Costa Mesa's Christmas and Hanukkah decorations are up in most of the familiar places around town, but they've had to pull some extra duty this year. Usually, the reindeer, giant candles, Santas, elves, menorahs, and light displays can't fail to bring on the familiar magic of the season—and if ever they don't do the trick, the evocative sounds of the carols and holiday pop tunes usually will.

But this year, all the seasonal regalia's power to enchant has had to overcome a drumbeat of less than jolly news—distressing headlines and bulletins with statistics that could have been written by the Grinch himself. Yet, as this weekend's unexpectedly resurgent shopping activity suggests, in the end, the buoyancy of the holiday spirit may be impossible to…

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For prospective buyers who will be out looking for Costa Mesa homes for sale in the coming year, last Wednesday’s “Housing Forecast for 2021” that was picked up by commercial newswires held both good and bad news. The mix of favorable and less-favorable elements alternated back and forth throughout the news release. Future Costa Mesa house-hunters might have felt the reader’s equivalent of watching a tennis match rally.

  • The source of the forecast—realtor.com—did offer up one overriding reassurance:
    GOOD: “The 2021 housing market will be much more ‘normal’ than the wild swings [experienced this year].”
    But that was tempered with:
    NOT SO GOOD: “Prices stay high.”
    The back-and-forth continued:
    ENCOURAGING: “…more home options will probably become…

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Attention, Costa Mesa!

Ready or not, the Holidays are not waiting around!

If that alert strikes you as unnecessarily alarmist, remember that this year's calendar works out to have fewer days than usual between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And if your traditional Thanksgiving tryptophane-engendered post-turkey stupor was followed by too many days of leftover turkey sandwiches, the resulting snoozefest may have led to your catnapping through this year's shortened holiday preparation days.

The fact is, Costa Mesa's holiday celebrations are already well underway. If you find that hard to believe, there's this proof positive: the eighth, final day of Hanukkah arrives this Friday! That's right; the Jewish Festival of Lights began last Thursday. The…

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As Costa Mesa nears the end of 2020, one of this year’s defining economic hallmarks was the sustained continuation of real estate price rises. According to last week’s email announcement from industry price monitor CoreLogic, U.S. price advances were more pronounced than had been foreseen by nearly anyone a year ago. Through the end of October, year-over-year, annual average housing prices rose by 7.3%.

These returns are studied by industry professionals—including Costa Mesa real estate agents and brokers—not only for comparison with recent local sales results, but as indicators of what to expect going forward. The details in CoreLogic’s “HPI Forecast” are just that—predictions—well-informed estimates rather than certainties. Based on U.S. public…

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Costa Mesa rental properties can bring their owners substantial investment income at the same time they are quietly building equity. It sounds clever—and it is clever, as many legendary titans of industry have pointed out. Nineteenth-century millionaire-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s “Ninety percent of all millionaires become so through owning real estate” is typical.

More recently is this quote from wealth-creation expert Robert Kyosaki, author of the mega-bestseller, Rich Dad, Poor Dad:

If you don’t like real estate, all you have to do is make hamburgers, build a business around that hamburger, and franchise it.”

Kyosaki’s sly observation lets us draw our own conclusions about the relative likelihood of becoming a one-in-a-billion…

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With Thanksgiving Day gatherings behind us, this year’s Costa Mesa holiday shopping action re-focused on the Black Friday sales phenomenon. Early reports were encouraging—but confirmed what Costa Mesa businesspeople expected: a substantial tilt to home-based shopping.

CNBC’s initial late-night observation was that bargain hunters were ringing up record online sales. This was a result that had been foreseen by retailers, who had prepared for the reluctance consumers might show to in-person shopping.

Even so, the National Retail Federation had projected that this year’s holiday sales would grow by somewhere between 3.6%-5.2%. If that proves accurate, sales will exceed averages reached during the previous five holiday seasons—a shot of good…

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In any other year, when Costa Mesa homeowners read an opening line like, “For the 13th time this year, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage set a record low…,” their reaction would most likely be something like, “Wow! They cut rates again! How great!”

Not this year. Most of 2020 has seen gun-shy Costa Mesa residents, having rebounded from one unexpected obstacle after another, take one look at that sentence and be more apt to focus on the unlucky number ‘13’ and think, “Uh-oh! Now what?”

But Costa Mesa homeowners can relax. The news flash is, indeed, good news (unequaled news, actually). As Realtor Magazine noted, when it comes to 30-year fixed mortgages, “home buyers and refinancing homeowners have never before locked in a rate this low.” When the…

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When you and your Realtor sit down to arrive at your property’s Costa Mesa listing price, there is no controversy about the mutual goal. The object is to arrive at the highest figure that will attract the greatest amount of interest from qualified buyers. That it will also begin the process of getting to the signing table in the shortest time is built into that objective. The only mystery is how many qualified buyers will be currently searching the Costa Mesa listings for just such a home.

That sounds a little simpler than it is in reality. The most basic element that goes into establishing the listing price is the Costa Mesa “comps”—recent sale prices for comparable homes. But since no two properties are exactly the same, that is just a departure…

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Sometimes perfectly logical assumptions just don’t pan out.

For homeowners who had planned to sell their Costa Mesa home this year, the sudden advent of the COVID-19 pandemic looked like the worst kind of bad news—what pundits call a “black swan”—the kind of out-of-the-blue event that thoroughly disrupts normal prospects. Sure enough, unemployment numbers soared, and businesses in any number of fields ground to a halt. As if those conditions weren’t damaging enough, for Costa Mesa home sellers, even showing Costa Mesa homes became close to impossible as everyone grappled with finding the best ways to deal with the changing conditions.

Few would have believed that already by summer’s end, residential real estate sales could possibly rebound as…

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For anyone who follows Costa Mesa real estate trends, this year has upended all expectations. Even following the declaration of the national pandemic emergency, the course of activity continued to follow an unpredictable path. Last Thursday, the National Association of Realtors® Newsroom revealed new details about the unforeseen shifts in the housing market. Normally, when the national economy sputters as profoundly as it has since to onset of the pandemic, it constitutes “a condition usually associated with slower home sales and lower home prices.” The opposite has come to pass on both counts.

The NAR’s key findings detail a market that has tilted toward more expensive—and more spacious—properties:

  1. Buyers have been seeking housing with more…

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