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3.5 months later, rates are at 5% again on the way down.

Zillow shows several 4.5% rates for LTV>50%.

So the punchbowl’s restocked with Red Bull and Captain Morgan, party’s back on! Risk on! BTFD!

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Fallbrook might be too rural for me, but I still enjoy looking at the listings.

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Rural isn’t a problem! Rural fringe of a major city can be a great lifestyle.

The offer is on a 1+ acre rural road home but it’s also only 1/2 of a mile from the nearest tract home subdivision and about 1.5 miles from the RSD strip mall area.

I don’t expect it to be profitable initially, I see a good chance of a small further dip, and as I said I don’t think East County is going to perform as well as areas further north. Purely as an investment, I think Santee, Vista and Mira Mesa are best positioned to move upscale as they are already fairly nice and close to high wage job growth.

However, I want my parents on the same lot as me, but a different house. And they want a two-bedroom house so they have a study. I also want gardening and fruit tree space, play areas for my son and future kids. RSD being close to the 94 provides the best value while still feeling upscale.

East County is already weaker than the rest of SD. ~2.5 months of inventory, lots of price reductions, lots of perfectly nice places with reasonable prices sitting on the market.

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Re Reston, DC is getting nicer and a minority of the older NoVa suburbs like Falls Church and McLean are nice. But in general it is a confusing traffic nightmare, poorly planned, hot and humid, and low quality of life area relative to the costs. The people living there themselves I liked, open minded, diverse, and well educated.

The densest parts of NoVa manage to be both pedestrian and car unfriendly. (One reason I like OB is that its the opposite, great for driving biking or walking).

Walking from one skyscraper in Crystal City to another 0.2 miles away you take your life in your hands and suck up tons of auto exhaust if you make.

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Making my first east county offer today!

The big rate drop is encouraging.

Zillow says I can refi my house at 4.5 30 year or 3.6 15 year.

At the same time, jumbo rates on zillow are the same for my purchase, despite MND saying they are .8 lower nationwide. The small number of results leads me to believe zillow isn’t a good place to look, though they are great for conventional mortgages.

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Fully agree.

Cal RE provides low tax, low risk, steady growing yield, and is a prestige asset.

Foreign buyers are enjoying huge gains here due to dollar appreciation.

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Looking for a 2-family property where the smaller one is for my parents and still 2 bedroom and 900+ SF. I want some hobby farm space too, so more lookout at old homes on big lots. I can’t afford the new homes on big lots.

1 baby born in early 2022, hope to have a couple more. I feel like the difference between average and the absolute best schools is small for K to 2nd, so my school quality concerns are not until around 2030. Looking hardest in the 1.4-1.7 range, up to 2.3 could be possible if the perfect place pops up, but seems like the listings that high are numerically rare and not great values. To put it another way, there are giant improvements between 1.0m and 1.4m homes, but a lot of the 2.0-2.3s the additional value is hard to see.

The proposed Cottonwood Sand Mine looks like a moderate negative for RSD. There’s heavy local opposition, but at first blush it doesn’t look that bad other than the additional truck traffic. It will only operate for 10 years, and in 3 year phases at each subpart, and there will be a nice bike lane and other substantial “free” upgrades to Willow Glen, and the land will be permanently rewilded and undeveloped. It is possible the EIR draft is understating the noise and air pollution risks.

I just made my first low-ballish offer today. I will look at two more places this week, both around Mt Helix, and then make a few more offers if my initial offer isn’t accepted.

I offered 8% below list, and the list price is pretty fair if the seller is OK waiting since the property is expensive and unique and has already been listed 3 months. It is a strange time to be hunting since, even though I am very bullish long term, semi-rural east county high-end had a good chance of falling 8-10% below peak, maybe even 15%. The people there are San Diego natives in much higher numbers and driving the market there, and they don’t have the high incomes of techie transplants.

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For now, East County is much weaker than OB/PL/Clairemont/UTC. More inventory (2.0-2.5 month supply in the larger zips), more huge price reductions. The big price reduction houses all seem way overpriced beforehand, so I am not reading too much into it.

More significant is there are a lot of fairly priced places cutting prices 50-100k after leas than 3 weeks on the market. That is something I haven’t seen before in large numbers.

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When cars self drive, distant suburbs will appreciate more since an extra 15 minute commute is just an extra 15 minutes playing on your phone or watching netflix, which you were going to do anyway.

Unfortunately I think door to door real self drive is still 8-10 years away.

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Interesting to see a bump on this ancient thread. Skyranch I am looking at right now.

Thinking of looking at 6307 Triana.

I will be viewing some places in La Mesa and El Cajon on Friday.

Easier commute for me and bigger lots. Santee I think has more appreciation potential. I do appreciate new high end finishes, but there are always tradeoffs and for me an older house on a bigger lot is the better trade. And the 1.5 area buys some huge places on big lots.

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The explanations of what fuels the jumbo spread make sense, but not why it suddenly has blown out to record negative lows.

It has been slightly negative before, but never ~0.9.

“Average loan quality is higher on jumbos” is the worst explanation because the gap is roughly the same for the lowest most prime conventional borrowers.

One explanation that has changed with time is the GSE fees on conventional mortgages, which greatly increased 2009-2014. This outdated article is the best on this topic:

Why Are Jumbo Loans Cheaper than Conforming Loans?

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Well “market forces” is kind of vague.

Why are jumbo loans relatively better than a year ago?

“ The jumbo loans we are doing are all stronger borrowers – high FICO, lower debt to income and loan to value and high reserves”

In aggregate, but the same borrower now can get a jumbo loan about .9% lower as opposed to the normal 0.3% higher. And the typical jumbo borrower has always been wealthier, higher score etc.

Well I will be putting in an offer that will require my first jumbo on Monday, hope I get it. Suburbia here I come!

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Up 6.5% on my short in two weeks! I need to think about exit points. Probably around the -20% mark.

PTON dropped another 80% from when I covered, should have really held on there. They purchased during their high flying days the much bigger company Precor, maker of my lovely AMT elliptical. I hope they aren’t negatively effected.

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Navy, I wrote my law school third-year paper on why the third year of law school should be optional. The two big points is that it hurts lawyers by making them pay $30k in tuition rather than earn maybe 75k in salary, and hurts the middle class by driving up the price of legal services.

Got a B+.

I don’t think mass loan repayment is a particularly good policy for the reasons everybody has mentioned.

It is less of a giveaway to the rich than PPP, but the biggest student loan debts are generally doctors, dentists, and lawyers. And a lot of the rest, middle class and poor people with large debts, aren’t actually paying them back. They either defaulted, are on a forgiveness plan, or have income based repayment of 200 or less a month.

So grading loan forgiveness on a curve, it isn’t that bad an economic policy. The best economic policy is to buy the top copyrights and patents and release them into the public domain, and to cut incomes taxes and replace them with Georgist land value taxes and Pigovian pollution taxes. Won’t happen of course!

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Just learned via email that due to my large oil stock losses, I have been downgraded from gentleman to yeoman.

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