Archive for December, 2011

Better Year End Economic Indicators… for the Country and South Lake Tahoe

December 27th, 2011 categories: Buyers Report, For Buyers, For Sellers, Lake Tahoe Real Estate, National real estate news, South Lake Tahoe, CA, Stateline, NV

Better Year-End Economic News

Rising Consumer Confidence, Lower Housing Prices, Falling Jobless Claims, Historic Low Interest Rates are hopeful signs.

Here's a few reports that have come in through the holidays that we find encouraging. All are hopeful about a recovering economy (yes, we too wish it were faster), and all are good news for home buyers looking for South Lake Tahoe opportunities in the new year.

CNNMoney.comThis first article came out just before Christmas, and it finds the number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits dropped to their lowest level since April 2008, boosting optimism in the job market. (here)

Associated PressThis next article came out today, and in it Case Schiller finds that housing prices dropped in 19 of 20 top US cities in October. We find it interesting that this is phrased as "housing recovery will be bumpy in 2012" rather than this is good news for home buyers, which lower prices always are. (here)

This article also came out today and it states the U.S. economy will grow faster in 2012 – if it isn't knocked off track by upheavals in Europe. (here)

Next today (it has been a good day for news) comes an article that says Americans are gaining faith that the economy is on the upswing. The monthly Consumer Confidence Index surged to the highest level since April and is approaching a post-recession peak. (here)

Though not found in a particular article, today's average mortgage interest rates are on average below 4%. We find these here, and this coupled with lower home prices are bountiful news for today's interested South Lake Tahoe home buyer.

Previous Lake Tahoe Real Estate Blog posts you may find resourceful:

Dec 13, 2011: US Housing Affordability Now at Record High
Dec 12, 2011: South Lake Tahoe, CA Home Values and Distressed Sales right now
Oct 2, 2011: More South Lake Tahoe, CA Home Value is Q3 Trend
Jul 6, 2011: Q2 2011 South Lake Tahoe, CA Real Estate Report
Apr 2, 2011: Q1 2011 South Lake Tahoe, CA Real Estate Report
Jan 2, 2011: 2010 South Lake Tahoe Housing Demand Report
Nov 16, 2010: What People are Buying: South Lake Tahoe 2010 Home Sales per Month
Nov 15, 2010: South Lake Tahoe 2010 Home Sales: Where We Are Now
Oct 9, 2010: Analysis of 2010 South Lake Tahoe, CA homes for sale
Oct 2, 2010: On Target with South Lake Tahoe, CA Homes for sale
August 31, 2010: US Home Prices Up… what about South Lake Tahoe?
August 27, 2010: I Woke Up this Morning… to the South Lake Tahoe Blues.
July 1, 2010: South Lake Tahoe Foreclosures: No Change Yet.
May 15, 2010: Where is the New Foreclosures Deluge?
November 15, 2009: Foreclosure Filings Down in October, what does it mean?

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Written by Richard Bolen | Discussion: Please leave a comment.

U.S. Housing Affordability is Now at Record High. How Good for South Lake Tahoe is that?

December 13th, 2011 categories: Buyers Report, For Buyers, For Sellers, Lake Tahoe Real Estate, National real estate news, South Lake Tahoe, CA, Stateline, NV

US housing affordability index at all time highTerrific News for all South Lake Tahoe Home Buyers

Here's what the article says: "There may not have been any generation in history that has faced such incredibly affordable home ownership, especially when a young couple is buying a first home to get started in life, invest in a home, and raise a family. At least in terms of housing affordability, young, middle-class Americans have never had it this good."

This means you, South Lake Tahoe home buyer.

The article comes today via the Wall Street Pit, and it is in full here.

The basis of the article, and it is worth repeating, is that it has never been more affordable for our public to buy a house than it is right now.

Here is an interactive chart from one of our Federal Reserve banks that shows the U.S. housing affordability index since 1980.

We hope you find this information helpful.

Previous Lake Tahoe Real Estate Blog posts you may find resourceful:

Dec 12, 2011: South Lake Tahoe, CA Home Values and Distressed Sales right now.
Oct 2, 2011: More South Lake Tahoe, CA Home Value is Q3 Trend
Jul 6, 2011: Q2 2011 South Lake Tahoe, CA Real Estate Report
Apr 2, 2011: Q1 2011 South Lake Tahoe, CA Real Estate Report
Jan 2, 2011: 2010 South Lake Tahoe Housing Demand Report
Nov 16, 2010: What People are Buying: South Lake Tahoe 2010 Home Sales per Month
Nov 15, 2010: South Lake Tahoe 2010 Home Sales: Where We Are Now
Oct 9, 2010: Analysis of 2010 South Lake Tahoe, CA homes for sale
Oct 2, 2010: On Target with South Lake Tahoe, CA Homes for sale
August 31, 2010: US Home Prices Up… what about South Lake Tahoe?
August 27, 2010: I Woke Up this Morning… to the South Lake Tahoe Blues.
July 1, 2010: South Lake Tahoe Foreclosures: No Change Yet.
May 15, 2010: Where is the New Foreclosures Deluge?
November 15, 2009: Foreclosure Filings Down in October, what does it mean?

