San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

heh

They've been trying to sell this house for awhile, re-listing it every so often. I'm sure one of the realtors here can tell you more about it.

I drive past the house every few days and the house is very high up on the slope. The cul-de-sac road has a very high slope. The yard itself is mostly slope. And also, the realtor for it is Battiata and wasn't there something shady going on with this realtor some time ago?

Anyways, not a terrific place.

On the bird's view, try rotating around the house to get an idea of all the slope problems.

surveyor,

Thanks. It looks like the long drive way to the front of the house is very steep.

Since you have driven pass this house, how is the "curb appeal" ? Have you been inside of this house ?

Nope.

Nope I have not been inside the house. Curb appeal is ok for the house, nothing special. I just imagine the appeal of a house being in a cul-de-sac is being able to have kids play in the area, but with the huge dropoff in the road, any kids playing or biking might fall into Pomerado Road, where cars skizz by at 60 mph. Maybe if the house had a better laid out backyard it wouldn't be a problem, but the backyard is slope (although there is some citrus orchard in the back of it and the golf course).

I could not find any previous listings of the home on the MLS. They purchased in 04 for 815k and they have a mortgage of 975k. This will be a short sale.

I know the home as well. Agreed with the assessment by Surveyor.

I drive past those homes often & wondered who/why someone would choose to live there.

Altho they look very nice, the view across Pomerado Rd. is the parking lot for Target/Albertson's. Some of these homes also back to Ted Wms. Pkwy. - major noise.

This home is not bad. I wanted to buy this home back when it was new in late 03. It was listed at 815K at the time. The driveway is shared and you cannot park your car in front of the garages. You won't have to worry about messing up your transmission, not the steep. That is the only thing wrong with the lot. It has about 6000-7000K flat usable land. Their is no danger of kids getting hurt rolling down the hills. The road noise is not that bad either, you can barely hear the cars from Ted Williams. There is no HOA or Mello Roos other the regular Poway taxes. This home was listed a couple years ago I believe for $1.05 mil. The home inside is OK. The kitchen is small, and has Cherry wood with stainless appliances. It's not highend appliances. There is a Micro-Hood. The flooring is not that nice, unless they upgraded it, but I don't think they did.

My office just listed this home - it is a short sale and will be subject to the lender(s) approving the sale, and for the record, there has never been anything "shady" going on with me or my office -

oh Snap!

For some, any view is better than none at all. Maybe they liked the open airy feeling being of being situated high up.

You could buy a condo in UTC with a view of some college students I suppose. Or a Portico in CV overlooking your neighbors bicycle storage, um I mean patio.

Beware of short sales! If you are not failiar with the way they work, they list at a rock bottom price that they never intend to sell the home for. The purpose is to stimulate multiple offers (this seems unethical to me) and then they raise the asking price.

I had a full price offer in on my dream home back in December of last year (short sale). It was an another Battiata listing. My offer was excepted and I scheduled a roofer to check an issue and was told when I arrived, there were other offers higher than mine. An accepted offer is not exactly an accepted offer, so don't get emotionally invoved. To this date, this property is still vacant. So, in the mean time, there has not been a payment made on this property in at least 12 months, I'd imagine the payments were about 8k plus, a month. I would have been a happy home owner had they not started playing these games and the bank wouldn't be sitting on this vacant piece of property. Who's running these bank owned properties anyway?? Doesn't make sense to me.

I have consistently posted about short sales. Indeed what you said janet can be the case many times, that the pricing is artificially low to get offers and then clean out the pipeline. Yes it is a VERY slow wait. I will not throw in any commentary on Battiata listings but looks like you have become familiar with them. Now when you said your offer was accepted did you actually receive your offer back fully executed and accepted by the seller? Or was it simply verbal?

Your agent should have advised you a bit better on the mechanics of the short sales especially if you started to get involved.

Now regardless of whether the property is vacant or not, if it is a short sale and not REO then the property still belongs to the homeowners. As far as the bank playing games, yes that DEFINITELY sucks. In fact in many cases I am seeing agents that have short sales going with offers into the banks, stop accepting offers so that they will not slow down the acceptance process. In your case it sounds like your offer was accepted, then sent into the bank, then more offers were sent in at a later date. While this does help with the probability of the offer getting accepted, it also SLOWS down the process as the bank has to then essentially start the review over again.

Finally, even with acceptance by the bank, potential short sale buyers are not out of the woods. Banks differ on how they will treat the seller of a short sale. In some cases they will release the seller from the obligation of the deficiency altogether. Basically a walk away free card. In other cases they will not authorize the short sale (release of lien) without the seller signing an acknowledgement of the deficiency and basically creating a new note of whatever the deficiency amount is. While this note is not secured by anything it is still a note. I have recently had a case where the bank accepted the short sale offer but would not release the seller and wanted the seller to ack the deficiency. The seller did not and thus the deal has fallen apart and the seller has said screw you bank, come foreclose on me.

Anyways it is all frustrating and tough to cope with. By the same token I recently had two short sale offers accepted by the bank that were submitted about 10 and 13 weeks ago respectively.

I know that many people think short sales are not worth the time and effort. However some of them really do close. You have to have a certain mindset, you cannot be impatient, you cannot get emotional, it helps if your agent is familiar with them but more important, the success will really depend on how the listing agent deals with them.