Category Archives: Uncategorized

Home As an Investment

Posted on December 29, 2014 | Leave a comment

By Jonathan Clements

This year, I sold one apartment and bought another. It was a reminder that the words “home” and “investment” don’t belong in the same sentence

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favor of home ownership. The tax breaks are impressive. Home ownership forces us to save: With each mortgage payment, we whittle down the loan balance, so eventually we own a valuable asset free and clear. Most important, a home provides us with a place to live.

But what about the price appreciation? According to Freddie Mac , home prices have climbed just 3.7% a year over the past 30 years, not much above the 2.8% inflation rate. To make matters worse, this figure doesn’t reflect the hefty costs of buying, owning and selling a home. What if you include those? Consider one columnist’s sorry tale.

Carrying Costs

This is a topic I’ve tackled before, most notably in a June 2005 Wall Street Journal Sunday article entitled “How Houses Eat Money.” That column, which appeared a year before the real-estate bubble peaked, detailed how I had fared financially with the home I then owned in New Jersey.

Disclaimer: for information and entertainment purpose only

Home-Price Gains at 2 Year Low

Posted on December 16, 2014 | Leave a comment

The pace of home-price appreciation in San Diego County fell last month to its lowest rate since June 2012, the period just before real-estate investors pushed annual gains into the double digits for a nearly 18 month stretch.

In November, the median price for a home sold in San Diego County was $430,000, up 3.6 percent from November 2013, real-estate tracker CoreLogic DataQuick reported Monday. That’s the slowest annual gain in home prices since they grew 1.7 percent year-over-year in June 2012. Over the next year, however, the pace would skyrocket to 24.1 percent in June 2013, as investors fixed and flipped bank-owned properties left over from the Great Recession.

Foreclosure resales now make up just 3.6 percent of all transactions, and as such the pace of appreciation has descended to single digits. The market is now paced by traditional factors like income, employment and overall affordability, which decreases activity because it puts less pressure on people to buy now or get priced out, said Mark Goldman, a loan officer and real-estate lecturer at San Diego State University.

disclaimer: for information and entertainment purposes only

World’s Largest Battery Coming to Southern California

Posted on December 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

The world’s largest battery is coming to Southern California.

The device will tie in to the region’s bulk power grid and vacuum up excess power. Flipping a switch, the charged battery will deliver a sustained jolt equivalent to more than 100 million common AA alkaline batteries, or a fleet of nearly 17,000 Nissan Leafs.

It’s a power plant of the future that produces nothing, but perpetually recycles wasted electrons. Multinational energy provider AES has been selected to design and build the 100-megawatt facility on its land in Long Beach, alongside the Alamitos power plant just off Interstate 405. Enclosed in a boxy warehouse, the big battery is likely to consist of tall stacks of energy storage cells and modules, arranged in row after row much like the computer banks of a modern-day data center.

Large battery projects and trials are under way across the globe using a variety of chemistries, but none quite on this scale.

In Southern California, an 8-megawatt battery is being paired with wind turbines in the Tehachapi area, north of the Los Angeles Basin, to make the energy more useful.

Praveen Kathpal, vice president of regulatory affairs at AES Energy Storage, said the Long Beach project is not a big reach for the company.