.
.
Wouldn't it be nice if prices really did go up forever? Wouldn't it be great if none of us had to work, and we could all just live off the appreciation of our houses? There really isn't much difference between believing in the magical kool aid of the bubble and believing in other forms of magical thinking. It is a wonderful fantasy, and believing in endless price appreciation must feel very good. I guess perpetual house price appreciation is the adult version of Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. If I had been able to drink the kool aid, I would have been less distressed by what I witnessed in 2004 through 2006. Ignorance really can be bliss.
How many homeowners are out there waiting for the good times to come again? I think Tom Petty put it well:
.
Well the good old days may not return
And the rocks might melt, and the sea may burn
I'm learning to fly but I ain't got wings
Comin' down is the hardest thing
Well some say life will beat you down
Break your heart, steal your crown
So I started out for God knows where
But I guess Ill know when I get there
Im learning to fly around the clouds
But what goes up must come down
Learning to Fly — Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Asking Price: $544,000
Income Requirement: $136,000
Downpayment Needed: $108,800
Monthly Equity Burn: $4,533
Purchase Price: $645,000
Purchase Date: 3/16/2007
Address: 63 Burlingame, Irvine, CA 92602
| Beds: | 2 |
| Baths: | 3 |
| Sq. Ft.: | 1,475 |
| $/Sq. Ft.: | $369 |
| Lot Size: | – |
| Type: | Condominium |
| Style: | Contemporary |
| Year Built: | 2001 |
| Stories: | Two Levels |
| View(s): | City Lights |
| Area: | Northpark |
| County: | Orange |
| MLS#: | S521978 |
| Status: | Active |
| On Redfin: | 47 days |
Corporate relocation home. Competely detached. Large wrap-around yard. View. New paint throughout. Gorgeous hardwood floors. 2 master suites plus den area. Gorgeous hardwood floors. Prestigeous guard-gated community.
Competely Prestigeous.
Three and four word sentences. I like the economy of words.
.
.
The title history on this property is a bit unclear. Sitex still shows the 2004 purchaser as the current owner, and it does not pick up a 2007 transaction referenced in Redfin. If someone did pay $645,000 for this place in March 2007, the 2004 owner (whose outstanding debt was $619,800 after her refinance) got very lucky. Perhaps this was a corporate relocation. If so, the corporation is a bagholder, and they are going to lose at least $133,640 after a 6% commission.
I hope you have enjoyed this week at the Irvine Housing Blog. Come back next week as we continue chronicling ‘the seventh circle of real estate hell.’ Have a great weekend.
🙂
We have featured this neighborhood before:
https://www.irvinehousingblog.com/2007/07/26/burlingame-over/
17 Burlingame is now bank owned:
http://www.redfin.com/stingray/do/printable-property?external_id=5842022
That is another example of a bank-owned property that is not on the market.
—–
Oh wow! A “wrap-around” yard! YES!!! YES!!!!!
And it even comes complete with a gate babysitter to make me feel safe!
I notice that they mention “gorgeous hardwood floors” twice. They must be very nice! This place is really worth $400K and that’s a stretch.
I was going to make comment on the “large” yard. In Irvine, a 20′ wide swath around your condo is spacious.
Did anyone else grow up playing football and baseball in their back yard? I guess it becomes obvious I didn’t grow up in Irvine — unless we are talking about playing football and baseball on a Gameboy…
At $2500/month rent and 160 GRM, you are right on at $400k.
That is 26.5% below asking.
My brother and I both grew up in a house that sat on one acre, we used to play baseball and football with friends in the back yard all the time. Or we would go out behind the house and build forts. Both parents are school teachers (which does not pay squat in AZ) and were still able to afford that nice house when just starting a family. In their same position back then in today’s market, they would not be able to buy that same house. It’s kind of sad.
The same purchasing power today will only buy you a shanty on the side of the road.
Agreed, 400K will pull in a knife catcher. But still a ways to drop even after that.
High $400s will be the next knife catcher price on this property AZ… The buyer after that, who really won’t be much of a knife catcher, will get it for $400K.
Redfin appears to be correct IMO re: that March sale. The assessor has a 2007 supplemental tax bill that was paid with the $645K value.
