patrick.net

Oops got cut off, gotta start again.

Los Gatos and Cupertino were sleepy retiree towns last time, the houses were generally small (

what is the problem here? How come my message got cut off?

Try again to see if it works this time.

Los Gatos and Cupertino were sleepy retiree towns last time, the houses were generally small. When I was househunting, the sellers were typically long-time occupants, the home was paid off, and acquired for $20K or so. An average home that you see on the market in these neighborhoods for 1.2-1.3M today was selling at ~400K. Back then, a typical ~200-220K household of today was making around ~140K for the comparable jobs. So you see, the ~400K home was not unaffordable at all.

Saratoga was decisively more expensive, and outta my budget. But if I applied today's financial sense (or the lack thereof), I could still stretch it. A 2000sf home with 15K lot was selling for ~550K, newer ones for ~600K.

Los Altos actually crashed pretty hard, so a home of 2000sf on a 14K lot was only going for 480K or so, the comparables that I was looking at had a 20K premium over Cupertino (foothill) or Los Gatos equivalents.

ps,

the question depends on the following things.

1) How many new buyers have moved in Saratoga in the last few years. From my househunting experience in the last bust, the new occupants who got in at the top were the ones dropping price like nuts. The old occupants just held on.

2) How much greenbacks the Fed starts to crank out. Well, as you know, 1M today is not the same as 1M tomorrow, adjusted for money supply.

3) How many buyers like yourself are eyeing that piece of Saratoga property

I frankly don't know the answer (duh!), and I am not eyeing any neighborhoods that everybody is eyeing on, so I am certainly hoping for far less competition when the time is right.

Call now and let me show you how I’m more than just a loan officer — I’m a personal Home Mortgage Consultant!

I am more than a code monkey -- I am a computer software professional! Engineers get less respect than an illegal alien nowadays. Oh well, free market.

Scott,

yup, that was it, I took it off my last message. Thanks.

The question is. Are housing prices really coming down? Or is the media and internet really hyping a crash up?

It seems that apartment inventory is shrinking but condo inventory is growing. If this is sustained, the crash may be cushioned for certain property types in certain areas.

Check out this place I was bidding on. It is in ‘The Gold Box’, but on a very busy street. I offerred asking price, and got rejected! It’s only about 1,150 sqft. Went for $1.14 mil!

It is a shame that it does not even reach $1000/sf, isn't it?

Speaking of condo vs. SFH, I have to say most of the SFHs built after 2000 are just condos in disguise, no difference whatsoever.

When you look at a place like the trailer park development called Creekside Village in Los Gatos, you and your neighbor can have a pretty good exchange of conversation just sitting at your respective living rooms. And if you care to the second floor, you can kiss your neighbor from your respective bedrooms. There is of course no yard, no parking space in front so your friends cannot visit, no view, what else am I missing?

I would rather live in a condo than a SFH like that. Speaking of SFHs, shouldn't there be a minimum ratio of buildable space to land to qualify? I don't consider SFHs 3 inches away from thy neighbors SFH.

I went to a Toll Brothers sales office last weekend and the saleswoman said that housing never goes down in California. When we gave examples in the 1990's she said that housing does not go down over longer timeframes.

I think they are inviting lawsuits.

I would rather live in a condo than a SFH like that. Speaking of SFHs, shouldn’t there be a minimum ratio of buildable space to land to qualify? I don’t consider SFHs 3 inches away from thy neighbors SFH.

I think they only need to be detached. Well, at the quantum level everything is detached but entabgled, hmm... :)

The Marina apartment being across the street from a lawn area that actually had so much liquifaction that little mud volcanoes formed on it in the Loma Prieta quake may have something to do with the condo have sold so far under the average (December’s average anyway) square foot cost.

Thanks, now I feel like a volcano cake (chocolate souffle cake).

George,

ehh, the problem is, a lot of folks on this site are not looking at the fringe neighborhoods that will drop like a rock, there will be plenty of those in the Bay Area. Quite a number of them are like ps, looking at premium neighborhoods like Saratoga where the notion of "they are not making more land" is sort of valid. Hence comes the question soft or hard landing.

We all know that the US is heading for a general RE bust, most likely the biggest one in history. We are just not sure for our target neighborhoods, how big the bust will be.

Not a haiku, but a Ragtime show tune:

The minute you closed my loan
I could see you had no lending standards
A real risk taker
Well capitalized, so carefree
Say, wouldn't you like to know
What's underneath my balance sheet
So, let me get right to the point,
I don't sign my name to ev'ry promissory note I see..

Hey, big lender!
Wouldn't cha like to lend-a
a little money to me...me...me!

