Green Real Estate Appraiser

Plenty of Signs the Market Has Cooled

Posted on August 27, 2013 | Leave a comment

Do you feel that hint of a chill starting to swirl through the housing market? The cooling is slight, but it’s for real.

Home prices are not rising as fast in most metropolitan areas as they did earlier this year and much of 2012. Multiple bid competitions — fierce in many places this spring and late last year — aren’t as intense. Inventories of homes for sale have increased this summer, reversing near droughts of listings that helped fuel higher prices.

Has your neighborhood “cooled?” Contact the appraisers at www.scappraisals.com for your home value questions.

Add in rising mortgage rates, and you’ve got a distinct, measurable momentum shift in the pace of the housing recovery. The recovery is still well underway — it’s just not as effervescent as it once was.

Consider some of the key numbers:

• Asking prices on homes listed for sale declined by one-third of a percent in July, the first drop on a monthly basis since last November, according to data compiled by Trulia.com. Quarter-to-quarter data through July confirm the moderating trend line.

• Pending-home sales — under contract but not yet closed — dropped by four-tenths of a percent in June, according to the National Association of Realtors. Resales of houses in June dipped by 1.2 percent.

• Inventories of homes listed for sale rose in a number of the hottest markets recently, after hovering near record lows for a year or more. Low inventories stoke buyer competition and bidding wars that can send prices up sharply. More plentiful inventories give buyers more to choose from and tend to calm things down. Trulia estimates that nationwide inventories of homes for sale are up 6 percent since January.

Disclaimer: for information and entertainment purposes only

Are Home Bidding Wars Easing?

Posted on August 25, 2013 | Leave a comment

San Diego County remains one of the most competitive housing markets in the nation, but local bidding matches appear to be easing, shows an analysis from online real estate brokerage Redfin. Competition softened in July due to an increase in listings and mortgage rates.

Contact the appraisers at www.scappraisals.com for your home value questions. They are San Diego Home Value Experts.

More than 70 percent of deals reviewed by Redfin in July faced multiple bids, a drop from 82 percent in June and a drop from 73 percent a year ago, based on the brokerage’s data. The national rate is 63 percent.

San Diego and Orange counties faced the steepest decreases in competition month-to-month. Still, the two regions rank as the No. 4 and No. 3 most competitive markets in the nation. San Francisco and Los Angeles topped the list.

Local home sales shot up to a 7-year high in July as 13 percent more listings became available, allowing potential buyers more choice in a supply-constrained market. Also, recent home-price and mortgage-rate spikes have discouraged some buyers who may have dropped out of the market. That paved the way for more persistent consumers to ink deals.

Disclaimer: for information and entertainment purposes only

Lawmakers are tinkering with electricity again

Posted on August 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

With San Diego Gas & Electric Co. lobbying ferociously, the California’s Legislature is poised to approve the first overhaul of electricity rates since 2001. Somebody’s going to get hurt.

By itself, this isn’t remarkable. Our system of regulating utilities creates winners and losers any time the government tweaks the way power costs are spread out among consumers.

How will utility rates effect the value of your home? Contact the appraisers at www.scappraisals.com for your value questions.

What’s different this time is technology. Lawmakers, and eventually regulators at the Public Utilities Commission, are wrestling with the advent of “smart meters,” the first major advance since the days of Thomas Edison.

In theory, smart meters make it possible for consumers — or their networked appliances — to see the hourly swings in power prices and adjust their lives accordingly.

If the price goes way up on a summer afternoon, my neighbor can just set his pool pump to run after midnight, when air conditioners aren’t running and power is dirt cheap.

Shifting peak consumption statewide by 10 percent or so would allow California to avoid building relatively inefficient, polluting “peaker” generators, and rely on its massive investments in wind and solar power.

That’s theory, anyway. Nearly all of the expensive smart meters installed in recent years don’t show prices.

Utility executives and their PUC regulators are terrified of mandating true price transparency.

Electricity is the world’s most volatile commodity. Prices in the daily spot market can hover near zero at 3 a.m. and shoot to $1.50 a kilowatt hour on a hot summer afternoon, when air conditioners kick on and the state flirts with shortage.

Most of the state’s power is bought on long-term contracts, so smart meters wouldn’t go that crazy under even the most wild-eyed free market scenario.

Still, economists and efficiency advocates have been rooting for widespread “time-of-use” pricing for years. Recent results from pilot programs suggest that households will cut their peak consumption by 15 percent if they can see and understand when prices surge.

Yet utility and executives remain wary of blowback.

Plenty of Signs the Market Has Cooled

Are Home Bidding Wars Easing?

Lawmakers are tinkering with electricity again

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