My house growing up in South OC did not have a huge yard by any means, but it was enough to play some soccer. We even got a basketball hoop out there for a few years. The family and friends time was priceless.
I have already decided I want my kids one day to be growing up in a legitimate yard like the one I had – even if it’s relatively modest. Or, at least in a place that has easy access to a large greenbelt.
It’s interesting to me to see people in other parts of the country where it’s their “thing” that they want a lot of land – kind of an extension of the American ideal of owning as much land as possible.
Perhaps it’s a bit parallel to people here who just “need” that “gourmet” kitchen. People here generally don’t seem to expect to be able to have that much space, unless of course you’re talking about luxury homes. The lots seem to continue to shrink. I’ll be able to flip burgers on my neighbors’ stove from my bed if this keeps up.
my biggest gripe about living here is being constantly told by everyone when I mention not liking the yard on a house is that “we use public spaces” – and it is always said like I just haven’t “adjusted” to the culture yet. Irvine has great parks – absolutely wonderful and I love them but even with the parks I still feel that I want an outside area for my kids to play in that is private – where they are not overpowered by bigger, less than well behaved kids.
Where we lived before we had 6 acres and NO parks which wasn’t great either – has to be a good medium somewhere!!!
Ipoplaya –
This place is heading back to its rightful place in the 200’s. It’s a small condo made for first-time buyers or people retiring on fixed incomes.
People such as yourself who like to show off and brag about how wealthy they are wouldn’t want to live here. It’s not flashy enough. There is not enough granite and stainless steel to impress the Jones’s.
When are people going to forget the past, shake their heads clear and look objectively at a situation? They want well over half a million dollars for 3-bed CONDO. In Irvine (no view, no nothing). It’s a 3-bed condo ladies and gentlement and half a million dollars is a boat load of money.
Forget what it sold for in the past or what could be. A half million for your basic, cookie cutter condo is completely insane. Look for this to be in the low 300s and maybe, just maybe, it will sell. Here comes that 50% drop peak-to-trough.
Our back yard was large enough to host small football games. Inevitably the ball or someone would land in my mom’s flower garden. It was a huge hassle for my parents, especially the broken windows.
My point is Irvine offers beautiful, large open spaced parks to play sports. It would be a shame not take advantage of it.
Personally, I would like to see more parents encourage their kids to put down the Gameboy and head to the park to play sports.
Football played a huge factor in my life.
It taught me at an early age the importance of teamwork and built my self-confidence.
I was no Matt Leinart but got a lot from playing the sport.
You are failing to realize that these neighborhoods reside on top of sacred land. Blessed by the pope.
It is pretty ridiculous how certain CA residents have become so disconnected from reality that a half-million dollars does not even sound like a lot of money to them. Well, I suppose it is not a lot of money because they have become accustomed to obtaining all that money by making a quick phone call to a bank who promptly piles the cash onto a silver platter and delivers it to their door.
I call them the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” crowd. They have watched too many Deal-Or-No-Deals to the extent that 500K or even a million dollars has become so trivial these days that it can be won on a television show.
It’s going to be a swift kick in the balls to many of these homeowners when they cannot find anyone to buy their houses as the money spigot has gone dry and all the first time buyers have chosen to rent instead.
That place is pretty similar to what I live in now AZ, just a bit smaller but built in the same year, so I figure a nice double-income professional family would spend the equivalent of $2300-2500 in rent on it. That puts the bottom value in the mid $300K range I’d think.
I do have granite though. Had the white DalTile in the kitchen forever but finally got tired of grout this past year. I don’t know who the Jones’s are, they surely have not visited my home…
Hi,
Great stuff…
Have you promoted this blog on Fast Pitch!(www.fastpitchnetworking.com)? It’s an online business network that has as one of it’s features a way to promote your blog to their audience of small business owners.
FP was actually just named Website of The Week by MSNBC’s ‘Your Business’ show for small business owners.
If you’re already on another network (LinkedIn, etc.) – no problem. Fast Pitch! takes a completely different approach. Compare Networks: http://www.fastpitchnetworking.com/comapre.cfm
Keep up the good work!
