reside real estate

Hello and welcome to the Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette. Today I want to talk to you about an article that recently came out of CNNMoney.com and it is titled, “Unemployed? Get a Federal Loan to Help Pay Your Mortgage“. An interesting program and what homeowners will be able to do is apply for a no-interest government loan for up to $50,000 to pay your mortgage and cover your arrears. What it will do is it’s going to offer assistance for up to two years and it will be forgiven if the homeowner stays in the house for five years. Let’s take a closer look.

To qualify for the program, homeowners must live in Puerto Rico or one of the 32 states not in the Hardest Hit Fund area. So, if you’re one of the states in the Hardest Hit Fund area, this program will not be available to you and some of those states include California, Nevada. Florida, Michigan and Arizona, where the original 5 when the Hardest Hit Fund was created in earlier this year in February.

And to qualify for the program if you live in one of those 32 states or Puerto Rico, you have to be at least 3 months behind on your payments but have a reasonable likelihood of being able to make payments again in the near future within two years. And, you also have had to suffer a 15% drop in income, but must have been able to afford your home before the income drop.

It is called the “Emergency Homeowners Loan Program” and they’re expecting to start taking applications before the end of the year, so, you can Google the Emergency Homeowners Loan Program and find out more information about it. And I think over the coming month or so, they’re going to release some more details about it.

That is going to do it for me today. My name is David Doucette, thank you so much for checking out the Reside Daily Bite.

Welcome to the Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette and today we have our weekly market report and we’re going to look at the 6 communities of Santa Monica, Westchester, Mar Vista and Palms, Venice, Culver City and West Los Angeles.

And the chart we’re going to look out today is called the “Supply and Demand by Month” and we are going to look at the last 12 months of history.

So, let’s start over here at September 2010. Last month there were 618 homes for sale and 92 homes sold.

Let’s take a look at where we were last year in September; we have 594 homes for sale and we had 108 homes sold in September 2009.

So you can see here the number of homes that have sold (you can follow my cursor across), it’s a little bit up and down; been hovering around the 100 homes per month. Certainly, last January and February, it’s down to about 50 homes per month. Then it is slowly climbing from March, April, May, June, where it was over a hundred units a month. And then in July, August, it started to dip. In September, it’s a little more than August. Be curious to see what happens in the coming months.

And as for the units for sale (the homes for sale), you can see as you follow my cursor, we dipped in December, January, February -which is typically the slower time; we see less activity. Then as summer approaches, you can see a lot more homes are coming on the market and now that’s starting to dip again.

Traditionally we’ll see over the coming months, fewer homes come on the market but with the state of things now, I’ll be curious to see what happens.

That’s our Supply and Demand by Month for today’s Reside Daily Bite. I’m your host, David Doucette, thank you so much for checking us out.

Hello and welcome to the Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette. And some very exciting news coming out of the interest rate department last week. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that interest rates have dropped, on a 30-year loan, to 4.19% – that’s the lowest rate we have seen in decades.

And a couple of interesting things about the interest rate, they’re also predicting it may actually go lower. And there’s a program there predicting that the Feds are going to be buying more treasury bonds that’s going to drive down the loan rates even more to try and boost the economy. Some are speculating that it could go lower than 4% on a 30-year fixed; some are predicting it’ s going to hover right around that. Either way, it’s great news for anybody who’s looking to buy a home right now.

And what’s interesting about the interest rates, is last spring the experts were talking about the end of this year the interest rates are going to be up by 6%. So buy now…buy now…buy now. Well, that hasn’t happened, probably because of some kind of double dip that were experiencing, I don’t know. I’m not saying that there’s a double dip.

But I want to put the interest rates in perspective. 10 years ago in October 2000, interest rates were at 7.8%. In 1990, interest rates were at 10.17%. Check this out, in October 1980, interest rates were 13.79%; and October 1981, interest rates were at 18.45%. Now, in October 1981, I was 10 years old, so I have no idea what’s the interest rate and all that stuff is happening. My parents had already bought their house years ago that I grew up in. Crazy, crazy stuff.

