No one may be sure of how many Costa Mesa homeowners chose to deal with their year-end stir-craziness by surfing the web last weekend, but for those who did so by Googling “top events of 2020,” there wasn’t much doubt about what finished as Number One:

The pandemic, of course.

Second place tended to be a jump ball between either the Presidential election or impeachment, after which a dozen other noteworthy occurrences vied for recognition. Among others, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s resignation from the Royal Family competed with the Australian and California wildfires, the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, a stock market crash (although Wall Street’s swift recovery made that one a weak contender), murder hornets, etc.

What did not…

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Gather ‘round, people: it’s The Year in Review time again—the week when columnists and TV talking heads line up to chatter and lament over the year’s record-shattering advances and failures. From Washington to Hollywood, Wall Street to Silicon Valley, 2020 provided as rich a trove of talking points as any year in memory.

Closer to home, for Costa Mesa homeowners and investors, the year in real estate was no exception. When news of COVID-19 first broke, it looked as if the pandemic’s spread might claim Costa Mesa real estate as an early casualty. Yet, despite the persistence of distressing developments in a host of other areas, local real estate watchers watched a much different picture being painted across the nation.

Here’s a selection of a…

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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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