North County Coastal monitor

[sdrealtor]

Time to catch up here. 3 weeks of data

New Listings

20 (12)

21 (19)

19 (10)

New Pendings

22 (19)

21 (11)

24 (17)

Thats

-2

0

-5

Closed sales

18 (10)

17 (16)

17 (17)

Inventory

80 (41)

85 (49)

85 (45)

Inventory has been about the same the last two months albeit quite a bit higher than last year. Pendings are also running ahead which is keeping inventory mostly flat the last couple months. Its game on for buyers that are out there. Should be a steady flow of inventory also. Still feels sluggish out there but steady

 

[evolusdv2]

It’s been a while since your last update.  Has much changed?

[sdrealtor]

Sorry I’ve been lazy posting but i do run the numbers. I’ll try to get an update out. Generally speaking the market feels like it’s softened a little bit and that inventory has built a little bit more but looking at it from a high-level it’s nothing I would consider a material change yet

[limkotir]

What happened to sdrealtor?  Last activity on this site was from a few months.  I assume he’s doing good, enjoy finer things in life, and just stopped posting.  Really enjoyed his weekly insights and numbers.  Hope he is doing well.

[evolusdv2]

Sadly, this site has been a ghost town for a while.  Market is expensive and just moving sideways, not much to report, though I really appreciate Rich’s periodic updates!

Rode the 2010 – 2019 wave up and sold. Missed the COVID price explosion tho…still renting and hoping for a better entry point.

[Coronita]

He’s still around.

A lot of us are old now, so we’re a bit slower these days.

We need to put on our bifocals, get out our walking canes, and it takes a lot longer to put on our adult diapers and dentures. So give us a break 🙂

I just turned a horseshit 50 recently, and receiving my AARP membership kit was doubly horseshit. And holy shit, my kid is a college now. Feels like yesterday we were just in the middle of the Great Recession, and talking about starting to put money into a 529k account for a 9 month old.

It’s all downhill from here, I tell you.

[barnaby33]

Oh come FLU, it’s been downhill for you for a long time! The rest of us are just playing catchup!

Josh

[barnaby33]

Time to fire this thread up again, or too soon?

[JPJones]

Wait, RECENTLY 50?  Man, the way you guys called yourselves old-timers, I thought you were actually old, not just pretending.  Nope!  Just my age.

😐

[Coronita]

Sorry, it’s been awhile since I checked in here…I feel old… My kid just went off to college out of state.. Now officially and empty nester. It seemed like just yesterday it was 2004, bought my first house in 2004, just starting out and made my first post here, and just sent my daughter to preschool….Time flew by so fast.

I talk with my daughter almost everyday, but I miss her frankly. Almost like a best friend that moved away. It was nice though, she called one day and asked me to her her with her Comp Sci homework, lol. I suggested it would be easier for her to just Chat GPT it, but she insisted I go over her assignment with her, so I’m like sure…

I told her not to study engineering, and to do something more enjoyable in life like art or business or marketing, but I guess I insulted her by saying that because I got an earful about “what, you think I can’t do it because I’m girl, isn’t it?”…. No sweetie, I was trying to save you from a lot of late nights in the computer lab doing homework projects like these while the rest of your friends are probably out partying and getting drunk….

 

 

[Coronita]

…But man time sure goes by so fast. It felt just like yesterday I was starting my first job at Qualcomm back in 1996…And oof, I feel like I’ve gone full circle now…

So part of the reason why I’ve been MIA, is well in 2022, I sort of tried to early retire….It wasn’t completely my choice, basically I got to a point in my career when i reached senior director and landed in a company that got acquired by a shitty parent company based in floriduh. I have never worked with a more stupider, dumber motherfuckers than this company. The original senior exec team that hired me to build a group all bailed and cashed in their golden parachutes, and my bronze parachute had not fully vested, so I was like oh shit, do I leave or do I stay… And this was right before covid…So the one time I decided to still it out, was the stupidest dumbest decision of my life , since this team was so hell bent on making everyone’s life in old acquired company miserable that they would quit. Well, being the ass that I am, I tried to prove everything wrong about them, and while they did their dandiest efforts to get me fired, I managed to get the 3 VPs that each tried to get me fired…fired themselves. Because while they tried to setup my team to fail intentionally, I simply stepped aside at the right time and let them take all the credit for the changes they made..which ultimately royally fucked up the sales for each of those quarters when their decisions resulted in a total product disaster, and then I ended up cleaning up after their big messes…It was the funniest thing I ever experienced, but whatever.. I made it past my 3.5 year mark, at at that point my bronze level parachute was fully vested, so I didn’t care and I knew that my time was up…though the person that ended up dooming me was a colleague that was supposedly an ally that turned her back and stabbed me so she could get promoted herself. Nice… Bitch… whatever…

Anyway, so I tried to early retire back in 2022. But frankly, all the talk about F.I.R.E. and early retiring, imho…wasn’t really for me… I was bored to death.. I mean, yeah, I got to spend a lot of time with my kid before she went off to college, volunteered a lot on a high school robotics team (team got to World Championships twice), spent a lot of time taking classes at the community college to learn things I always wanted to do but never got a chance to do. …auto mechanic, suspension, brakes, engine diagnostic, engine performance, autobody collision repair and restoration, autobody paint and refinshing., welding.

