Irvine Housing Blog

Not sure if Kurtyboy are up yet or not, but duh,
you spelt “mi” wrong, and “spel” are missing another “l”; wait, “wurd” should being spelt with an “o”, and “ron” are completely spelt incorrectly.

I are great speller, but not so well on Grammer…

Good for you.

That is why the ‘Maverick’ is going to lose the election.

He has deviated so far from what the average person would consider ‘conservative values’ that he has made himself look like a pandering fool. 

They go popping off about ‘socialism this, socialism that’ while pushing wooden-arrow bailout bills, free money for irresponsible borrowers, etc, but by god willing to fight tooth and nail to prevent those sinning homos from having equal domestic privileges as the godly straights. 

I used to have a lot of respect for McCain, but it has been all but lost in watching him flip and back-peddle over and over again throughout his campaign.

Apparantly I am not the only one as I read yesterday that Arizona has gone from ‘Strong McCain’ to now just ‘Leaning McCain’.  Obviously the intellectually honest Republicans here refusing to carry the water for a loser of a platform.

Ron Paul was their man.  Whoops!

You are 100% correct. John McCain should have worried about the 94% of those that aren’t losing their homes and about those that have been forced to rent because they refused to take exotic irresponsible mortgages. If McCain would have though about those and created tax breaks that would create income tax deductions for money put towards down payments, he may have had a chance.

Just wait until the 2000 rollbacks are complete and this place and the others are selling in the 200K range.  There are going to be some very unhappy knife catchers in this neighborhood.

Someone should start an ad to play on the television over there that says “Would you like to lose 200K in 2 years while working from home?  Buy my guide to real-estate and we’ll show you properties like this condo that are destined for your financial ruin!  Act now before all the falling knives are caught!”

The seller is purely trying to salvage as much of their FICO as can be tenable in their situation.

They are trying to find the lowest possible number that the bank will accept which is why you keep seeing the piddly little decrements. 

The bank will go ahead and give the seller some false hope in the meantime, figuring that they might as well get a few more payments out of these people before they eventually default and another foreclosure to deal with.  In the meantime, the sellers will keep making their mortgage payment, thinking that the bank is working with them.

At this point, it is in the bank’s best interest to keep sellers like these strung along and stalled while the payments are still showing up and the other foreclosures work their way through the system.

I would say to today’s seller:

Quit stressing yourself out.  Put the keys in the mail and go find yourself a nice rental somewhere.  Take your FICO licks, suck it up, and move on.  The bank is just playing you with all this short sale stuff.

I saw a place pop up in my redfin emails almost every day for a month or so. They were changing the price every day by a few bucks (up or down) so that it would appear in a search as an “updated” listing.

Clearly, these people are chasing the market down, but I think that the strategy of doing it weekly might make some sense to try to generate new people walking through the place every weekend.

However, after 3-5 of these weekly cuts, if I were in the market, I’d show up and offer them 30-40K below whatever they were asking, telling them “would you rather get this now or in a month?” So, I think the strategy can quickly become counterproductive.

Depends how you look at it.  $300/month HOAs are reasonable considering you have access to pools, the Woodbridge beach area, and other amenities.

Great if you have kids and you don’t have to worry about having a pool in your backyard.

You should check out some of the condos in Turtle Rock that have $500 month HOAs…now that’ll leave a mark.

P.S.  I like the description on this place how it says it’s close to the 405 freeway…no shit…you’re practically living on it!  Location…location…location…

Is it really a nice neighboorhood?  All of Irvine can seem like a creepy potemkin village, but the part of it north of the 405 is possibly the creepiest.

Just a matter of time.  Certain areas of the country leave the denial phase of the mania slower than others.

Wow…that’s hardcore.  Not as bad as a 75% drop from the peak in Palmdale though.

50% drop from the peak in Irvine?  Maybe, maybe not but Irvine is no Sacramento…people actually want to live here.