Tammy
Those must have been interesting football and baseball games in the back yard in Arizona when it’s 110 degrees. I grew up in Hawaii and I thought we had small yards there but at least we had enough room to play a game of jarts or setup a target and shoot arrows at it. I can’t imagine doing that in a typical Irvine yard….
On a side note – the formatting of the comments is looking good today….was something fixed?
Dano
$375k – $400k by 2010. $99k if it was in Tempe, AZ.
CK –
I would like to see your theory on how people are going to pay 400K for a condo when a great deal of the “high paying” jobs in your community have gone PFFF!
Please. Do tell.
2300.00 a month to rent this place. That’s a riot.
A lot of people seem think that AZ is 110 degrees all the time. It’s not like that. A few months out of the year it is that hot.
We also had a pool in the back yard. The hot temperatures made the water temperatures quite pleasant! Lot’s of Marco Polo games!
I still think paying over $500K for two bedrooms is insulting. I don’t care how fancy the kitchen tile is, how great the wood floor is, how wonderful the little yard is, blah blah blah. If you pay over $500K you should have at least three bedrooms. That’s IT.
I totally agree, A half a million for a condo then add the taxes and the association fees and your probably looking at close to a $4000 monthly payment. Almost anyone from outside of the area would think how absurd that would be but not in south Cal! People there actually contemplate it and some even take the plunge.
I totally agree, A half a million for a condo then add the taxes and the association fees and you’re probably looking at close to a $4000 monthly payment. Almost anyone from outside of the area would think how absurd that would be but not in south Cal! People there actually contemplate it and some even take the plunge.
I grew up out of state and lots were measured in acreage, not footage. We lived on a 3/4 acre lot. You could play football or baseball in the backyard and we had a basketball hoop (with enough room for a three point line) in the driveway out front. I want that kind of space for my kids. Sadly, you just can’t get that kind of lot size around Orange County without paying big, big bucks or moving to the fire zone.
“Wouldn’t it be great if none of us had to work, and we could all just live off the appreciation of our houses?”
This is exactly the thing I was getting scared to see in people’s psyche. Almost every one believes that getting rich means finding and entering next speculative bubble in its infancy and getting out before it bursts. Greenspan & Bernanke have done a lot of damage to this country by slowly making common public addictive of asset bubbles. People forgot that getting rich means hard work, entrepreneurship and risk taking. That is going to come back again, but we will become a lot poorer relative to China when we get there.
I think your assumption is wrong, David. Notwithstanding the couple in San Clemente profiled in the article, “a great deal” of the high paying jobs in Orange County are still jobs and are still high paying — at least for now. The rental market is liquid and fluid. You can’t argue that those aren’t market rents. You’ve made the point that rents will go down, but they aren’t cratering the way prices are. It is what it is, and no amount of snarky comments from you are going to change that.
I pay $2,450 for a place that is 125 sq ft smaller than this. And I’m very comfortable with that number. One way to think about it, AZ, which I hope helps to put it into perspective:
The big 4 accounting firm I work for establishes a standard pay scale for each role within the firm. Since all roles are universal across geographies, we then assign a salary differential based on the market — where each city is assigned a % of the national average “base” for the role.
For instance, St. Louis is set at a 100% level, because we have determined they are an “average” priced market. New York, San Francisco, and LA/OC are all set at 120%. Phoenix? 92.5%. As a matter of fact, as I look at the schedule, Phoenix is the same % as Des Moines, IA.
Perhaps that will explain that while $2,300 or $400k strikes you are ridiculous, it’s a little more manageable here. I’m not saying its cheap for us, or that its even the right number because we certainly continue to be overpriced. But you need to factor in some differential to our markets as you formulate your analyses, particularly regarding rents.
And no, you don’t need to quote me the median income from the census? We’ve had that conversation.
I had to pay for every window I broke. Back then, it was about $35 for a garage door window (most likely to break) and more for a house window. That was like 2 months allowance! If I didn’t have the cash, I had to work extra jobs for my dad to make the money. But then I wised up and paid a few bucks extra for fiber glass windows in the garage — they didn’t break. They looked like crap, but I told my parents that if I was paying for them, it got to choose. To this day (at least the last time I was there), that house has half glass windows and half fiberglass windows in the garage doors.
