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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.
...and thought, "Good job at filling that big hole and rebuilding." *thumbs up*
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
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.
This is a class war, friends. And the classes are all the people who just happened to be born a few years earlier, against everyone else who got here later.
They got theirs, and put into place all the rules and regulations about property taxes, development restrictions, crappy public transport, that allow them to keep their rents / payments low, and screw everyone else who equally wants to live and work in the area.
You hear all these old (yes, old) local residents complain about being "forced out" of their homes and neighborhoods, and sure they're sympathetic and it's fashionable to rail against "gentrification". But how about the thousands of young people/families/workers who can't find a place to live or rent at a reasonable price when they move here? Who's advocating for those people? I would argue they are more severely impacted in their lifetime earning and career potential by the cost of living here, and I side with them, not the rich (yes rich) people who've lived here for 30 years and are established.
I'm tired of the local-level complacency and Nimbyism, and the California regulatory and legal process that make it possible for so many young workers (who are what is going to keep us successful as a society) shut out of living affordably and reasonably in one of our most important economies.
As a Owner of a couple of duplexes, a serious DIYer, a tech nerd and live in Denver, I agree, flippers are prime A-holes. Shitty workmanship, it's all about lowest cost to acquire, lowest cost to improve and highest price to buy. When shopping for a house, i've inspected many "flipped" homes and the quality of work is nearly always sub-par. If you are an inexperienced home-buyer, and don't know what to look for, you'll be swayed by the "oooohhh Shiney/New" facter. Often, these "improvements" will fail after a few years.
YOU NEED TO PAY ATTENTION TO DETAILS!
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?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Certain areas of California are basically a different country with a different currency. if people want to live there and be slaves to their homes, have fun with that. For those lucky enough to have lived there when prices were affordable and are now selling, congrats.
Like happened in California, The real estate price run up is happening in Dallas right now. My house has nearly doubled in price since I purchased it 15 years ago, with 75% of that run up being in the past 5 years. Houses are selling so quickly that many buyers are resorting to making offers sight unseen and bidding wars are breaking out. Builders cannot turn out new homes fast enough.
Why? Because a load of companies have decided that North Texas is where they want to be. Toyota, State Farm, and Liberty Mutual (to name a few) have been moving large portions of their employees to the area.
I hope this trend continues until I'm ready to retire in about 10 years. By then, I'll be dumping the house and heading to the cheap country and living on the proceeds....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah. I live in a small town of about 15000 people, with a large and stable employer, which has led to a a very strange and hot real estate market for a place 50 miles away from anywhere.
When I was shopping for a home, I made a habit of inspecting the cabinet hinges in every room and bathroom. I don't care about a shiny new granite countertop. Cheap $0.50 hinges means corners were cut, and the place will likely fall apart. Nice Blum hinges on even the smallest cabinet? That's a winner. I am sure there are other things to look at too, but hinges worked for me pretty well as a 'tell'.
However, they can't actually afford a $6K per month mortgage payment
Then something is jacked up if they qualified for it.
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.
Money? What money? Last time I checked, California was riddled with a fucking obscene amount of debt.
California is not in debt. It is hard to pin down the actual net worth of California as a whole, but if its share of the total US net worth is proportionate with its share of the total US GDP, then California's net worth would be just over $10 trillion after subtracting state and local debt. There are probably only 5 countries other than the US with total wealth greater than the state of California (Italy is close, so maybe 6 countries).
California's government may be in debt, but that is only one small part of the state's entire balance sheet.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke