San Diego Real Estate Podcast with Jack Campbell

Undertaking a renovation project is a big step, no matter if it’s for one room or a whole home. Here’s my advice if you’re in a similar situation.   If you’re thinking about buying a home that needs some work, or making a renovation to your current home, here are three things that you need to consider: 1. Know your ability. We aren’t all interior design specialists. If you don’t know how to pick a tile or what backsplash looks good in a kitchen, get some help. We work with designers who can advise you, and it’s not nearly as expensive as you might think. 2. Be realistic about your project. As you tackle one project, it may make the rest of the home look like an eyesore. Be realistic about the scope of your project, and don’t go too narrow or too wide. “Design consultants might have access to cheaper, better materials.” 3. Manage your finances. A lot of people don’t realize that there are a lot of different levels to finding materials for renovations. Some materials are available to the public at places like Home Depot and Lowe’s, but there are other professional-grade materials that the average consumer may not have access to. If you do decide to do a renovation, at least reach out to a design consultant. They might have access to materials that will make your home look better and your life easier. If you have any questions for me, feel free to reach out via phone or email today. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

If you own an investment property, here’s how California’s new rent control law affects you.   If you own an investment property or are thinking of purchasing one in the future, how does California’s new rent control law affect you? To answer that question, there are a few key details about this law you need to keep in mind.  First, it imposes a 5% maximum increase—plus the cost of inflation—to rent costs on an annual basis. In recent years, property owners were able to increase their rent cost anywhere from 5% to 7%. Second, this law doesn’t impact mom-and-pop owners. In other words, if you’re an individual owner of a single-family residence that’s not held as an LLC or corporation, this limitation probably doesn’t apply to you. It’s more intended to control larger investment properties like apartment buildings. “If a tenant’s lease term expires and they leave the property on their own accord, you still have the right to increase your rent.” Also, this law doesn’t apply to properties built in the last 15 years, and it protects tenants from being pushed out by landlords in order to raise rent prices. However, if a tenant’s lease term expires and they leave the property on their own accord, you still have the right to increase your rent.  Lastly, this law was retroactive to the beginning of 2019, so if you’re thinking of jumping ahead of it and making some quick changes to your investment situation, chances are that won’t work out so well for you.  There are many other components to this bill, so if you have further questions about how it affects any future investment purchase or sale, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d be happy to help you. 

If you want to earn top dollar for your home, follow these three tips.   Profitable deals are possible at any point in the year for home sellers in our market, but it takes careful planning to achieve these kinds of results.  Here are three key strategies you can use to get top dollar for your home, no matter the season: 1. Sell a lifestyle. Every property has unique features and assets, so play yours up. If your home has a great back yard, perfect for entertaining under the stars, make that a selling point and do your best to target “outdoorsy” buyers. If your home has a huge kitchen, make that a key feature of your marketing. It’s all about identifying the kind of lifestyle your home facilitates, then reaching out to buyers who would be interested in that way of living.  “Every property has unique features and assets, so play yours up.” 2. Stage your home. Telling buyers what kind of life they could lead in your property will only go so far. You also need to show them by decluttering, depersonalizing, and staging your listing. Buyers want to be able to see your house as their future home.  3. Avoid overpricing your home. Everyone wants to earn top dollar, but setting your price too high can have the opposite effect. The secret to getting a great deal is actually to set your price at (or slightly below) market value, which will attract a higher number of buyers and could potentially incite a bidding war. Think of it this way: If your home is listed alongside four very similar properties, but yours is the only one priced below market value, which do you think buyers are going to gravitate towards? That’s right: Yours. And once you’ve hooked them, they won’t care so much about having to pay a few thousand dollars extra to win out over the other buyers you’ve also drawn in. It’s all about strategy.  If you have any other questions or would like more information, feel free to give me a call or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Short sales and foreclosures are not one and the same, and today we’ll explain the difference between the two.  Despite what some may assume, short sales and foreclosures aren’t one and the same.  To give you a better idea of how these two things differ, let’s start by defining each. Foreclosure is a process by which a lender can recover the loan balance when a property is in default after the borrower has stopped making payments.  A short sale is a settlement negotiated with the lender in order to avoid foreclosure.  However, short sales and foreclosures aren’t the only options available to homeowners in distressed situations. You can also ask your lender about a loan modification agreement—which allows you to change the terms of your mortgage to compensate for financial hardship.  “Today’s lenders would much rather help you stay in your home.” Today’s lenders would much rather help you stay in your home. After all, very few people would call a short sale or foreclosure an ideal solution. However, if remaining in your property just isn’t an option, then you should always try a short sale before defaulting to foreclosure.  Not only do short sales give you a greater capacity to negotiate, but they’re also less detrimental to your credit. And the little damage it may have on your credit score can be more easily restored than credit damage from a foreclosure.  When you go through a foreclosure, though, you have very little control over what goes on. Rather, you’ll simply receive a series of notices from the bank letting you know that they’re preparing to seize your property.  No matter how it plays out, being faced with the prospect of foreclosure is never pleasant or easy. If you ever find yourself in this situation and have questions about how best to handle it, please give us a call or send us an email. We would be happy to help you. 