Today, interest rates are at 4.19% and predicting to even go a hair bit lower.

That is going to do it for me today, thank you so much for checking out the Reside Daily Bite.

Welcome everybody to the reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette. I want to let you know about a podcast that is currently on my website, residerealestate.com/podcast called “What is a short sale?” I have the good fortune of having in the studio (in the office) to interview, Toni Patillo of LA City Short Sales.

Toni is the broker record at Keller Williams, Santa Monica -the office that I worked with. She has been focusing on short sales for the last 3 years. It is 98% of her business right now and she has it down to a system. She has negotiators on her team and she is a fantastic resource; a wealth of knowledge.

I encourage you to check out the podcast on my website, again at residerealestate.com/podcast episode no. 14 called “What is a Short Sale?” We talked about what a short sale is and from the seller’s perspective. If you’re thinking or if you know somebody who’s thinking of trying to do a short sale, you want to hear this episode because we talked about some of the things that need to be in order for you to be considered for a short sale. So, definitely check that out. It’s a great podcast; I think it’s about 40 minutes or so.

And that is going to do it for me today and my name is David Doucette, thank you so much for checking out the reside Daily Bite.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette and today, I want to talk to you about a trend that was reported in the New York Times recently about Refinancing into Shorter Loans and their saying homeowners  are starting to do that and it is becoming more of a trend. And the Gold Standard has always been a 30-year fixed loan. What we’re seeing with refinancing is people are refinancing into a 15-year loan. So, what that means is less time to pay-off their home; it’s going to be higher monthly payments but a lot more of your monthly payment is actually going to go towards the principal on the loan rather than the interest.

And I went to my trusted source on the internet, BankRate.com and they have a comparison chart that you can go and plug in. So, I plugged in for just a $500,000 loan. Today’s interest rate is 3.625% per 15 year and the 30 year is 4.25%; so the 15 year is typically going to run about half a point lower than the 30 year. But your monthly payment on a $500,000 loan (this is just the mortgage itself) is about $3,600; on a 30 year loan, it will be about $2,500. So $3,600 and $2,500; a difference of about $1,100 a month.

So, what that means is (this is where we see the big numbers), total payments are $649,000 on a 15 year loan and on a 30 year loan, $885,000. So, $885,000 up here and $649,000 here. It’s really about $240,000 difference between the 15 year loan and the 30 year loan…so, very interesting.

And what the article says is the people that are doing this are the ones who can afford to do it -typically ones that are making more than $250,000 a year, obviously. It’s going to depend on what area you live in but they’re also saying the people who are doing it are the ones who are pretty secure in their lifestyle and pretty set with the home that they’re in.

And so, I think it’s a great option if you can afford to do it or if you know somebody that can afford to do it. You can save on a $500,000 mortgage. You can save $240,000 over the life of that loan. Plus, in a 15 year loan, it’s now paid off in 15 years which can now free up some money to send 2 boys to college, which is something that I’ll have to be thinking about in about 15 to 16 years.

So, that’s going to do it for me today, I want to thank you so much for checking out the Reside Daily Bite.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette. Today, we have our weekly market report for our 6 neighborhood communities here on the Westside of Los Angeles: Santa Monica, Venice, Palms and Mar Vista, Culver City, Westchester and West LA. What we are going to look at today is the median sold price of homes last month, September, versus where we were a year ago. So, it’s a good way to get an indication on what’s going on in the market and what’s going on in your neighborhood and you’re going to quickly find out that not all of the neighborhoods are doing the same thing.

So, let’s jump right into it here…we have our Median Sold Price by Month -that is the average sale price of homes that are selling. And we’re looking at Santa Monica first. What you can see here is September of 2010 (so last month right here) compared to September of 2009. The average sale price a year ago is $1.625M. That dropped a little bit to $1.574; change of about $50,000. So, it’s down to about 3% from where we were a year ago. Not a big concern here and you can even see August of 2010 is a good month for Santa Monica.

Let’s take a look at another community…West LA. Again, here we are at September 2010 and compared to September of 2009. In 2009, average sale price was $725,000; September of 2010 is $706,000. Change is about $19,000 or down 3% -again, not a huge concern.

