Laguna Niguel Real Estate Blog

There's an interesting article over at the Orange County Register about the recently published index by the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo Bank that ranks O.C. as the nation's fifth least affordable housing market. But this is actually good news for Orange County home buyers since last year the county ranked in the top three, just behind Los Angeles and Salinas. This means that housing in the county is becoming more affordable. In fact this news follows on the heals of an announcement by the California Association of Realtors report that home affordability in O.C. is the highest it has been in three years.

If you're curious as to where you might find the most affordable market, it's Kokomo, Indiana at 93%. Lets see ... palm trees, breathtaking coastline and ideal year-round weather with sunny days and an average temperature of 70 degrees. At this writing it is 6° F in Kokomo Ind. You decide.

Labels: home sales, industry news, market, market update, South Orange County Real Estate

Posted by Cherri Fox at 6:57 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

David Wessel of The Wall Street Journal Online explains why, when tracking home prices, getting a clear picture of the recent past might be more difficult than you think.

The two best barometers of housing prices are the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's index and the Standard & Poor's Case/Shiller index. Both are based on the same concept that looks at repeat sales of the same houses yet, as Wessel points out, there are significant discrepancies in the resulting numbers and with housing prices so important to the health of the economy, people want to know "why these two carefully constructed measures differ."

Read more at Tracking Housing Prices, why the Numbers Conflict .

Labels: home sales, industry news, market

Posted by Cherri Fox at 7:57 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

A couple days ago, I started my morning ritual as usual with a cup of coffee and a round of reading the latest news and blogs. I was about to read up on the Trulia's Inside Story @ PRU (short for Prudential), but then right when I started, I realized that the story was not what I expected. I felt bad for the Trulia folks, who provide me with awesome map tools, that really help my clients find awesome properties on my website.

I followed their story over to Sellisus
which expounded on the article. Being that I have an affinity for both Trulia, and Sellsius, I naturally left a comment on the story at their respective homes. Within about 5 minutes, Matt, over at Inman News called me to see what my take was on the whole thing.

The result came up in an article on Inman News discussing the whole thing.

Nevermind the fact that I don't know how to relate to Zillow yet, I think that Trulia and Zillow both should be given their shot to educate agents. Maybe the convention was just a bit to rigid of a forum for that, I really can't say. It was a really interesting read with the morning coffee though.

Labels: industry news

Posted by Rory at 2:15 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post