One thing I also found interesting. Occasionally, a few sales occurs due to unusual circumstances. One of my neighbors in Torrey Hills bought their home at the peek close to $1.2m, put in about $150k upgrades. Then, they put it back on the market, 3 months later. It finally closed escrow recently about $1.1m. At first, I thought this was a flipper. But it turns out that the couple bought the house because they were trying to rebuild a family. Things turned even more sour, and they ended up separating. Hence their “motivation” for sales at the huge loss. It’s sort of sad, but reality is that a lot of times, these things happen to people that don’t necessarily have “credit issues” or “finance” issues.
Moral of the story
1) never make big financial decisions if you’re having family problems.
2) sometimes market annomalities can be found by sellers of unusual circumstances.
…About the home. Nice home….But imho bad feng-shui. The previous owner was also a couple that got divorced. For the sake of the current owner, I hope it was just a coincident.
About nice areas falling in price….imho…It really depends on on how long the housing correction lasts. It always starts in the less desirable area. But once those areas come down in price, and become property that have more bang for the buck, it will start impacting nicer areas.
i think the reason why homes in nicer areas haven’t quite fallen as much, is simply because home prices in less nicer areas haven’t drastically detorriated yet. Once it does, then all homes will be impacted, except possibly the multi-mullion (+$3million homes)- people who buy those homes usually don’t do any financing and are immune to any market correction. There hasn’t been enough price differentiation yet. For example, it ridiculous that anyone would pay for $700k for a home in chula vista, when you could get something slightly smaller in say Rancho Pensequito, or even Carmel Vally for $720k (much smaller), regardless of the how big the home is in Chula Vista is. Why? Because regardless of whether it’s new or bigger, it’s still in Chula Vista- bad neighborhood, with bad schools, and bad environment. It doesn’t make sense. If you make that much money to afford something $700k, you don’t want to live in area where the majority folks around you don’t…Frankly, I wouldn’t even pay $500k for a home in Chula Vista, because before I’d buy there, I’d buy in Mira Mesa. Other areas like Chula Vista need to significantly correct, and there needs to be enough price difference between different locations before we see “nicer areas” take any signficant hit in a meaningful way.
