Pah, you lot have it easy. I just sold my apartment in London for £450,000 (c. $850k??). That’s a 900sq ft 2 bed with no outside space, not even a window ledge, in a decidedly average part of London. Would be great if I was moving to outer mongolia to cash in but I’m stuck here.
If that was sold in popsicle form, I would totally buy it.
What’s that grey stuff above him? God, or freezer ice?
I meant it to be left-overs in tin-foil, but I like God better 
So you make a lot of money when you sell. So what? You still have to leave to see any profits, so in other words, like I said, you’d be crazy to stay in a market like that. Not to mention, what on earth were your property taxes like?
Let’s face it, you got lucky with the market. That doesn’t mean that’s a reasonable market in which to buy a house.
Threads like this make me glad to be in NorthEast Ohio, I’m looking for a house right now and you can get a nice 3 bedroom for 110k.
Property taxes are funny in California. They’re based on what you paid, not on the value. I pay 25% what the guy across the street pays.
Very lucky. I’m the first to admit it.
Hey, I grew up down there. I know of what I speak. I blame the traffic – nothing makes large groups of people act like idiots more than gridlock.
No.
I can’t believe people are paying the prices they are. I’m in a 1945 brick two-story, 1200 sq. feet, 4,000 sq. ft lot, two car garage. The estimated value of the house (and all similar houses in the area) is $245,000. We are maybe a ten minute walk from rapid transit, 7 miles from downtown Chicago.
People forget that the housing market (just like any other commodity) is based on supply and demand. That’s supply and demand, not supply and necessity. The reason houses are so damn expensive in SoCal is because apparently there is enough demand for million dollar houses that people will keep selling them for a million until people stop buying them.
The fault with people thinking the prices will “just keep going up” is that you better hope peoples salaries “just keep going up”. There’s a point where realestate just becomes unaffordable to the majority. Apparently SoCal hasn’t hit that point.
I say it’s “demand” and not “necessity” because nobody “needs” to live in SoCal. They choose to live in SoCal. And part of that choosing to do so is putting up with the extreme cost of doing so.
When the day comes that people wise up and decide the price to live there just ain’t worth it, then nobody’s buyin, then demand goes down, then supply goes up, then prices go down. Econ 101.
I think we’re already past that point. What skewed the supply and demand equation was, first, that interest rates have remained extremely low for an extremely long period of time. Add to that the stupid loans that lenders were giving out like candy, and you have a recipe for disaster. Homes ARE unaffordable to the majority, but they were given loans that allowed them to get into those unaffordable homes.
Well the chickens are coming home to roost now. One subprime lender after another is tanking. Foreclosures are rising at an astronomical rate. Sales are way down, and inventory is way up. IMO, the only reason Los Angeles isn’t showing price decreases like the entire rest of the state is just statistical sleight-of-hand. Those in the realty industry trying to tout this as a “recovery” are deluded. The reality on the street is that the market is declining. Demand is down and supply is up - can the third piece of the puzzle be far behind?
The supply in Southern California, at least in the L.A. Basin is also pretty bad. Thanks i large part to Proposition 13.
Having been to Santa Barbara fairly often for workshops, I have one issue with it. How the hell do you get anything done with that beautiful beach nearby? I usually stay at Fess Parker’s, and it is hard.
I also would be nervous about buying a house in a heated market just about now. But I thought it was expensive 11 years ago when I did buy, and it turned out to be pretty much a low point. I’d never recommend moving to anyplace to make money in real estate, but if you need to move for other reasons, it may make sense to buy even expensive places. Around here, a lot of people bought far away during the boom, and are stuck with 3 hour or more commutes. Even worse, if the market goes down, those houses will lose value first, since living close to the Valley is advantageous if you can do it.
And I also freely admit I was lucky.
We’re probably past that point, but many people haven’t realized it yet. The current trends in mortgages seem to be designed to extend the illusion that the average person can afford a $1/2 million house.
OK Giraffe, I’m just going to have to hunt you down and hurt you. Even though L. A. is a great big freeway and I’ve been away so long, I still know the way to San Jose.
But then you find yourself living in northeast Ohio. 
My SO is from there. I’ve visited, and it’s nice. Lots of green. Can we have some of your unused land?
Christ, people. How do you do it? I have a 2000 square foot (3 bedroom, 2 bath, huge finished basement, garage) house on a huge lot in a historic district in Birmingham, AL. It was totally renovated from the ground up before we moved in, and we only paid $138,000. And we thought it was expensive (2 good incomes.) How the hell do you people afford that?
I don’t know how people do it either. I live in the Boston area and the housing market is basically the same as SoCal. We have a nice house and land but it was because we bought the mother of all fixer-uppers 35 miles away from the city and spent literally 6 years most days and weekends doing major construction with substantial monetary gifts from family to help with the large projects like replacing all the windows, furnace, and refinishing every single square inch of interior and exterior space. The house cost $350,000 in almost uninhabitable condition in 2001. We put about $200,000 in necessary repairs into it. The market has since soared and a contractor recently told me it should go for about $800K.
It worked out fine for us in the end. However, I see all kinds of people my age just waltzing in and plopping down $600,000 for a nice starter house. I know that many of them don’t make as much as we do yet they are taking on a $4000 a month mortgage or even more. Although I don’t know how their finances work, I know how mine do and that would be plain unworkable especially when you consider that almost everything else is more expensive in these expensive real-estate markets. Throw in a couple of kids with 2 X $1500 a month daycare bills and things start to get serious very quickly.
I have no idea how they are doing it.
See what I mean about Southern Californians? They’re grumpy.
How about moving to Buffalo?
No, they didn’t leave off any zeroes – that’s $9,900!
So what if it needs a few repairs? 
Hee hee!
My wife and I bought in LA County about 6 months after we got married, just as the prices really started to ramp up. (We didn’t know that then, we thought we were idiots for buying at the top of the market). We paid $217,000 for 1200 sq.ft. on 6000 sq. ft. witha big back yard (a tough find in these parts) in a secluded shady neighborhood. We thought we were getting robbed, since it was a former rental.
About a year ago, at peak, it was worth over 3 times what we paid. That’s softened somewhat, but we still have a very fat pile of equity that doesn’t need to do anything right now but provide blissful peace of mind. And soon a new kitchen.
I have younger co-workers, and I have absolutely no idea what they are going to do when they feel like buying. I couldn’t imagine breaking my own back right now to get into a house I couldn’t afford just to watch its value slide down with the market.