Testimonials for Blog

Buying or selling a home in 2016 can be both easier and harder than it’s ever been. For first-time home buyers or sellers, there is a lot to navigate. This is especially true for millennials, who are beginning to come out of their economic shells, get married, start families and buy their first home. Buying or selling a home is easier because there are an incredible array of tools and websites to help you do it. In-depth information on homes, neighborhoods, prices, school districts, etc. helps to give you a full picture. However, it’s also more difficult. There is so

Real estate agents that sell houses in La Jolla, Pacific Beach, Point Loma and Ocean Beach say that now it is a seller’s market. It is a great time to sell because many buyers are looking for a house and there aren’t that many houses listed. “If a house is market-ready, clean and neat and has a good location, it sells fast. Many families don’t want to renovate a lot before they move in, so they buy a house that is ready to move in,” says real estate agent Michelle Serafina.Agents Tony Franco and Lionel Silva note that the hot buying

The cities with the fastest-growing rents in the U.S. probably are not the ones you’d expect. That’s because they’re not the most expensive cities for a renter to live in (e.g., San Francisco, New York City, Washington, DC). Instead, rents are shooting up in places that seem like bargains compared to those high-priced metropolises ($3,550 for a one-bedroom, San Francisco? Really?). But if they keep up the pace—and they probably will—these cities won’t be bargains for long. Rents rose 2.7% across the country in March compared with a year earlier, according to Apartment List, which analyzed its own data for

    Low inventories and eroding affordability coupled with financial market volatility contributed to a second consecutive month of year-over-year declines for pending home sales statewide, CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (C.A.R.) said today.   Pending home sales data: Statewide pending home sales fell in February on an annual basis, with the Pending Home Sales Index (PHSI)* decreasing 0.4 percent from 121.4 in February 2015 to 120.9 in February 2016, based on signed contracts.    On a monthly basis, California pending home sales increased 26.4 percent from January, well above the long-run average increase of 15.9 percent typically registered from January

The realty sector is a dynamic industry that is quickly adapting to the world of networking. Everything is interconnected and participants in this sector should not overlook developments happening within the property market, and more importantly, those happening in other economic markets as well. According to the 37th edition of Emerging Trends in Real Estate, a publication that discusses trends as well as forecast developments and investments in the realty sector developed by Pricewaterhousecoopers (PWC) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI), some of the leading forces that are continually interacting are technology, globalization, demography and urbanization. In the realty sector, a

  There are signs that the red-hot tech scene is slowing down in Silicon Valley. Some analysts are predicting a major crash is on its way later this year. But others are optimistic that lessons were learned during the dot-com bust in 2001. Venture capitalists are starting to close their wallets and not invest in tech. Real estate analysts are warning the rate of growth for the housing costs in the Bay Area has surpassed where it was at right before the dot-com bust in 2001. So the big question, are we heading for a devastating bubble pop? Or are

  Nina Hatvany has worked for 25 years in San Francisco as a real estate agent concentrating on the high end of the market. Today, as a result of a reeling stock market and concerns about global economic stability and growth, the conversation with well-heeled clients has turned decidedly more cautious. “I have a number of buyers who are just more hesitant,” Hatvany told CNBC. “They look and they talk and then they start arguing with me about the slow IPO market and overvalued unicorns. I feel like I have to argue with them about how nice the house is.”   As

After a December that was unseasonably balmy for a large swath of the East Coast, January saw a return to winter norms: frigid temperatures and mountains of snow (even in the drought-parched West, thanks to El Niño). Real estate markets around the country also followed the regular January pattern, according to realtor.com® data: fewer homes on the market, and those that are for sale move like semi-frozen molasses. But just like the seeds that are waiting to sprout once temperatures warm up (hey, is it April yet?), we’re seeing signs that buyers are getting ready to jump into the market this year when the time is right. “Our initial readings on January

With the latest numbers on existing-and-new-home sales from the National Association of Realtors(NAR), we can now close the books on 2015. And quite a year it’s been. As we’d expected, 2015 produced major growth and some big-time milestones in California’s housing’s recovery. Jonathan Smoke, chief economist for NAR puts it this way. How good was it? Total home sales grew 7 percent over 2014 for the best year in real estate since 2007, based on 6 percent growth in existing-home sales and 15 percent growth in new-home sales. The increase in 2015 was a stark contrast to the decline in total

Few sights are as beautiful as a home perched on a craggy cliff, overlooking the ocean—except when that cliff starts to crumble. That’s what frightening video footage has shown is happening to the coastline in Pacifica, CA, just south of San Francisco. Ten days of El Niño rains battering this bluff have caused portions to collapse into the sea. And since some people’s apartments are situated so close to the brink, many lost their backyards and porches, and now must be wondering if their homes are next. The city of Pacifica has declared a local state of emergency. So far, it has condemned 20 homes as uninhabitable, ordering its inhabitants to vacate