Let’s take a look at another community…and here, we’re looking at Culver City. Average price a year ago is $632,500; last month is $620,000. So, a change of about $12,000 and down about 2%. And you can see the activity in Culver City -it had a very active summer.

Let’s go to Venice. This is where we’re down about 38%. So, average a year ago was $1.125M and last month was $700,000. That’s a change of about $425,000; down about 38%. The reason could be is there’s a multi-million dollar homes on the canals and on the oceans that just haven’t been moving recently. And that may be one of the causes of the drop at 38%. Again, it’s compared to where we were a year ago to where we were last month.

Let’s take a look at Westchester. Westchester is up 9% -it’s been healthy. A year ago, $690,000 and last month is $750,000. So, up about $60,000 or 9%. Pretty healthy for Westchester.

And then Palms/Mar Vista -very interesting. Here we are 2010 of September and here, 2009 September. So, a year ago, we were at $735,000. Now, last month, we were at $880,000. A change of about $145,000 or 20%. Some nice activity with Palms and Mar Vista and you can see here, pretty active summer for Palms/Mar Vista but in September…very active month.

So as you can see, the neighborhoods or real estate is hyper local. The six neighborhoods we’ve just looked at…they all touch each other on the Westside of Los Angeles and you can really see the different activities in each neighborhood. So, when we are hearing home reports in CNN or CSMBC, we have to take that with a grain of salt and remember to look in our own backyard to really get a sense of what’s happening.

That is going to do it for me today. My name is David Doucette, thank you so much for checking out the Reside Daily Bite.

Mortgages: Congress holds conforming loan limits at nearly $730,000

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette. And today, some interesting news or some good news coming out of Congress; this was reported in the Mercury News in the Silicone Valley at MercuryNews.com and you’ll see a link to that on my website at residerealestate.com. The Reside Daily Bite will have a link to this news article below the video.

The title is “Congress holds conforming loan limits at nearly $730,000“. That is very good news and it says, “Lawmakers have voted to keep the maximum size of loans guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration at the current level through the end of 2011.” So, this is really good news for the more expensive areas such as the Bay Area, also here on Los Angeles, on the Westside. This is great news because the average home price right now for single family home, depending on the neighborhood, is around $650,000 to about $800,000. This is a very much needed extension that we received and without it the limits would have fallen to about $625,000.

It’s very good that we have this and I just want to read a couple of quotes. One of the gentleman publisher of a trade publication called Inside Mortgage Finance put a kind of a funny quote… “Nobody wants to oppose or upset the Realtors and the home builders in an election year”. So, it was kind of funny.

They’re predicting it will help about 60,000 borrowers annually. Again, very good news for the Westside of Los Angeles.

That’s going to do it for me today. My name is David Doucette, thank you so much for checking out the Reside Daily Bite.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette and today, we’re going to talk about Zillow and their Zestimates. Before I jump into that, I just want to let you know, if you like the kind of content that you’re seeing here today, you can head over to www.facebook.com/resideFAN and you can like us over there. I also encourage you to send this link to any of your friends and associates who you think might find this information helpful, especially today’s video. If you have any friends that are thinking of selling their home, this is a very good one to send them because we’re going to be talking about Zillow and their Zestimates.

So let’s jump right into it. We’re on the Zillow homepage. Zillow is one of the most frequented US state websites on the internet, with over 12M visits per month -so they got a lot of activity over there. It’s not an appraisal website and I think sometimes, homeowners can think that it is somehow related to an appraisal or the actual value of their home…and it’s not. And now, I’m going to show you why, here in a minute. If you scroll to the bottom of their website, you will see “Zestimate Values & Accuracy” and what a Zestimate is, is a Zillow created thing through some formula that they have come up with and that they have developed. Let’s click on that and that’s going to take us to “What’s a Zestimate?”page- Zestimate home valuation is Zillow’s estimated market value. And they say it’s not an appraisal. It’s only Zillow’s estimated value but what I want to point out here is really the lack of accuracy in this for homeowners trying to establish real market value of their home.

