Comments on: Hopeful Romantics

By: Ellie

Ellie — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:28:11 +0000

Nevermind all these properties are way overpriced but their locations leave a lot to be desired. Busy streets, crowded intersections, junkyard neighbors, etc.

By: mm

mm — Fri, 23 May 2008 05:35:11 +0000

i wouldn’t buy (b) though. I drove by the property the other day, the color of the wall is light pink/light orange which makes the property even older than it is. From outside, you can predict that the HOA didn’t do a good job.

By: T K Eng

T K Eng — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:53:23 +0000

One of the key difference between Arcadia and Irvine is that Arcadia is centrally located in the SGV, which has a much larger recent immigrant population (less than 15 yrs in US) than South OC, although that maybe changing rapidly. Recent immigrants are not familiar with past market history, and in many Asian countries there is no past housing data available for research whatsoever. Many recent immigrant buyers simply want to live in Arcadia for the status symbol, school district, convenience, etc. I think demand from wealthy recent immigrants (esp. investors, govt. officials and their family members, etc.) from countries w/high economic growth rates will continue to support these high prices until the demand slows. Hopefully the overall market forces will soon dampen the “wealthy foreigner” effect on Arcadia housing.

By: T K Eng

T K Eng — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:37:58 +0000

I think much of the venting against sellers is more “frustration” than “lack of class.” The “housing boom” has priced a lot of people with less than $200K/yr income out of desirable areas like Arcadia and Sierra Madre. With rising inflation and unemployment, most potential buyers (I presume most readers here are either buyers or real estate professionals monitoring the market) are simply frustrated with the astronomical prices, myself included. I grew up in SoCal and remember it wasn’t long too ago when home prices were about 4 – 5 times the annual income, and most people could plan to buy a home with a yard and pool for their kids to grow up in. Now that home prices are at 27 to 30 times our annual income, Los Angeles has turned into another un-affordable city (eg. Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, London,Moscow) where the overwhelming majority of the people can no longer afford a home. For those of us who are not making a percentage on real estate transactions, the housing situation in SoCal has been pretty depressing until recently. Let’s hope there will be NO HOUSING BAILOUT and the market forces will drive these unreasonable prices further down to affordable levels.

By: Conductus

Conductus — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:04:41 +0000

Want to see a stop-motion video about a couple of mice who must second-guess their real-estate-purchase descision? I made this video recently. Please check it out and comment. Thanks. Blemish and Pittance: The New Place

By: puckhead

puckhead — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:44:47 +0000

Arcadia has definately seen declines and higher inventory. The biggest difference between Arcadia and OC is that there are still new houses being built in OC while Arcadia is pretty much built out.

By: TheArcadian

TheArcadian — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:41:50 +0000

I would say Irvine is similar to Arcadia in the fact that its school district is desirable and has a big (and increasing) Asian population/culture. Irvine is of course 20 times better in terms of infrastructure and community planning.

Irvine’s current housing housing crisis is just a shadow of things to come in the San Gabriel Valley.

By: TheArcadian

TheArcadian — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:35:14 +0000

Yup, it looks like the bottom market is out of the game while the higher-end continues to move properties (although at lower volumes).

By: TheArcadian

TheArcadian — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:33:05 +0000

Although I am not a big fan of using the median sales price as a “true” indicator of current property values, I would hardly call it meaningless. An an analyst, we avoid using averages to avoid erroneous data since a handful of extremely priced transactions can skew the report. The median, on the other hand, moves in line with actual data.

DataQuick provides hard data that is used widely in real estate appraisal and research.

Zillow is completely opposite in the fact that they use grab millions of data points and creates an average likely property value (their ‘secret algorithm’). In some areas it is very accurate and in others values they are off by tens or hundreds of thousand of dollars.

From Zillow.com:
“Our data sources may be incomplete or incorrect; also, we have not physically inspected a specific home. Remember, the Zestimate is a starting point and does not consider all the market intricacies that can determine the actual price a house will sell for, such as entertaining offers, negotiating, closing costs, timing, etc.”

I like Zillow because they do a great job at putting together graphs reporting data that we already know:

http://www.zillow.com/quarterlies/QuarterlyThumbs.htm?msa=Los+Angeles+Long+Beach+Santa+Ana+CA

By: FreedomCM

FreedomCM — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:29:33 +0000

Are the previous two commentors “real estate professionals” working in Arcadia?

In my part of OC, I’ve found prices have rolled back to 2004 levels for the individual properties I have been monitoring, about a 30% decrease, and IPO has found the same for Irvine.

But maybe “Arcadia really is different” (or not)