Ditto on the value of playing football. I liked basketball more as a sport, but football was a better lesson for life.
Moved out to LA area in 2003 from the Deep South with my wife right after we both finished graduate school (Ph.D. sciences). Within a year of us both having a real job (grad school had a stipend of $15k/year each) we decided to buy a house. Our loan broker approved us for $1.1 Million dollars. I laughed so hard that I nearly fell out of my chair. Bought a house in the mid-500’s in spring 2004, sold it in spring 2007 for mid-600’s (missed the peak badly!) and moved to Chicago. I’ll be coming back to live in California whenever I can spell Million without capitalizing it.
Completely agree, skek. While we love to sensationalize instances such at the San Clemente fools, but they are certainly not the rule. So there were 4,100 mortgage jobs lost in Irvine. Are there not something north of 150,000 jobs in Irvine? And then you have the great OC jobs that people in Irvine also commute to? (like me, live in Irvine, work in CM)
Further, I’m not sure how many of these mortgage jobs we can classify as “high paying”. I bet more of them than we think were people grunting out applications for $60k a year, and commuting back and forth to Corona.
And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I sure have not noticed much difference in how long it takes me to get from Bristol to Culver on the 405 at 5:30pm….So at least some people still have jobs.
Same here.
TWO bedroom not Three.
TWO
Great story, didn’t know about fiber glass windows.
When one of the windows broke everyone would immediately scatter (myself included) and hit the exit before our parents came out.
Skek’s right, which sport doesn’t matter the important thing is to find one that you like and play it.
Two bedrooms with $450 in HOA and mello-roos before you even tackle the mortgage, property tax, insurance or maintenance. Add the $550 a month property taxes on the asking sales price and you’re at $1000/month in new expense for the privilege of owning.
When property tax, mello-roos and HOA are nearly half the rental value, properties will have a long way to fall.
Even at $300K, the the taxes, HOA & mello-roos still eat $750/month.
“My point is Irvine offers beautiful, large open spaced parks to play sports. It would be a shame not take advantage of it.”
Except all weekend long and half the week nights are over-run by organized sporting groups like AYSO. So sorry, no room for you and a pick-up game, casual neighbor kids game or anything else. It’s league play.
I’m well aware of your different markets, CK.
It has to do with your own salary information. You earn more on average in CA….But not THAT MUCH more. Certainly not enough to justify your incredibly inflated housing and rent costs.
When I compare the median salaries in my field between here and California, there is about a 6K difference on average yet your housing and rent costs are almost double our costs here.
Divide that 6K by 12 months and it leaves you with a whopping 500.00 extra per month which does not cover the difference.
I am not evening mentioning the extra money you spend on gasoline creeping up and down those freeways on your 40 mile commutes.
If you want an acre of land, try escondido or temecula. I’m sure people in NYC would love 3/4 an acre but obviously due to density thats just not possible.
It may be sad that your parents could afford lots of land on a mediocre teacher’s salary but good things don’t last forever. For example, a good friend of mine in his late 50s manged to purchase one mid-sized and one large home in California on a postman’s salary while raising three kids. Those days are long gone.
Today, you could probably only afford to rent an apartment in Santa Ana on a postman’s salary. I would probably go nuts and shoot up the place after a few years….
I should add by “purchase” I mean “paid off”. These are conservative folks who don’t squander money and pay their mortgage first.
IR, you seems to nitpick on property descriptions. Let’s see if you can pick on this one:
Desirably located with panoramic views of the hills, close to top-rated Elementary School, & easy access to & Hwy. , this approx. 2-year young, 3-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom townhome faces the community park. It features approx. 1,670 sq. ft. of living space with an open light floor plan; living room with high ceiling & granite-façade fireplace; gourmet kitchen that is great for entertaining with granite countertops, cooking island with breakfast bar, & pass-through to dining room; cozy family room that opens to kitchen; impressive master bedroom suite with French doors leading to balcony & dual sink vanity in bathroom; hardwood/tile/carpet flooring; 2-car garage; laundry room; enclosed patio; central A/C & heating; & more.
This **was** my property last year.