Let’s look here…we have, “within 5% accuracy of the sale price; within 10% accuracy of the sale price; and within 20% accuracy of the sale price; and also the median error”. And you can go and look at your metro areas.

Here, we have Los Angeles – only 30% of the homes or 30% of the time will it be accurate within 5% and that might sound pretty good but I’m going to explain why it’s not in a minute. 54% within 10% of sale price; within 80% accurate within 20% of sale price and a median error of 9.0%; again, this might sound like okay within the margin of error but, within 20% of sale price…if your home is say, have a market value of $750,000. 20% of $750,000 is $150,000, so, it could be between $600,000 and $900,000 -that’s a huge window.

But I want to talk about this 5% column because a 30% accuracy…you might think 5% is pretty good. It’s not. And I want to tell you why. In our marketplace here on the Westside of Los Angeles, homes are selling within 1-2% of the list price -that’s right, 1-2%. So, you need to make sure your home is priced at market value if you want it to sell. What often times happen is, realtors and homeowners will establish a list price above market value and what’s going to happen is that, home typically will sit on the market until they have enough price reductions to bring it down to market value and then it will sell. Again, homes are selling on average within 1-2% of list price.

So, if we look at this 5%…it’s only 30% accurate. I, as a homeowner can’t really count on that at all. Really, the only way to know the real market value of your home is to pay an appraiser to appraise your home or have an experienced real estate agent show you comps of what is recently sold in the area -recently sold, that’s what we want to see (typically within the last 3 months). We could go back as far as 6 months but typically, we want to see what sold in the last 3 months to determine market value.

So, if you’re using the Zestimate, just be careful. And if you’re really thinking of selling your home, do not use the Zestimate; contact your realtor to have them do a comparative market analysis. If you have any questions or comments on this one, feel free to email me david@residerealestate.com. That’s going to do it for me today, thank you so much for checking out The Reside Daily Bite.

Welcome everybody to another episode of The Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette and I am throaty; my voice is about 75% and I was out of the office yesterday, so, there was no Bite yesterday. I was home sick and I did have just a little thought of recording a Bite at home but that would have been a disaster so, I didn’t.

Today’s bite is an interesting one. It’s an article that came out last week out of the San Diego Tribune titled, “Downsizing is Booming“. And it’s interesting because the first line says, “Goodbye, McMansion. Hello, bungalow, condo or suburban split-level.” So, what they’re saying is, really, the era of McMansion is over and people are going to be living in smaller homes and being a little more mindful of their space in a living.

That’s a trend I predicted a few years ago and started to see some of that as an architect; and I think we’re going to see more of that as we move along were people, rather than trading up to their homes, they’re probably going to stay in their home and maybe renovate their kitchen or knock down a wall or do something to their existing house. Smaller renovations are kind of what we’re seeing right now as people adjust to the market and to the economic that we are in.

I actually think it’s a good thing. I think it’s an opportunity for us as Americans to reprioritize our habits and a lot of what we’ve been doing. The articles say, “Median home size has dropped 6 percent since 2007, in large part because cash-strapped Americans can’t afford to buy, heat or maintain larger homes.” So, it is interesting when you buy a larger home it’s not just a larger purchase price that you have to deal with. You have the larger utility bills, the heating cost, and the cooling cost. So, a lot of people have been realizing this and what some people are doing in these bigger homes is, they are going to the short sale process (or have gone to the short sale process), renting in the interim and then their plan is to buy a smaller home in a couple of years.

So, I think living within our means is going to be a new cool. It’s a great article actuall…if you go to the San Diego Tribune -titled, “Downsizing is Booming“. It’s kind of a lengthy article but it is really good. And, I think that’s it. I’m about 75% here today.

That’s going to do it for me today, for The Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host. Thank you so much for checking us out.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette and today, I want to talk to you about an article that came out of the Orange County Register last week, entitled, “1 in 3 Unlikely to Qualify for Mortgage“.