Now three years later I'm in foreclosure
Don't you wish you had required a down payment
A real big risk taken
Undercapitalized, security free
And now you know
What's underneath my balance sheet
So, let me get right to the point,
Every creditor in town has a lein on me...

Hey, big lender!
Wouldn't cha like to lend-a
a little money to me...me...me!

I am not at all surprised that average selling price is less than 100% asking price in Cupertino. I have seen empty open houses, with bored RE agents. The reason, is the asking price is WAY too much. Don't know how to exactly write this. Let me try ... IT IS WAY OVERPRICED. They have been priced with the assumption that RE market is what it was last year.

The sellers who get it quick, make a deal. 2 houses (actually a townhome, and a condo) had an asking price in the range of $400/sqft. They went in a couple of days - I did not even get the chance to go for open house as the house got sold before the weekend. I gather there were multiple offers and went over asking.

The ones that have asking price around $550/sqft and above, get almost no visitors. So the truth is somewhere in between.

At this rate Cupertino may be one of the early parts of BA to see a decline in YOY per sqft value.

Actually I have an idea of estimating the degree of bust.

We have access to public transaction records in each neighborhood right? We also know the total number of SFHs or condos in each neighborhood. 2003 seems to be the year that RE started to take off like mad. So we can tally the number of SFHs and condos transacted from 2003-2006, and compute the % of these transacted units in the entire pool, the higher the %, the higher the likelihood of a hard landing. I don't know if anyone knows how many houses in a neighborhood are entirely paid off, that will be one single most important indicator.

Then we can come up with some kind of peripheral risk profiling of neighborhoods. # of preforeclosures and tax liens in 2005 as a % of entire housing stock.

I think all these indicators can be rather reliant in predicting the magnitude of bust.

Owneroc,

The View From Sillicone Valley web site would give you the transaction information.

Yuck !

NOT Sillicone
= Silicon

>> I am more than a code monkey — I am a computer software professional! Engineers get less respect than an illegal alien nowadays.

I call myself “The Architect” — learnt after Matrix …..

Do you work for [the] Oracle? How are you going to deal with NEOs (negative equity owners)?

George,

I absolutely agree with you. Exclusive neighborhoods may not do better at all. If you log on to foreclosure.com, you will find plenty of pre-foreclosed homes (relative to the entire housing stock) and tax liens oweing 50,000+ in some "exclusive" neighborhoods. I even find people there I know who were known to be "doing well".

At this rate Cupertino may be one of the early parts of BA to see a decline in YOY per sqft value.

Per sqft value may be deceiving, as some have better amenities than others. We need to look at pergraniteel-adjusted prices.

At a quantum level, we don't know whether a house is undervalued or overvalued until it is observed. And, once observed, the price itself is affected by the observer. So, in effect, we are all affecting the prices simply by observing them. Worse, the notion of an objective state of price-ification is meaningless.

(Damn, it's so much easier to kill a cat.)

I don't know, realtors spin well in up and down markets.

SFWoman,

we would have LESS than a 50% chance of killing the Realtor?

We do have to compensate for the degree of quantum entanglement that Realtors(tm) already have with the Underworld.

I'd say that there is always a 100% chance that you end up getting a calendar with an oversized, airbrushed photo of the Realtor(tm) regardless of the state of the radioisotope.

Check this one out, the school closure is getting out of hand. There is a graph at the end of the article on kindergarten enrollment up till 2002. I believe the picture is going to look even worse if projected out to 2006.

http://www.demographers.com/SCHOOLCLOSURENEWSLETTER.pdf

Fucking Shitball Troll
Metaphysical maggot
Bed buddy of MP

Want proof maggot asshat trolls such as, metaphysical, are not only fucking annoying but stupid shit gobbling monkeys?

Take a look at the piece of shit "condo" it was so unfortuately outbid on. 1.1mil WITH NO FUCKING PARKING.

Where the fuck is it going to park its Hummer? In its wifes ass?

Trolls post online crap
Special Olympic gold medal
Both are retarded.

>I believe patric.net INVENTED the term CONDOTINO

I believe Peter P. invented the term.

@SFWoman, who knows, who cares? If you wish to be truly amused take a look at the blogs from a while back. The maggot MP was posting his flowing brown wave of crap from his work computer. The IP was traced back to Credit Suisse First Boston. The maggot then went to full cover its ass mode, it was quite amusing.

Haiku City USA:

Scary house price, make
me think twice. Hundred-thou job,
I live like a dog.

Damn, I AM a dog.
I grovel in dirt though I
make one hundred K.

Every day house price
goes up. I scream and I cry
and ask god why...me?

We are the children
Of the golden ghetto. We
Live like big piggies.

Next year I make more
Than two hundred-thou and still
Live like a damn cow.