Based on the salary differential my company uses (120% for OC vs. 92.5% for Phoenix) that $6k variance in your field would mean you make about $22k? Yeah, I can see that $2,300 for rent might strike you as a bit steep.
BTW, my commute is 4.1 miles. The people who commute 40 miles live in Riverside. My guess is the housing prices in Riverside are very comparable to yours.
That’s funny, CK.
Yeah, Orange County companies in my industry uses New York City, Los Angeles, San Fran and (to a lesser extent) Chicago as “market” for compensation. Phoenix is considered a second tier market and pays about 25-30% less. Interestingly, San Diego is also considered second tier. You make 25% less if you live in Oceanside and commute south than if you live in San Clemente and commute north.
And to be clear, that’s not a statement about quality, but a reflection of cost of living and the competition for qualified personnel, which is intense in the top tier markets.
I think skek means acrylic/Plexiglass or polycarbonate/Lexan window, not fiber glass. You can’t see thru a panel made with fiber glass due to the orientation of the fiber.
Thanks, 7. I’m sure you are right.
Ain’t that the turth:
“Im learning to fly around the clouds
But what goes up must come down”
I’d like to add that many people dismiss truth as being a doom and gloomer. I think the ones that saw what was happening and swallowed their pride and cut their losses short or had the patience to wait, those are the next winners. I’m begging to see them every day in or market.
touché Nonesuch.
I grew up on an acre in CO, and both of my parents were also school teachers. The house was about $100/sqft, not including the basement, and they bought it in 1986. I’ve seen homes in CO for about $100/sqft currently, which makes me re-think the whole “inflation hedge” mentality.
It makes me laugh when I look at the income requirement; an income of $136,000 must put you in the top 10%-15% of households. If this is the extent of what they can afford I’d hate to see how the rest of the nation lives. Prices have a long way to fall. Even $300k seems overpriced for this. Then again, some people have lower standards than me.
Do the HOA’s allow people to even walk on the green belts, let alone kids to play soccer or baseball in Irvine? I have found that the people that live near the green belts are the bitchy ones that think they own all the common area they can see from their windows.
Forget it! I have fought that war; never again will I live under the control of the Nazi HOA boards.
Walking or playing on the green belts in our community is at your own risk, since many of the dead beat dog owners feel it is someone else’s job to clean up after their mutt.
Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding!
Thank you!
As an investor: if it rents for 2300 month; – $300 HOA = $2000.
– 10 % property manager = $1800 month.
>>> $21,600 yr. income.
7% interest rate, 1.2 % tax, .8% utilities, insurance, vacancy, misc. ~9% total.
In a flat market, ie, not counting on appreciation:
$21,600 / .09 = $240,000 would be about break even.
In a dropping market, depression environment with possible increasing interest rates, it would have to go lower to accomodate the price, rental value, and vacancy risks.
Rule of thumb from 1978 when I bought first rental was 10x gross for SFH rental investment; interest was running about 10%.
Exactly. It shouldn’t take two people earning 70K to be able to afford a place like this. If you can’t understand that then you have been brain damaged by excessive Kool Aid intoxication.
The very thought of this thing selling for 300K should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You should be feeling a serious disturbance in the force.
4100 jobs will be a drop in the bucket by the time it’s over.
It’s just getting started, CK. Be patient.
Your realtor possesses advanced writing skills. The “2-year young” reference is a bit odd, but he or she appropriately used semicolons (with the exception of ; & more) to create a complex sentence structure. I have seen maybe two or three of that caliber here in Irvine.
Truth be told, English was never my best subject, and I still struggle with grammar, but the writing of most local realtors is so bad, it is easy to make fun of it.
Well that may be true, but it shouldn’t discourage you from hopping in the car and heading to another nearby park, which in Irvine are numerous.
If Meadowood Park is crowded, I simple walk a short ways to Citrus Glen. No need to over-think it.
Godwin’s Law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
Have you all seen how banks are turning a “blind eye” to foreclosures? Too many backlogged, courts are overwhelmed. People staying longer for free! Ain’t it a beautiful country? Living in a million dollar house for free!!!
http://seekingalpha.com/article/71236-banks-blind-eyes-distorting-foreclosure-rate
Ladies and gentlemen of IHB, may I suggest that we ban Kindra’s IP address and then respond in kind, perhaps with a well orchestrated google-bomb? I leave it to the more tech-savvy types of formulate the specific plan.