So, what they’re saying is, 1 in 3 people will not qualify for mortgage and it was in an analysis that was done by Zillow; and they mentioned some credit score numbers. But what’s interesting is, borrowers with credit scores under 620, who requested purchase loan quotes for 30-year fixed, conventional loans were unlikely to even get a single loan quote on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace; even if they offered a relatively high downpayment of 15-25%.

According to MyFico.com, nearly 1/3 of the Americans, or 29.3%, has a credit score that low. Very interesting. And then it also says, not surprisingly, the analyst found that the lower interest rates went to borrowers who are among the 47% of Americans with primo credit scores of 720 or higher (So 720 or higher, you have a great credit score). And they give a little box here, if you’re above 720, your interest rate could be at 4.3% versus if it’s 620 to 639, you’re at 4.9%. So, a difference of 0.6% – that’s a lot. Let’s see, what Stan Humphries, Zillow’s Chief Economist said, “We’re getting in an area of historically low mortgage rates, reaching levels not seen in decades. Coupled with 4 years of home value declines, homes are more affordable than we’ve seen for years. But the irony here is that so many Americans can’t qualify for these low rates, or can’t even qualify for a mortgage at all”.

So, the lesson in all of these is making sure you talk to your lender -the very first thing you do if you’re considering buying a home. You want to know exactly how much you can afford based on your current income and the money that you earn. So, very first step before you even go out start looking at homes, looking at the right price range, make sure you are working with your lender. If you need any lender referrals, I have 3 very good lenders that I work with.

That’s going to do it for The Reside Daily Bite today, my name is David Doucette. Thank you so much for checking us out.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host David Doucette and today, we have this week’s weekly market report for the Westside of Los Angeles for the communities of Santa Monica, Venice, Mar Vista/Palms, West LA, Culver City and Westchester. You can also visit my website to download and print out this report. And that is residerealestate.com/blog and look for episode 059 and you can download it right there. Alright, let’s jump into the activity today. I want to talk specifically about Santa Monica.

Download the Market Report for the Week of October 2

In Santa Monica right now, we have 28 homes for sale under $1.2 M (the market we’re looking at); so, we have 28 homes for sale. We have 18 that are currently in escrow.  So, they’re in various stages of either home inspections or funding of the loan. We’ve had 17 homes expire or listings, I should say, expire in the last 6 months. We’ve had 54 closed transactions in the last 6 months. And the average sale price is $858,031. The average list price of the sold homes is $867,545. And I explained last week the ratio of the actual sale price to the list price of that sold home –and that’s 98.9%. Again, very important that sellers price their homes at market value. The average square footage is 1,371 sq ft. The average price per sq ft is $620. And the average days on the market is 54, which is pretty good. It’s a pretty active market here on the Westside.

Alright, let’s check out some activity the past week for Sept. 26^th to Oct 2^nd. We’ve had 55 new listings come on the market last week, which is a lot of activity. The week before, we had 40 come on. Also, -which I don’t like to see- 47 price reductions. That’s a lot of price reductions and there’s several reasons why we need to have price reductions but oftentimes, the list price is just unrealistic when it comes on to the market and I think it’s part of our job as realtors to educate the homeowners so we can price their home at market value. Accepted offers last week was 39 -that’s up 6 from the previous week. And then, sold, that is 18 -and that’s up 5 from the previous week. So, good market activity for the week of September 26^th to October 2^nd.

Again, you can download this at residerealestate.com/blog. Look for episode 059. That is going to do it for The Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host David Doucette. Thank you so much for checking us out.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of The Reside Daily Bite. I am here with Lee Fox of Koodooz and we’re getting ready to record a podcast interview. So, this is a little mini trailer of what you’re going to hear on the podcast. And Lee, what are we going to talk about today?

Lee: I guess it depends on the questions you ask me. We’re going to talk about youth empowerment, philanthropy and how to leverage the passion points of kids to have some community outcome.

David: And tell us in 3 sentences (because we’ve been talking for a little bit,) the mission of koodooz.