I’m not trying to defend these high HOA fees - they are high - but its important to note that these fees do include your homeowners/fire insurance in addition to the maintenance of the parks, pools, etc.  And in my opinion the Woodbridge associations do a good job of maintaining the properties.  In my neighborhood in the last 5 years they have replaced the fences, put in new roofs, painted the exterior of the house, and they do a good job on the regular gardening on the exterior of the house.  But I agree that these HOA fees essentially amount to increased costs of ownership that must be factored in when you are consdiering buying a property!

Actually, the Woodbridge HOA is $73/mo. and is by far the best value in Irvine (given that you are getting 20 pools, 40 tennis courts, etc.).  Compare to Northpark or Quail Hill which are more $$/mo. and provide fewer (though newer) facilities.  In places like Quail Hill, you pay a lot of HOA to maintain slopes and greenbelts on hills which are more costly than flatter areas like Woodbridge.

The bulk of the HOA associated with this unit is not for Woodbridge, but rather the local condo association and covers the usual condo upkeep (exterior, paint, roof, insurance, trash, landscape, ...).

Second, Irvine is full of public parks.  Some of the larger parks in Woodbridge are actually public Irvine parks as designated by the “City of Irvine”  words under the signs.

IMO, convenience.  And many HOA dues include common area/external maintenance on properties.  Our place is getting painted right now.

I think Irvine goes with the local pools in order to keep the crowds down and maybe lawsuits as well.  If you had just a few large public pools it might attract folks from surrounding communities thus making it less private.  Ever been to an LA County public pool?

What’s nice about Irvine is you can drive 10 minutes to the beach but it’s also nice not to have to get in your car and walk down the street to the pool.  I don’t like to drink and drive.

The HOAs do lessen the amount you can borrow but all depends what your needs are…different strokes for different folks I guess.

Let’s see; Mr. Republican Bush has done so well with the last eight years. The entire country is circling the drain; you REALLY want another Republican in office? Especially such an even tempered guy like whack job McPain?? Perhaps you’d rather Caribou (boob) Palin? She’s about smart as a box of rocks; but I’ll give her this, she’s a pushy bitch; West Hollywood got it right.

Maybe our country needs some shaking up; maybe it’s time for someone besides “right of eminent domain” white men to give this country a wake up call. (If you’re wondering I am white and sick of the status quo.) It’s always been about rich white men in this country; this, I might add, included our founding fathers who decided we were really too stupid to elect our own president, hence the electoral college.

Maybe YOU need to wake up!

“40% decrease in property values we could foresee a 40% decrease in municipal services (based on property taxes) IN ONE YEAR- do you REALLY want to go there”

Let’s see, a 40% decline from peak puts us at 2002 prices or so?  I don’t recall municipal services lacking in 2002, so I don’t mind if they do fall to that level. 

In fact, I think municipal services were even better in 1997, so let’s let values drop to there!

First, I sincerely doubt that Obama is “the most socialist candidate ever.” In fact, I don’t remember anyone tossing around that term about him at all before his comment to Joe the Plumber. I’m not saying I’m sure he’s not, but one wonders if Humphrey was more so.

Second, so what? The US has one of the most liberal (in the classic sense of the word, meaning favoring less government intervention in the economy, what we here in the US call “fiscally conservative”) governments of all western democracies. If the US were to elect a more “socialist” person, it’s in the context of the US’s overall liberalism. Even if Obama is the “most socialist candidate ever”, we’ll move a step closer to Canada. We’d still be at the far end of the scale.

Finally, voting for Obama because you think McCain’s plans are too “socialist” might actually make a ton of sense for a lot of people. You’re assuming that a voter is a single-issue voter. Take a fiscally conservative, socially liberal voter, for example. Ordinarily, maybe that voter might be torn. But, if McCain is proposing policies that are similar to Obama’s on the fiscal dimension (not the same, but the difference is more slight), then perhaps you consider both candidates bad on the issue, but you like McCain slightly more. But you might like Obama a lot more on other issues. Decreased differences in policies on one dimension increase the weight given to differences on other dimensions.