Green Real Estate Appraiser

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.

read more at: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/dec/15/dataquick-november-realestate-listings-mortgages/

Disclaimer: for information and entertainment purposes only

• Driver’s licenses: Starting Jan. 2, unauthorized immigrants in California will be allowed to take tests to obtain a state driver’s license. The DMV expects to process up to 1.4 million applications from people who live in the state illegally, as authorized under AB 60, passed in 2013. The law’s stated goal is to make California’s roadways safer by ensuring more drivers are trained, tested and insured.

• Plastic bag ban: Starting July 1, California could become the first state in the nation to phase out single-use plastic bags, first in grocery stores and pharmacies and a year later in convenience and liquor stores. Opponents of the law, however, submitted signatures this week to place a referendum on the 2016 ballot. If enough signatures are deemed valid, the law will be suspended until the electorate votes on whether to keep or eliminate it.

• Paid sick leave: Also on July 1, millions of Californians will begin earning paid sick leave under AB 1522, a law championed by San Diego Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez. It requires all businesses in the state to pay full-time and part-time workers a minimum of three days sick leave. It will largely affect retail, fast food and other service-industry jobs that don’t offer sick leave benefits. California became the second in the nation to require the benefit, after Connecticut, marking the largest ever expansion of paid sick leave.

read more at: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/jan/01/new-laws-2015-california-legislature/

disclaimer: for information and entertainment only

The Senate’s 11th-hour extension of the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act through Dec. 31 will save Foster, who works for a nonprofit ministry group, from having to pay the IRS about $28,000 next year on $100,000 of mortgage debt canceled by his bank as part of a short sale on his condo. Before the Senate’s action, he told me he had no idea “how or where we could come up with” that sort of money.