches, there actually were some bright spots:

  • Finally: the long-constricted supply of homes for sale began to stage a turnaround. The record inventory shortfall had been frequently cited for sluggish U.S. home sales volumes—but a turnaround was in progress. For the week ended June 4, the number of active…

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In Costa Mesa, Father’s Day is theoretically supposed to be as important as Mother’s Day, but the reality can differ significantly. Even historically, the June celebration has always struggled to catch up with its mid-May precursor.

History has it that beginning in 1905, Mother’s Day’s originator Anna Jarvis started campaigning for a holiday honoring Moms. If there were many naysayers, they haven’t been heard from since, possibly because of Anna’s persuasive argument that mothers are “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”

Four years later, in Spokane, Washington, Sonora Smart Dodd was listening to an early Mother’s Day sermon when inspiration struck: Dads should be feted, too! Despite the fact that her argument was…

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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…

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“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…

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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…

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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…

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