Lee: The mission is to heighten awareness for the impact that kids can have. I’d love to give the example of a little girl that wanted to do something for the BP oil spill and she contacted the Audubon society and said, “Hey, I can draw really well”. And she drew greeting cards -here own designs- raised a $175,000 to help rescue animals. So, these are the kinds of opportunities I want to bring to life for all kids.

David: Wow, very cool. So you guys can tune in to the podcast to hear more of these kinds of stories and you can find that at residerealestate.com/podcast and Lee, really quick, how do people find you?

Lee: www.koodooz.com -that’s my website, otherwise, I’m on Twitter @koodooz

David: That’s okay and if you’re wondering what koodooz, how she came up with that, I’m curious too and you’re going to have to tune in to the podcast to find that out. That’s is going to do it for us today, thank you so much for checking out The Reside Daily Bite

Happy Friday everybody and welcome to another episode of The Reside Daily Bite; I’m your host, David Doucette. Today, I want to talk to you about the Consumer Confidence Index. It’s still going to be a happy Friday after we’re done talking about it.

The Consumer Confidence Index is a number that is used to measure the confidence of how consumers feel about the economy based on their spending and saving habits. It’s a very important number because the Federal Reserve will look at that number when they’re deciding whether to make changes in the interest rate. The stock market pays attention to that number, as well. So, it’s a very important number.

How do we come up with it? Who does it? Well, the Conference Board, which is an independent economic research group, is the ones responsible for coming up with a Consumer Confidence Index and they do that based on 5,000 households; they do it monthly. And the reason I’m talking about this today, is they just released September’s number. It’s down from August by about 5 points. So, where we are right now (September); it is at 48.5. Our Consumer Confidence Number right now, in the United States, is 48.5. In August, it was 53.2. We’ve come down about 5 points.

Now, what does that mean? Well, we have to put it in historical perspective to really understand them. In September of 2000, the Consumer Confidence Index was up around 142. In September of 2007, it was down to about 112. That’s when it really started to quickly go down for about the next year and a half to about 50 or so. The lowest of the Consumer Confidence Index was March of 2009. It was 26.9.  We’ve been making our way up and in May of 2010 (so, May of this year); we were actually at 62.7. We’ve been kind of coming down a little bit since May and hopefully we’re going to see that numbers start to come up. It comes out monthly. It’s very important number to follow and you’ll probably hear it on the news. And, that is the Consumer Confidence Index number.

It’s still happy Friday here. I want to thank you so much for checking out The Reside Daily Bite.

Welcome everybody to another episode of The Reside Daily Bite. The title of this show today is called “Good Realtors Work, Great Realtors Network” and the evidence of that today (you didn’t know that, did you?) is I’m here at a Tweetup event that my co-host, Michele, and myself  put together. We did that to basically take Twitter, bring it offline, make more of a relationship here on the Westside community and build some relationships here.

So, Michele, how do you like doing the group?

Michele: It has been so great and I’ve made so many great friends and so great business relationships and actually got some business from it. I think, small, tight, focused networking is really the way to go. It doesn’t really do any good to meet 50 people in a night and just splatter your business cards all over. You have to really connect with people and find out what people do and how you can help each other.

David: Yeah. And it’s very cool because we’ve been doing this, I think, 5 months now and we’re getting a lot of people coming back. So, it’s a lot of that familiar faces. And Debra, who is one of our members, is doing the presentation tonight. And Debra is…well, I’ll let Debra… what are going to talk about tonight?

Debra: Well, tonight, I’m going to talk about the importance of networking and kind of like what Michele just said –is essential. If you’re going to network, you need to network live, as well as online, and find ways to leverage the real life relationships for online purposes. And when you’re networking online, find ways to expand those relationships. I kind of agree with what you’ve (Michele) just said but I have to add a little caveat towards this because I do the media-bistro networking events and we get hundreds of those. It is okay to meet a lot of people and then, trade business cards and connect with them online (Facebook and on Twitter) the next day. That way, you start developing rapport.  So the next time you encounter the same group of people, maybe you pick 5 or 10 that you meet in the event and develop a relationship. You go and see these people again and then, you pick a different batch. I do these networking parties and it’s so funny…I see my friends, and I give them a hug and say, “Thank you, it’s great that you came. I have to now go talk to people I don’t know”.

