John's Blog

On May 1st new legislation (by Andrew Cuomo) went into effect, which is crippling the Real Estate market. The piece of legislation that I am referring to is know as the HVCC or Home Valuation Code of Conduct. Theoretically the intent of the legislation sounded good, to enhance integrity in the ap...

Please print out the Real Estate Finance compaint form and complain about Andrew Cuomo himself. http://www.oag.state.ny.us/resource_center/complaints/pdfs/ref_complaint.pdf Everytime one of my listings falls out of escrow because of a bad appraisal. I am going to be letting him know. Maybe a 1,00...

Please click on the link below and watch this Video. http://www.hvccpetition.com/Video.aspx If you agree with the content of the video, please then sign the petition and forward to as many people as you know. While we as Realtors have are being negatively impacted, this law has devistated the app...

To evaluate a rental property you need to know four things. Income, expenses, standard rules of thumb for quick gauges of value, and fuzzy logic. IncomeWhen it comes to income, you can not trust what the MLS printout shows. The income is likely too low or two high. You need to develop your own se...

Last year, we began looking to purchase a piece of income property with a partner. Our search started with the 5+ unit category because this is traditionally where you find the best cash flow. After scouring the market for 6 months, we came across very little inventory, and even less attractive d...

Several blogs ago, I wrote about about different ways of calculating value, "Market Shows Signs of Good Relative Value".Today I was reading several articles that highlighted historical valuations, based upon annual rents. One article mentioned that homes over the last 15 years have sold for 16.4 ...

4th Quarter 2008 by John Dumke The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens starts off with a statement of contrast, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.....".  The real estate market, as well as the stock market, has embraced the opening line of this novel. One day the stock market...

Recap - Last Year - A sharp correction In the 2nd half of 2007 market activity and prices fell off a cliff. (see www.LBRE.com for previous newsletters). The correction was so abrupt and dramatic, it ranked as the largest year over year price drop in California real estate history. (See Case-Shill...

There is only a 4 month supply of single family homes in Long Beach. This is Bullish. And it is in sharp contrast to last fall when I saw a 10 month supply of homes for sale. Why such a steep change? The main reason is that sales have picked up. While this increase in the number of sales is the ...

Several months ago the SoCal MLS required agents to specify whether a listing was a short sale or not. It took a while for all listings to be updated, but now this is working well. There are currently 1140 SFR homes for sale in Long Beach, 302 are designated as short sales, 838 are designated as ...