“It’s no secret that homes that are presented at their best sell for the highest price and in the least amount of time, and my team and I want to make sure your home achieves these same results. This is why we’ve created the “Renovate to Sell” program.”  With this program, not only do we give you an advance on the funds to renovate your property, but we oversee the contractors’ work to ensure everything is done correctly. And the best part? The money won’t be due until you close escrow, so whether it takes 30 days or 30 months, we’ll work with you to see your home sale through.  It works in three simple steps:  1. After scheduling a consultation, we’ll sit down with you and compare the benefits of selling your home as is versus using our Renovate to Sell program.  2. We’ll arrange a meeting between you and a designer who will advise you on what  items you should focus your renovation efforts on and provide an itemized breakdown of the associated costs.  3. We’ll place your newly renovated home on the market and sell it for top dollar!  If you think you could benefit from having a little extra capital and the assistance to renovate your home to its full potential before it goes on the market, please give us a call. We’d be happy to see if this program is a fit for you! 

Many people are at a loss when deciding whether they should buy their next home first or sell their current home first. Our guaranteed sale program is designed to help you decide which option is best for you. There are three steps involved in the program. First, we do a thorough market analysis to determine the value of your home. Next, we come up with a sale price, which we guarantee. Finally, we market the home for sale, and if we attain a higher sale price than what was agreed, you keep the difference. If you feel like this program will take the stress out of your transaction, don’t hesitate to give me a call so we can talk more about how it can benefit you. I look forward to hearing from you.

“How can I transition from my current home to my next home without juggling two mortgages or ending up homeless?”  That’s been a common inquiry from my clients lately, so today I’d like to share five ways this can be done—three of which are traditional, while the other two aren’t as traditional.  One traditional method for transitioning between homes is to market your home for sale until you have an interested buyer. Once you do, make sure your contract stipulates that you’d like to stay in the home after escrow is closed. This allows you to carry equity from your sale to the bank and bolsters your purchasing power when you’re making an offer on a new home. The second method is to market your current home while also searching for and purchasing a new property all within a matter of days— also known as a concurrent close. This, of course, would mean you’d have to synchronize the purchase of your new home and the sale of your current home. Given that it will need to line up with your seller’s schedule, this isn’t always a workable possibility.  “Through our Guaranteed Sale Program, we’ll aim to sell your home at a pre-arranged price and within a certain time frame, or we’ll buy it ourselves.” Third, you can purchase and close escrow on your new home and sell your current home thereafter. This is another method that might be tough for some people to pull off because not only will you be temporarily saddled with two mortgages, but you won’t yet have the funds from your home sale.  Now for the less traditional methods. The first is our team’s Cash-Out program, which will allow you to extract your current home’s equity before closing on it so you’ll have the funds readily available to purchase your next residence. Give us a call if you’re interested in receiving more information about this program.  Finally, you can take advantage of our Guaranteed Sale program. In the event that you enlist our help in marketing your home, we’ll aim to sell it at a pre-arranged price and within a certain time frame, or we’ll buy it ourselves. This will ensure that your equity is freed up and your home doesn’t sit on the market for a long period of time.  If you have any questions or you’d like to have a conversation about which method, traditional or non-traditional, best suits your needs, please contact me directly by calling 858-240-9900 or you can send me an email at Jack@CampbellSD.com. I look forward to hearing from you!  

It helps to assess where our San Diego market is today by looking at national real estate trends that have developed over the last three or four years, so that’s where we’ll start.  If you’ve been paying attention to trends over that period, you’ve noticed that property prices and incomes have continued to increase. On top of that, interest rates have stayed moderately low—the sub-4% range.    Late in 2018, we saw the Fed applying pressure to our markets to slightly drive rates up, which inevitably led to some changes. If prices and rates are both trending upward, something’s got to give. Housing inventory will increasingly swell and the market will slip into decline unless household incomes start to rise.  Though interest rate-related change has been felt on the national level, conditions have actually stayed relatively steady in our local San Diego market. Interest rates have improved through the first half of 2019, and that progress should continue for the remainder of the year.  The steadiness of our real estate environment is mostly attributable to our strong labor market. Constant job and wage growth in San Diego’s tech, biotech, and pharmaceutical industries, along with our military, has been majorly important to the health of our local market.  “The market is very mixed and beginning to balance out, and that’s widening opportunities for both buyers and sellers.” In addition, the demand for housing has gone up as our population has grown larger and larger. San Diego’s population has continued to outpace our development of new construction.  Now, let’s take a look at the year-over-year numbers for our local market:  - Countywide home prices have increased by about 2.6% - Inventory has increased by around 2.9%  - Home sales have decreased by about 7.3%  Above all, the one thing I want you to take away from today’s update is that the market is very mixed and beginning to balance out, and that’s widening opportunities for both buyers and sellers.  The lower price points, for example, are white hot right now: There’s a ton of demand, more and more millennials are entering this market, and inventory is scarce. The absorption rate in the entry-level tier is at about 2.4% currently, which means we have 2.4 months’ worth of inventory.   Given the balanced state our market is soon to be in, don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions you have, whether you’re buying or selling in San Diego. We look forward to hearing from you!