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Written by Richard Bolen | Discussion: Please leave a comment.

A Glance at the South Lake Tahoe, CA real estate home values right now.

December 12th, 2011 categories: Buyers Report, For Buyers, For Sellers, Lake Tahoe Real Estate, Major Market Reports, Market Performance Updates, Median Sold Price Report, Sales Reports, South Lake Tahoe Statistics, South Lake Tahoe, CA

South Lake Tahoe, CA median sold priceA 17.3% decline in the South Lake Tahoe, CA median sold price over the last 365-days.

At present the South Lake Tahoe, CA median sold price is $231,500. This is based on all sales in the last 180-days, with the Tahoe Keys not included. If the Tahoe Keys were included, the median sold price over the same time frame is $250,000. In other words the Tahoe Keys skews the South Lake Tahoe median sold price upward by $18,500, or 7.4%.

Over the last 90-days, the South Lake Tahoe, CA median sold price is $227,900, and over the last 30-days it is $207,500. In other words South Lake Tahoe, CA home values are still trending downward.

At this same time last year, the median sold price over 180-days, again with the Tahoe Keys excluded, was $280,000. This means that the South Lake Tahoe, CA median sold price has declined $48,500, or 17.3% since December of 2010.

 Distressed Sales :
Part of any real estate market these days are distressed sales. The incidence of bank owned and short sales does affect a market's median sold price. Like it or not, distressed sales are part of the market, and very much in the competition mix. This means buyers have distressed properties to choose from, which impacts all home sellers, and distressed sales do pull median home values downward.

As of the end of November, for all of the 376 homes sold in South Lake Tahoe, CA to that date, 48.7% of them were distressed sales. For all 507 homes sold in South Lake Tahoe, CA in 2010, 46.4% of them were distressed. What this means is there has not been a meaningful change in the incidence of distressed sales this year compared to last.

Another way of looking at this is the decline in median home values we have seen in 2011 is across the board, rather than primarily because of distressed sales.

Previous Lake Tahoe Real Estate Blog posts you may find resourceful:

Oct 2, 2011: More South Lake Tahoe, CA Home Value is Q3 Trend
Jul 6, 2011: Q2 2011 South Lake Tahoe, CA Real Estate Report
Apr 2, 2011: Q1 2011 South Lake Tahoe, CA Real Estate Report
Jan 2, 2011: 2010 South Lake Tahoe Housing Demand Report
Nov 16, 2010: What People are Buying: South Lake Tahoe 2010 Home Sales per Month
Nov 15, 2010: South Lake Tahoe 2010 Home Sales: Where We Are Now
Oct 9, 2010: Analysis of 2010 South Lake Tahoe, CA homes for sale
Oct 2, 2010: On Target with South Lake Tahoe, CA Homes for sale
August 31, 2010: US Home Prices Up… what about South Lake Tahoe?
August 27, 2010: I Woke Up this Morning… to the South Lake Tahoe Blues.
July 1, 2010: South Lake Tahoe Foreclosures: No Change Yet.
May 15, 2010: Where is the New Foreclosures Deluge?
November 15, 2009: Foreclosure Filings Down in October, what does it mean?

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Written by Richard Bolen | Discussion: Please leave a comment.

Better Jobs News is Good for South Lake Tahoe, Good for us All

December 8th, 2011 categories: Buyers Report, For Buyers, Lake Tahoe Real Estate, National real estate news, South Lake Tahoe, CA, Stateline, NV

The job market is directly tied to the housing market.

Weekly US unemployment claims fall to nine-month low.

How better US jobs news is good for South Lake Tahoe is simply this: the national jobs market is directly tied to the housing market. Steady improvement in our country's employment picture will eventually lead to first, home value stability, and secondly gradual return to higher home values.

What's good for today's home buyer is rising home values have not occurred yet, nor do we expect that in the near future. As one tracks the jobs market, though, there will become a point where it will cost more to buy a South Lake Tahoe home than it does now.

Today's jobs report cited 23,000 fewer unemployment claims than were expected.

CNN MoneyHere's some bullet points in today's report as brought to us by CNNMoney.com:

  • The number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits fell to a nine-month low.
  • This signals a bright spot in the tough employment environment.
  • A level below 400,000 often signals job growth strong enough to lower the unemployment rate.
  • These numbers could have been affected by seasonal adjustments for the Thanksgiving holiday.