David: And that’s really what all this is about. You’ve mentioned it -rapport, relationships. That’s what we are building and that’s what a great realtor will do; because a great realtor needs to be in a community, establishing relationships. So if I need to refer an organizer to one of my clients, I refer Michele or if I need somebody who needs to put a blog together or write, I can refer to Debra. So, thank you for coming tonight.

Michele: And if I need a great realtor, I would definitely refer to David.

David: Oh well… I’ll take it, I’ll take it.

Debra: Yeah, I’m waiting to make my fortunes so I can have you (David) sell me a house and then, you (Michele) can organize it.

David: There you go.

Debra: And in the meantime, if any body needs a personal trainer for writers, my Twitter url is “writeononline”

David: Oh yeah, @writeononline…

Debra:  @writeononline (WriteOnOnline.com) If you’re a writer, an expert, an entrepreneur and you need a little bit of a shove in the right direction, you call me.

David: And what’s your Twitter, Michele?

Michele: I’m on Twitter: @orgmish. That’s o-r-g-m-i-s-h

David: And I’m on Twitter @residedavid. That’s going to do it for The Reside Daily Bite today; thank you so much for checking us out.

I discuss some overall figures, statistics and analysis for Westside housing Market. Also included in the discussion is the recent activity this past week for homes under $1.2 million in the communities of Santa Monica, Venice, Mar Vista and Palms, West LA, Culver City, and Westchester.

Download the Market Report for the Week of September 25

Welcome everybody to another episode of The Reside Daily Bite. I’m your host, David Doucette and today, we have our market report –our Westside market report for the week ending September 25th. We are going to look at homes under $1.2 million in the communities of Santa Monica, Venice, Mar Vista and Palms, West LA, Culver City, and Westchester.

So, let’s jump right into it. We’re definitely seeing some good market activity here on the Westside. Right now, there are 303 homes for sale; for pending escrow, we have 136 homes and what that means is, those are homes that are in the escrow process, homes that buyers have put offers in on and the seller has accepted. So, they’re in various stages of home inspections or getting their loan funded.

We’ve had 147 listings expire in the last 6 months (I think that is a little higher than I would like to see). We’ve had 471 homes closed in the last 6 months; again, this is under $1.2 million in the 6 neighborhood communities. The average list price is just over $754,000. The average sale price (what it has sold for) averaged $743,000. And, the ratio between the two is 98.6%.

Now, I’m going to explain this list price to sale price. Very important, if you’re a seller or thinking about selling watching this, you need to pay attention to this statistic. What the list price is? This is the list price of the home that sold the average (that’s what it was at) –this is $743,000 (it’s what it sold at).

If you look across the board, you can see all of these numbers are within 1-2% of the list price of the sold homes. So, what that means is, homes are selling within 1-2% of the list price of market value. The issue here is, if you’re a seller and you price your home above market value, chances are, it’s not going to sell until you do price reductions to get it down to market value because as you can see by this chart, buyers are buying within 1-2% of market value. So, definitely pay attention to that. The average square foot -the average size of the home- is 1,457 sq ft. The average price per square foot is $515. And, the average days on market is 54. This is pretty good, especially in today’s environment; this is a pretty good number.

And let’s jump over to Westchester here for a second. Look at this, 30 days on the market in this community. The larger home here is 1,652 sq ft, so your money or your purchase price can go a little further in the areas of Westchester (as you can see: $426/sq ft).

Let’s check out some activity this past week. 40 new listings in the market; 27 price reductions (again, I was just talking about pricing it at market value); and, 33 accepted offers (so that means 33 people have opened escrow in the past week). That certainly is a good sign and we’ve had 13 properties closed escrow in the past weeks –that is a good sign as well.

You can find this video, not sure where you’re watching it, but you can find it on my website, ResideRealEstate.com, look under Reside Daily Bite. Look for episode number 55. You can download this chart and print it out so you can keep it as a reference.

My name is David Doucette. I want to thank you so much for checking out, The Reside Daily Bite.