IMHO, the property and assoc fees are so high in Irvine. Therefore, all the messages posted on this board regarding investment calculation are wrong. The month rent *160 just not apply in most of Irvine area. This will justify why we think this property only worth no more $350k.
For example, the property tax in Woodbury is around 1.8% and in northpark is around 1.6%. This is much high than traditional 1.0. Also there are two assoc fees, total around $360/month. So a $2500 rent, the landlord can only get around $1800. The correct calculation should be: $1800 * 200 = $360K. (Should be 200 because house in Irvine is easy to rent out)
My understanding is that investors in real estate (usually aparments, not SFRs) look for a 12% return, 7% is low. You need a higher return to take on risks involved, otherwise you would just buy gold.
$2300/month – $300 HOA – $200 taxes = $1800/month
$1800 x 12/.12 = $150,000 = price when speculators will jump in.
Will we see this happen????
Who knows
CK
I hope you don’t work for the big 4 firm that audited New Century (KPMG I believe)…. who knows, when the blank hits the blank we may be down to the big 3….
The IP address for Kindra’s site is 64.202.163.9
I can’t remember the syntax for a ping of death… I’ve got six servers pinging that site on constant loop right now. Just need someone to help me increase the packet size!
A big ole 4.3% unemployment rate in OC… Oooo Aaahh, so many people out of work. Our unemployment rate has been holding steady for essentially the past eight months. It ticked up over 4% when the mortgage jobs went poof, and hasn’t changed much since then.
“a great deal of the “high paying” jobs in your community have gone PFFF!”
Sorry AZ, but that statement is uninformed and moronic. The mortgage biz was/is a small fraction of the employment base in the Orange County area. For every 100 mortgage workers that bit the dust, probably only 5 or them made six figures. Most were loan processors, junior underwriters, call center people, insides sales, admins and customer service types. These people were making $30-50K per year… That might be “high paying” in your neck of the woods, but it sure isn’t here.
I had a small mortgage company in my building go under. It was mostly staffed by hot young party chicks that would normally make $10-12/hour somewhere and because the biz was booming, likely were pulling in double that. Trust me, they weren’t the home buyer types…
What ole AZ fails to realize is that at $400K, assuming a hypothetical young couple has 20% down on this condo, buying is likely cheaper than renting based on today’s mortgage rates and today’s rents.
I guess you think people will pay a premium to rent vs. own huh AZ? Home prices will not fall below rental equivalency for any sustained amount of time.
ipoplaya,
You place more faith in that particular government statistic than I do. The measure of unemployment is gamed by dropping the chronically unemployed from the count. Also, many of the jobs that did disappear were non-W2 jobs that wouldn’t show up in the unemployment figures anyway.
Thanks IR. I’m glad I found the *right* realtor….sold my house back in late August of last year at a small loss (less than $5k).
Arizona isn’t that cheap. I live in a very moderate mid-town neighborhood in Tucson and only a block away a quite nice, but not at all fancy, apartment complex converted to condos in the bubble years, but didn’t quite finish the conversion before the collapse. They are selling one-bedroom units of about 900 sq. ft. that are not nearly as nice as this place for 80K, roughly, and they are indeed selling them — it’s by no means sold out, but they’re unloading at least a couple of units a month at that price. So, while this blog isn’t about Arizona, my guess is that for something of this quality in Tempe you’d be looking at over 200K.
I agree with Lisa above. The prop tax with the inclusion of the so-called Mello-Roos makes newer properties in Irvine highly expensive to maintain. This property was probably built and sold around $350k before the kool-aid bubble starts to sink into Irvine.
I wouldn’t touch this property even at $350k.
Ben: “we will not let price drop 10% each year”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx1OCuevyLU
So far 1 year with +10% drop, wait for two-three more years of +10% drop, wet dream Ben
The unemployment indicators are one bit of data. I’m in the business of putting people to work in Orange County. We haven’t noticed much fall off in terms of requirements for new resources over the past 6-9 months… The revenue coming out of my OC branch operation has been steady.
