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$782,000 Over Asking For a House in Sunnyvale (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A house in Sunnyvale just sold for close to $800,000 over its listing price. Your eyes do not deceive you: The four-bed, two-bath house -- less than 2,000 square feet -- listed for $1,688,000 and sold for $2,470,000. "I think it's the most anything has ever gone for over asking in Sunnyvale -- a record for Sunnyvale," said Dave Clark, the Keller Williams agent who represented the sellers in the deal. "We anticipated it would go for $2 million, or over $2 million. But we had no idea it would ever go for what it went for." This kind of over-bidding is known to happen farther north in cities including Palo Alto, Los Altos and Mountain View. But as those places have grown far too expensive for most buyers, future homeowners have migrated south to Sunnyvale, a once modest community that now finds itself among the Bay Area's real estate hot spots.
Except they insist that the rest of the US bend to their will in all things, without exception. There won't be any high density Syrian refugee build-outs appearing in this neighborhood, but the rest of the US is racist when it objects to the same.
This isn't news for nerds. I'm not even sure this is news for real estate agents.
Ooh a house sold for 40% over list price! So what. Ooh Silicon Valley is massively over-priced! Again, so what.
Money talks, and considering California is the sixth largest economy in the world, that's a very loud voice.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But it's not necessarily too much for what the purchasers are really buying: time.
Just from an economic standpoint, it's not hard to justify if you value the time spent and earn what's typical for a senior engineer in the region. Suppose your time is worth $200/hour, and you save ten hours a week on your commute for 48 weeks out of the year. At a seven percent discount rate the net present value of time you'd save over the course of 20 years is over 1.1 million. Of course then you still have the house, which unless the regional economy collapses is going to be worth more.
But having had a job where I commuted over an hour each way for ten years, it's not just the value of your time. You get used to it, but it take a toll on your quality of life. Especially if you have kids. Being able to see your kids off in the morning, and have dinner with your family most nights (even if you have to back into work!), what price would you put on that?
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Debt isn't necessarily bad. Debt to fund operating costs is (almost) always bad. Debt to fund capital investment is only bad if the interest on the debt is worse than the return on investment. If one person rents a house and the other takes out a mortgage at 3% interest to buy a house in an area where the house value appreciates at 6% per annum, which do you think is more fiscally responsible?
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Almost doubling in 15 years results in a 4-5% growth rate, not to shabby, but not particularly outstanding.
Meanwhile the S&P almost tripled in value over the last 15 years.
Doubled in 15 years is about 4.5% interest rate. Meanwhile you're paying about 2.5% property tax in North Dallas and then you're paying homeowner's insurance. So while you're definitely doing better than the average homeowner, you're not going to retire off your house anytime soon. Owning a home is better than renting one most of the time, but people here in Dallas often overstate the economic advantage of home ownership.
which means there are 32 states with better debt-to-GDP. California is in the bottom half, which lends statistical weight to the GP post.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Hmm? Been having budget surpluses the last few years.
That is actually part of the problem. California's taxes are highly progressive and mostly based on income tax. Wealthy people tend to have highly variable incomes. So when times are good, California's budget racks up huge surpluses, and politicians being politicians, they tend to squander the surpluses on vote-winning boondoggles. Then a few years later, a recession comes along and the economic pendulum swings the other way. The revenues dry up, and we are locked into spending that we can no longer afford.
This is also why the "boom and bust" cycle is stronger in California than in many other states. Because of the volatile nature of government tax receipts, the government tends to overspend in good times, heating up an already frothy economy, while yanking spending at the very time some stimulus is needed.
The answer, of course, is long term planning and fiscal restraint, but you don't win elections by being a naggy sourpuss.
No. The debt-to-GDP ratio is about 8.9%. That's pretty damn good. And with the now-balanced budget, it should go even lower.
Yes, California is a high tax state, but you get a lot for your money. I just moved here and so far, it seems like a great bargain, especially after Texas (which is called a "low-tax" state, but has ridiculous property taxes and fees to make up for the lack of state income tax). And California is in the top 10 of states re: per capital income, so it really doesn't seem more expensive to live here.
When I walk outside my house in California, I'm in California. When I walked outside my house in Texas, I was in fucking Texas. You can't put a price tag on being in a beautiful place with lovely weather.
You are welcome on my lawn.