110 degrees magazine - Index

110 degrees magazine - wlinks_may08 - Index

FROM WHERE I SIT I THE BEST OF TIMES; THE WORST OF TIMES
Real estate plays such a big role in our East
County economy that the current downturn
reminds me of the old line, “If mama ain’t happy
then ain’t nobody happy,” because it seems that
when real estate is down, nothing is going well.
And right now not much is going very well
around here from an economic point of view.
Good things always seem to come out of bad
things, however, and life has a way of pushing us
out of our comfort zone and into a difficult place
where we’re forced to make good-but-difficult
choices that we couldn’t bring ourselves to make
when living was easy.
Now, after spending a decade in the real
estate industry, I’m in the wonderful place of
being Publisher of East County’s premier
lifestyle magazine. I never believed that buying
and selling property was the purpose that I was
created for. But for a while we were seeing such
things as new listings get swallowed up in a
few hours by buyers who offered a higher figure
than the asking price. It was difficult to consider
changing professions while those big checks
were coming in.
Some of us could read the handwriting on the
wall. We knew that the economy couldn’t maintain
that kind of pressure cooker heat forever but
none of us predicted the extent to which the
marketplace would slump when the correction
finally occurred.
Most of us are susceptible to the misconception
that whatever is currently happening with
12 www.110mag.com May/June 2008
“MY PARENTS PAID THE PRINCELY SUM OF $60,000
FOR OUR FIRST HOME. MY MOM REMEMBERS SOME
YEARS WHEN REAL ESTATE VALUES DOUBLED, AND
OTHER YEARS WHEN THEY PLUMMETED”
the housing market is the way that the “real”
market will remain. But the fact is that housing
values rise and fall like San Francisco cable cars.
Except that for housing markets the up grades
are consistently higher than the declines.
My parents paid the princely sum of $60,000
for our first home. My mom remembers some
years when real estate values doubled, and other
years when they plummeted but she always
maintained that if you graph home prices over
any decade you choose, the line always goes up.
I can’t imagine what that property would be
worth today even in the midst of our depressed
housing market.
I became a licensed Real Estate Agent during a
period when it was much tougher to buy a house
than it is today. Apart from some kind of FHA or
VA support, borrowers had to come up with a
down payment of at least 20%, plus they had to
add a whopping big PMI insurance premium.
There was no such thing as stated income; you
couldn’t qualify without actual paycheck
receipts plus sterling credit. Buyers were warned
to plan on waiting five years before expecting to
gain any real equity.
The wheel has turned and the market has now
returned to those conditions, except that even
now it’s still not nearly as difficult to qualify for
a loan as it was back then.
Anyway, this is California so things can’t help
but get better over the long haul. Some of my
Rotary buddies and I were talking about weather
— scorching Arizona, freezing North Dakota,
rainy Oregon, hurricane-and-bug-infested
Florida…. We all concluded, that we live in the
best of all possible places.
My partner, who grew up in Pennsylvania and
lived in Minnesota and Montana, told me that
during his first winter in the Bay Area a rainstorm
blew branches off some trees and flooded intersections.
When he heard on the radio that it was
the worst storm in ten years he concluded that
any place in which Mother Nature couldn’t come
up anything worse than that during a whole
decade was the right place to live.
The appeal of Northern California is more than
simply weather. I worked for a while for FedEx on
Oahu, which is only a 20-minute shuttle ride
from Waikiki’s tropical paradise. Hawaii was
great, of course, and I had good friends there, but
I missed my family, plus the society, entertainment
choices, and affordable prices of such staples
as milk that were available in the Bay Area.
You can’t keep a good place down. The Bay
Area is still a region where people from all over
the world would love to live. Prosperous conditions
will return.
In the meantime, the decline has propelled me
into my position as Publisher of 110° Magazine.
Thank God for these hard times that have pushed
me into the place where I should be and into
doing what I should be doing! Making this professional
change was wonderful indeed!
Tricia Piquero
Publisher
tricia@110mag.com