Maybe that will change, but the employment picture in OC is not bleak at all at this time as a general rule. It likely is for those in mortgage, and maybe some in construction, but other industries have yet to falter significantly.
Hey, and if things were really that bad, our fave 33 Triple Leaf wouldn’t have gone into escrow today!
In a normal market, a landlord can actually make money by renting out the units. I know it sounds outlandish. Start the horse laughing, Ipoplaya.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/04/news/economy/recession_jobs/index.htm?cnn=yes
200K sounds about right for AZ. I put it in the 250K to 270K for CA at the current income differential.
Godwin’s law only applies if we call each other Nazis. However, it probably isn’t a good idea.
The thing about people like ipop…
The same people worked at Bear Stearns too, I’m sure they would have blogged the same thing about emplyment on Friday and then came Monday and boom, they were gone..
There are statistics and there are statistics.
Let me give you the perspective from the IT recruiting/staffing/consulting industry alan, and please note, I live this day-to-day and make my bonus based on this business…
Today in OC, we still have way more work requirements for skilled professional IT workers than we do candidates. Our challenge is not to get the business, it’s to find the recruit. A secondary challenge is to find people to work for us as most of the major players in staffing/recruiting/consulting have been doing quite well and talented sales people and recruiters are routinely poached for bigger and better comp.
This also holds true for the three other markets we are in, although I would say much less so for Denver. There is talent there and not a ton of hiring. In Charlotte, lots of jobs and hiring and not nearly enough talent. This is a bit surprising as Charlotte is dominated by financial services, banking, and insurance. BOFA and Wachovia are still spending lots of bucks on IT projects…
Will we return to the days of the tech recession, when in OC you had multiple good candidates for a single job opening? I have no idea, but I am quite sure its not that way today, at least in the IT space…
$60k/year is low paying? What f*cking planet are you from? That’s higher than the national median household income!
This 2 bedroom condo can rent no more than $2300/month.
The reference to entertaining is so funny!! With my family, it’s called bringing your beer and lawn chairs and setting them up on the LAWN and PORCH and having a good ol’ time. Fook this granite stuff and hanging out in a kitchen.
I’m just signing up here and want to thank all the regulars for the entertaining and insightful comments.
>> Let me give you the perspective from the IT recruiting/staffing/consulting industry
I can translate: I’m a salesman. I convince myself that truth is what works to my advantage. I viciously attack the credibility of anyone who possesses facts or opinions that contradict me.
<<<...my biggest gripe about living here is being constantly told by everyone when I mention not liking the yard on a house is that "we use public spaces" >>>
Public spaces in Irvine equals unbuildable land that is either unstable crumbling bluffs, toxic landfill of another kind or poorly located parcels. It is amazing that Irvine used to make such a big deal about being a planned community. They seem to have shoehorned in most detriments found in organic LA, including excessive density, expensive housing, smog, vast tracts of industry and traffic. The only thing missing is crime and minorities, but the Chinese have that covered, and the children of Irvine about to reach their peak criminal years. And, most ironically, the houses look and feel like the tiny 1940s crackerboxes found in LA.
One more thing is that there is no RSS feed notification. I miss that. I subscribe to different blogs and news services and would be able to easily see if IHB had new postings. No longer true.
And in order to submit a comment you have to verify a word in a box. Un necessary.
This house is really laughable at this price, even for CA.
Here, some knife-catcher acquires this mangy, rabid dog in the high $500s in early 2008, and expects to clear out nearly $100k profit inside a few months, in the middle of the worst downturn in real estate ever, and the bursting of the biggest credit bubble in the history of the world?
Based on what CA posters are telling us of the rents this place would fetch, $400K is absolute top dollar for this dump- and that much only because it’s in coastal California
WTF are the current prices based on?? My wife and I started looking around for a new condo in Irvine and the numbers are all over the place. I know they’re all overpriced but some are just beyond ridiculous! I’ve seen a condo in Woodbury going for $699k
176 GROVELAND Irvine, 92620 $699,000
Tha’ts F’**in 1400 sq ft.