Housing Prices in SoCal...JHC on a Posicle Stick!

This is not shocking to anyone, but it is so freaking frustrating to go looking for a house in Los Angeles area and realize what you have to pay to buy a freaking postage stamp that describe a walk-in closet as a master bedroom and generously describes the tool shed as a two-car garage. My sister and her family moved to Ausin, Texas and bought a huge house and lot for $450k, What can I get for that? 900 sq/ft home and 2500 sq ft lot, unless I wouldn’t mind commuting 75 minutes each way to work, then I can probably get 1300 sq ft. Whoo-hooo!! But hey, at least the market has softened.

Two incomes and what we can afford is “cute” and or “quaint houses” that will stretch our budget to the limit.

Yes, we are thinking of moving, as are so many other people and that sucks! We have friends and family here. We like it here and we don’t want to move.

Sincerely,
Frustrated as hell living in Los Angeles.

I feel your pain. We’re shopping for a place right now (we’ll be making an offer this week if things go well with the lender) and it is a pain. We’re looking at condos as there is no freaking way we can afford a house in our area.

I know this is a pit thread, but I have to say I love our realtor. She is absolutely amazing and a dream to work with.

Yup! The prices in SoCal just boggle the mind! When I left Santa Barbara and moved to the Annapolis area of Maryland, I was astounded at the difference. I rented a real house(!), on a large plot of land(!) with trees and a creek(!), for $125.00 a month LESS than I had paid for a crummy two-bedroom apartment. Yet, people were complaining about the high cost of housing over here. All I could say was, “Buddy, you ain’t seen nothing unless you’ve seen the outrageous prices back in Southern California!”

Not that I wish to diminish your rant – the Los Angeles real estate market is totally rant-worthy. But do consider yourself lucky that the market has softened somewhat. We bought at the peak (we had to – long story), and we considered ourselves lucky to get an 800sf home on a 1200sf lot for a mere $650k. And my husband does, indeed, have a 75 minute commute each way to work (but of course that’s because we choose to live near the beach, and he works in Hollyweird, so that’s the price we pay for our choice).

Good Luck!

Well it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when the bill comes due on all the crazy loans people took out to buy houses they couldn’t afford. When you get down to less than 20% of the population making enough money to afford the median home price, seems like something’s fundamentally out of whack.

JHC on a popsicle stick!

I didn’t know you used to live here. The June gloom set in early this year.

I bought a 1800 sq ft, 3br ranch house for 265k in 1993. It’s worth 1.1 mil now, assuming you can sell it. Houses are sitting for a while now.

What I find really bizarre is to go back to my home town of Santa Maria and discover that the houses are incredibly expensive. Santa Maria, a high-priced area? What the heck?!

On the up side, we will be in the market for a new house in the next year or two, when we should be able to pick one up on defaulters for a song. Just waiting a few more months for all of those mortgages to get nice and overdue…

But yeah, the market is way over-priced. But it’s the price you have to pay for living on the Left Coast (aka Paradise).

Hey, thanks for clarifying that. I had no idea what the OP meant. I still don’t get the reference because what does Jesus have to do with housing prices? But at least I now know what the reference referred to. Hmm, did it have to do with the “frustrated as hell” reference?

To the OP: Good luck with your move! Are you moving to Austin, Texas also? If not, the places you probably don’t want to consider are NYC, Hawaii, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, CA. I’m sure there are others. And you might want to compare salary ratios to housing prices if you haven’t decided where to move yet.

How weird you should bring this up. For shits and giggles, I was looking at houses last night. It was giving me the vapors. It’s either pay 750K for a decent “starter home” in a good area, or I stay where I am and commute my life away.

I love it here, is the kicker. Stupid expensive Paradise! grumble

Yeah, $450K for 1300 sq ft. would be a bargain around here. Oddly enough, average selling prices are still rising, though slowly, though DOM is increasing and the inventory is up. I don’t know about SoCal, but in the Bay Area the percentage of subprime loans is lower than the national average.

Prices in my area are forecast to drop 9% in the next year, I think they’re being optomistic. There are house in my neighborhood that have been for sale since I moved here.

Is anyone else perturbed when the news announcer says something like “More bad news in the housing market: prices drop X%…”. Sorry, that’s good news to me. Just give me the facts, don’t color it with your biases.

Christ, people. I don’t care if my family, my SO, my job, my dogs, and the last pizza on earth was in LA, that’s insane (and so are you for staying!) I bought a house a year and a half ago that cost a lot more than it could have because it’s in town. My commute is seven minutes on a good day. I paid $175,000 for a sweet 1928 three bedroom brick house with a nice big yard, good schools, close to everything, nice neighborhood (although on the not-as-nice edge). Gas is cheaper here, too.

Six years ago I moved from the SF Bay Area to Colorado, very near Denver.
I had “reverse sticker shock” considering that our 28 year old ranch style house sold for more than the two story with basement, four year old house we bought out here.
Sweeeeet!

Housing prices in Annapolis, MD are insane, at least if you’re in the market to buy. If so much as two square feet of water can be seen through the bare branches of the trees during two weeks of winter, you pay for a “water view” and the prices skyrocket beyond description. There’s an 800 square foot shack on a lot not far from us that they’re asking over a million dollars for because of the water view (and they’d better sell it fast; as soon as the trees leaf out, the water view will be gone!). And if you buy it and want to tear down the shack and rebuild? It’s in a restricted zone so that you can’t replace it with a house with a bigger footprint. We were joking at my physical therapy session today that they’ll build an 8-story house to get enough room to actually live there.

The cheapest houses, such as the ones in the area where we’re renting, sell for upwards of 250K. We’re talking, again, 800-sq-ft places that were originally beach homes, built of concrete blocks with zero insulation and disgusting well water. We like the area, but the houses suck; we’re going to move in closer to Papa Tiger’s job this summer even if we do have to pay more to live closer in to DC. You get your choice: reasonably priced housing and a long commute (with expenses – and from here, for most people that means driving), or higher priced housing and lower commuting costs. But thus far we haven’t found anywhere where we could have a combination of both.

Why, oh why, did we sell the nice townhouse we owned in Wheaton when we moved down south in 2001? We couldn’t buy it back today for four times what we sold it for!

Did you read my post? I have made over three quarters of a million dollars on my house in thirteen years.

We’re getting out of the house game in favor of renting. We bought our place on the south side 10 years ago for $88k, it’s worth double that today, but if we were house hunting for a favorable location in the Chicagoland area, unless you want a place you’ve got to shoot your way out of, or move to (shudder) Indiana, you’re paying $350,000 for a 900 sq. ft. post war brick hole in the wall. We could afford it, but it’s stupid.
Friends of ours moved out to Anaheim, they’re moving to Costa Mesa because of the jobs they both have, they brought back some real estate brochures recently, and I saw what amounted to a trailer with a palm tree out front for 625,000. Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. That’s just stupid. For that kind of cash, that house better come with help.

I watch “Flip That House” periodically. There’s no fucking way I’d move to SoCal to buy a 45 year old ranch for $750. Chicago appears to have realistic housing prices at the moment. Hopefully everyone else will even out. It’s nuts out there!!