 

It was fun..and yes, I got a lot of things done that I wanted to get out of those things… I got my ASE certification to do HVAC repairs so I can legally buy large quantities of refrigerant so I can service all 7 of my cars and the HVAC systems of my rentals if I wanted to… Yes, I did get a CA smog inspector license from the Air Resource Board so I can smog my own cars, lol.. .And I did spend a lot of time and money repainting my white miata and my now POS 25 year old blue Audi that was my first new car that I handed down to my daughter who refuses to let me get rid of it..

And money really a problem, since I have rental income coming in, dividend income coming in, together that almost fully replaces a software engineer’s salary… My kid’s 4 college + 2 years of grad is taken care of by a fully funded 529k and umta custodial account, and i have no major debt as all my properties are paid off , except my primary which I did a cash out refinance at 3% for 30 years and took that equity and stuck it in a basket of CD’s, money markets, and  lower risk dividend paying stocks, currently together averaging about 5.8% return to pay that 3% note…because I didn’t want all my equity to be just sitting there doing nothing… But that’s about it.

But I was bored to tears otherwise.Because there was only so much I could spend working on my cars, or taking classes, or doing nothing. I hate to travel, except to see my kid at college. I’m not a foodie, I don’t like to golf, I don’t have a drinking or drug problem..And there’s only so much I’m willing to spend on cars and track/autocross days. And while back when I was in my 20’s and 30’s I looked forward to always working on my cars, now everytime I need to work on them, it feels more like a choir than a hobby. Plus it’s getting harder to lift stuff (yes, you can buy tools and equipment to compensate for that)…And newer cars are even harder to work on. My seventh car I picked up is virtually impossible for me to work on without a $15,000 diagnostic tool from the manufacturer.. Something as simple as a reseting an oil change service light requires a $800 made-in-china knock off diagnostic tool, and an oil change at the local dealership is $2500, when other than the need to reset the service light, the cost of materials for me to change the oil is $80!

 

It just felt weird not working, not having a schedule, not getting up on time, and a lot of things slipped, like not going to the gym, and I felt my mind started to lose it’s edge by not putting it to use building stuff. Seeing people go through dementia, got me really worried if i don’t really challenge myself, that might be me in a few years…

 

Soo… last month, I returned back to work as an individual contributing engineer for a private company doing research… I realized I do not want to spend my remaining time dealing with and being in senior management and have no interest in climbing the corporate ladder any further. In many ways, I don’t have cut-throat personality to do it, nor do I enjoy it, so in many ways, I’ve realized I hit my glass ceiling.

I’m having a lot more fun being hands on again, and one of my tasks is to figure out how to get their AI systems to start designing an implementing all the mobile communication software they want to make that normally I would be training junior engineers to help do and learn, except now, they want to experiment to see if if 25+ years of experience can teach a bot to do it better than a human. My preliminary rudimentary experimentation says, it does not look good for future entry level software engineers…

Besides that task, my company wants me to help setup a lab here, and that involves running coax cables, pulling cables, installling antennas and test equipment…This last task, was a bit ironic…

You see, as I was sharing with sdrealtor and AN, my new job is actually quite comical and it proves I have gone full circle….Back in 1996, I interviewed to work for Qualcomm, and after passing hours grueling technical interview covering digital signal processing, communication theory, communication system, etc… I finally got an offer and was so excited to be joining Qualcomm, thinking…wow, I’m going to be working on all this cool tech doing CDMA…only to find out when I joined the company..all they wanted me to do was pull out cables, run coax cables, run RF antennas, and setup test hardware…I was a hot headed kid back then, and I was infuriated that this was shit work that a monkey could do, that should have been assigned to someone that doesn’t even have a college degree, not someone that came from a pedigree Ivy League engineering program… WTF…. And so for the next 2.5 years, I taught myself software from scratch, and one day walked into my director’s office and gave him an ultimatum… Either put me on a software team or I quit…The director stonewalled me and basically said “well qualcomm doesn’t hire software engineers that don’t have a masters degree, so go finish your masters degree, and in 2 years when you graduate, we can put you on a software team and start you out testing software and writing shell/perl scripts to test…” But I could already do all that, why the fuck do I need a masters degree for this? The conversation didn’t end well, and so I quit, joined a “pre-ipo startup that was going public anyday now” in the Bay Area and stayed in the bay area for the next 6 years, developed me career, and moved back to san diego for personal reasons, at much higher positions than had I stayed…

 

But now, fast forward to 2025….29 years later, I’m starting a new job again.. And what does this new company want me to do? Pull cabls out, run coax cables, setup test equipment, etc….And my reaction this time? “Wait, let me get this straight… You want to pay me almost close what I was making before as a director of engineering … to pull cables, run coax cables, setup test equipment for a test lab you want me to help setup because most of you guys are software only….stuff that a money can do……SIGN ME UP and when do I start….”

Ah yess, the circle of life….As AN would say… “the best jobs are the jobs that pay you a CEO’s worth of pay to do the job of a trash collector…” lol….

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