(full article here, and another article about the same information from the New York Post here.)

Previous Lake Tahoe Real Estate Blog posts about jobs:

Aug 5, 2011: Better Jobs Report News
Jul 28, 2011: A Better Jobs Report… amid this Political Nonsense!
May 8, 2011:  A Good Jobs Report
Mar 4, 2011: Jobs Report: Good News for all of Us, and South Lake Tahoe too.
Mar 3, 2011: Caution: positive South Lake Tahoe housing news found here
Feb 10, 2011: More Better Economic News for South Lake Tahoe

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Written by Richard Bolen | Discussion: Please leave a comment.

Some new things about the Lake Tahoe Real Estate Blog

December 5th, 2011 categories: About this Blog, About Us, Lake Tahoe Real Estate, South Lake Tahoe, CA, Stateline, NV

New things coming on the Lake Tahoe Real Estate Blog

Progress is being made from our efforts to help you in South Lake Tahoe

At first the vision was to create new stat services for South Lake Tahoe home buyers to better recognize the deal they are looking for, and at the same time to provide a means to help a buyer understand when they are not paying too much.

It took about a year to create this new tool, and it's been sitting here on our site innocuously on our site for about a month. What happened to change that original vision, though, is it has become apparent that these new tools are quite likely to become national real estate products.

There has been much recent feedback to suggest so, and this feedback has caused some immediate changes here. First, we will be taking these new tools off our site for the time being. This will happen today. They are being reworked, reformed, scaled to enterprise level software, and will be given a striking new user interface from this design firm (I have a past relationship with them, who built the product for the public company I co-founded in LA back in the '80's. Check out their client list here).

In other words the beta versions of what we have been developing worked. Now it's time to get very serious about software product development.

Our focus is now here. A new company is being formed to develop and sell our new real estate applications nationally. There are four programmers working on this as we speak, and key administrative, accounting, financial direction, sales executives and future board members have been identified. It is perhaps more than anything else their effusive response to what we're doing that has given us this new direction.

We suspect it will be in the second quarter of 2012 that we will bring our new applications with the new user usage interface back on this blog. By then they will also be elsewhere in preliminary tests to serve other markets as well.

In the meantime, we will continue posting consistent valuable South Lake Tahoe real estate information here, and we can't wait for you to be able to use these new tools for real. They will fundamentally help you better buy and sell a house here in South Lake Tahoe.

In the meantime, here's a link to a video about the beta version of one of these applications.

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Written by Richard Bolen | Discussion: Please leave a comment.

South Lake Tahoe, now with Two New Eyes

December 4th, 2011 categories: About Us, Lake Tahoe Real Estate, South Lake Tahoe, CA, Stateline, NV

South Lake Tahoe w two new eyes

Gratitude and Progress with Cataract Surgery

We must apologize for the gap in between our last post. South Lake Tahoe visuals have been just a little awkward with one eye, the new one, seeing things at 20-20, and the other eye seeing from a 20-400 point of view.

My glasses with only one lens didn't change that oddness, and as my right eye healed, seeing so good and new that it did, things did get a little better, but not so much that I wanted to spend my days in front on computer screens. Focus just wasn't the same.

Surgery for the left eye came last Tuesday. It too was quick, painless, and I was much looking forward to it. But the instant better sight that I experienced in my right eye didn't come with the new corrected left. Blurry was what I saw first, and it took a few days for that blur to become more clear.

Both eyes from cataract surgery are still adjusting, and it is a pleasure to write again. There is still more healing and adjustment to pass, and it will still be 3 more weeks before I can get new glasses. The truth is I already see better than I did wearing my old glasses, and with a tweak in new lenses for distant vision, and for real close up stuff, I will see better than I have… ever.

Gratitude leaps in bounds for both my surgeon, and for the amazing technical progress and medical advancements made for this sort of thing, and I'm also grateful for South Lake Tahoe, you have never looked so good.

About cataract surgery on the first eye, here.

Some Lake Tahoe Real Estate Blog videos you may enjoy:

Jul 14, 2001: Heaven on Earth: a video featuring the South Lake Tahoe Weather
Jul 5, 2011: Awesome Fireworks Finale: South Lake Tahoe, July 4, 2011
Dec 9, 2010: How to find and use our Bolero Button… and why you should.
Oct 20, 2010: Bijou Neighborhood video
Sep 28, 2010: A South Lake Tahoe Indian Summer
Sep 23, 2010: Emerald Bay Treetops… and a Bald Eagle
Sep 16, 2010: Walking on Water… South Lake Tahoe Style
Sep 11, 2010: Al Tahoe Neighborhood video

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Written by Richard Bolen | Discussion: Please leave a comment.

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