Tax dollars wasted.
College degree worth less than
Sh-t. Me big groundhog.

Silicon Valley
Left me stranded, took away
My pride. I cry tears.

I am but a broke clock
That has stopped dead in its tracks.
No time relax.

Hell hath no fury
Like the market that will crash
Hard. Tsunami time.

I sip cheap wine to
Kill the pain and dream housing
Market falls in flame.

Put down the bong; Turn
Off the Led Zep; zip up your
Pants and go to work.

Pop!,

Uranium Participation Corporation [TSX:U] has a ETF for Uranium (I think). If you have ideas about creating a position based on Uranium please post it here.

ps,

it depends on which pocket of Saratoga you are targeting. If you are targeting the areas west of 85, the golden triangle area or the foothill south of 9, then I'd say don't expect bigger than average crash. If wife really wants it, and you can afford it, then be a good husband.

If you just care about the Saratoga address and don't mind living to the east of 85, then you have bigger bargaining chip. Saratoga is a good piece of real estate, I personally won't mind overpaying a bit for it.

I think anything in the *right* pocket of Saratoga with about 15K lot and 2400 sf home in a good condition, shouldn't crash below 1M. When it gets close to 1M, I believe there will be lots of pent-up demand in the surrounding suburbs wanting to trade up. I have a colleague who literally moved a couple of blocks over just to get the Saratoga address. That's my take on it.

Also, the part of Saratoga bordering Cupertino actually goes to Cupertino schools. The part east of 85 goes to San Jose, and the rest goes to Los Gatos-Saratoga school district.

Investing in uranium ? I wish I had. This is what happens when you are a techie surrounded by only techie friends. You think GOOG is the only game in town.

CCJ is up - get this - 10 times - no typo there - since Jan 2003. Someone on this very blog mentioned being long on CCJ, only a few weeks ago. I wish I had discovered Patrick.net in 2003.

Shiny red dump truck
Loose your parking brake with zest
Cut loose your moorings

Aim for that Lexus
With leather interior
Don't stop when she screams

Faster than bullet
Dump truck Dump truck, then...
no more Realtorâ„¢

ps,

correctomondo, when you remodel, your home gets reassessed at the market value, that is why I resent this freaking bubble so much, I can't even remodel my home for the fear of tripling my property tax bill. You are only allowed to do very basic maintenance without triggering a reset, you want to do some nice remodeling job? Bang, the county got ya!

Anything above 2M will get a serious haircut. But I personally sense a lot of support at around 1M level. Anything in the west valley area, in a decent location with a large enough lot, some to good view, 1M list price will get you multiple offers above asking.

Now, here is something you need to ask yourself. Do you think something serious will happen to our economy? To me, I am hesitant to trade up or upgrade not because I cannot afford to, but because I don't want to spend a respectable portion of my networth on my home, while I am not sure how the US will turn out in the next 2 decades, I feel we have a lot of unwinding to do, a lot of time bombs to set off. I am not a rich person that I can just treat my residence as a consumption.

If nothing too bad happens, I'd say the part of Saratoga that you are targeting won't go below 1.2-1.3M. Now, if we as a country are doing some serious unwinding in the next 10 years, then all bets are off. That's why I personally will hold off to 2009/2010 so that I can get a better look.

Also, if you are affluent enough that you can afford to lose, say, half a mil, then I think finding a prime Saratoga home at around 1.4M may not be a bad idea. After all, money is for buying joy as well, what is the point of money if you cannot buy a bit of self-gratification. I am just not in a situation to ignore a half mil loss.

astrid,

as the middle class, esp the middle upper class of America get marginalized, they typically converge on particular locations, rather than disperse. They converge in places with good job prospects, good schools, and a natural location with enough greenbelt, scenery, nature, etc. The coming oil crisis will make this trend even more obvious, in essence, people tend to live more together. Crime is another reason driving people to flock to certain suburbs.

For example, Palo Alto only has about a total of 700 homes listed each year. Saratoga has fewer. The *right* pockets of Saratoga have even fewer, probably less than 100 a year. I won't put LG on the same rank as Saratoga, I rank the *right* pockets of Saratoga along with the *right* pockets of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. The total listings in the *right* pockets from these suburbs probably will be less than 300 each year. Do you think you can find 300 households who can fork over 1.4M for these 300 listings each year? I think I can.

Sorry for sounding like a snob, but if you live here long enough, you will know the difference in the same town, it is more than just an address.

astrid,

I will move to Seattle if we continue to rain like this. I know how far 1.5M can go in Seattle, even today. I can move into Medina and be BillG's neighbor.

>I believe patric.net INVENTED the term CONDOTINO

I believe Peter P. invented the term.

No, I thought Lunarpark invented the term... or perhaps some newspaper.