'Market Trends' Category
Some Benefits From The Real Estate Bust -2009
December 28th, 2009 Categories: Brookside Escondido, Escondido, Foreclosures & Short Sales, Market Trends, Real Estate News
It’s always nice to get a different perspective on the events of the last couple of years, and one that I respect is that of my CPA, Jim Vander Spek. Jim has written columns for the North County Times for years, and recently posted an article about some of the benefits that have come out of the current market conditions. So, with permission from the author, here is Jim’s take on the Escondido real estate markets courtesy of Jim and the North County Times… 
The ongoing real estate bust with its foreclosures and drop in home values has created difficult problems for many. These have been discussed a great deal with the hope frequently expressed that prices will again rise. However, the news is not all bad. Let’s consider some benefits from the real estate bust:
Prices are down for newcomers. People are picking North County over other places in the country because it has again become affordable. My parents moved into a foreclosed Escondido home in 1965 during a similar bust. This allowed us to escape from Canada to paradise, for which I have been thankful ever since. San Diego County is a great place to live. Of course, we now have a much more diversified economy than way back then. I know of two young professional families who picked Escondido over many options because it looked like a great town and was affordable as well.
Prices are down for young families. They don’t have to move to Arizona anymore. Stopping the outward migration of young families is vital for the long-term health of our economy. We are seeing young families buying homes and setting up their lives here instead of some far away place. Let’s keep the grand kids here. Other places don’t look all that great anymore. Staying here, they can help us become even better.
Unqualified buyers no longer qualify. People are not creating impossible and inappropriate debt obligations. Further, homes are no longer being purchased with the intent to create vastly overcrowded communal habitats. Those which were purchased with this intent are rapidly being foreclosed upon and vacated.
This is great for neighborhoods and gives relief to community services as well.
Few recent massive tracts were built in North County. These are a bane elsewhere. Our healthy inventory of suddenly affordable housing stock is spread around and represents a tremendous economic asset for North County. It’ s not as though we are talking about boarded up neighborhoods.
Foreclosures provide an economic boost. Many are choosing to skip house payments for eight months or more and then end up paying half as much for rent going forward. What about the poor banks that are hurt by this? Oh well, they have good friends in Uncle Sam. Besides, they should never have made those loans to start with. Maybe they will be more careful next time.
California is a non-recourse state for purchase money mortgages, so the legal and tax consequences of such “strategic foreclosures” are often minimal. A recent Wall Street Journal article said that households abandoning mortgages are adding $5 billion a month to their cash flow, representing a “stealth stimulus.” North County is sharing in that.
McMansions lose appeal. Who needs a 3,500 square feet house to live in any way? Excess living rooms and bathrooms you could park your car in never made any sense. Who wants to pay the taxes, upkeep and utilities? People are again properly starting to look at houses as places to live instead of as unreliable, highly leveraged investments. Hard earned cash can be spent on more useful things and to accomplish important life cycle goals.
Jim Vander Spek is a certified public accountant and Escondido resident.
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San Diego Real Estate Stats November 2009
November 1st, 2009 Categories: Market Trends, San Diego
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Windermere and Zillow Announce Partnership
October 2nd, 2009 Categories: Find Your Home, Market Trends, Marketing, Real Estate News
The following post appeared on Zillow’s website announcing the new partnership between Windermere Real Estate and Zillow.com. I thought it was great that they mentioned Windermere in San Diego, coming on the heals of meetings held between Steve Rodgers and our Marketing Team with Lloyd Frink, Zillow’s co-founder and President.
Written by Spenser Rascoff, Zillow’s COO, see the article below:
Today, I am thrilled and excited to announce our new partnership with Windermere Real Estate, the largest real estate brand here in our own back yard in Seattle (among many other places).
Windermere is one of the largest real estate brokerages in the country, with 8,000 real estate agents and more than 30,000 listings. Windermere’s listings now appear on Zillow through an automated listings feed, which is great news for Windermere agents and Zillow’s home shoppers.
If you’re a home buyer in one of Windermere’s markets like Seattle, Portland or San Diego, you’ll now see thousands more listings in your area. All of those listings now appear on Zillow.com and on Zillow’s iPhone application, the #1 residential real estate app on the iPhone.
If you’re a Windermere agent, it’s time to celebrate and to thank your broker for doing you a huge favor. Your listings are now on one of the largest real estate websites at no additional cost to you, complete with multiple photos and open house information.
If your brokerage doesn’t currently send Zillow a listings feed, watch this video to learn more.
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The Social Media Revolution
August 22nd, 2009 Categories: Find Your Home, Market Trends, Marketing, Poway, Rancho Bernardo, Real Estate News, San Diego, Santa Fe Valley, Technology
Watch this video on the Social Media Revolution and it will surprise you. Next be confident that your team at HotOnSanDiego is employing these techniques to buy and sell your homes!
- The Social Media Revolution
Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)
- By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
- Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
- 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
- Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
- Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
- comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
- 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
- 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
- % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
- The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
- Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
- 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
- Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
- What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
- The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
- Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
- There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
- 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
- Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
- If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
- Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
- 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
- People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
- 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
- Only 14% trust advertisements
- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
- 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
- Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
- 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
- According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
- 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
- In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
- More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
- Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
- Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser
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