Greetings Real Estate Fans, Happy New Year to you and your family. New year, same story. In the last two weeks, rates have shot up back above 7%. Not only that but the economic news has been poor in the first few weeks of our new year. Many indicators are showing that rates may stay at this level for several months. Time will tell. I will be sending another email in the next few days addressing my forecast for this year. In this Update we can see the December numbers along with the year-end numbers for our local market. To be clear, 2024 was bad. Really bad. I have been…

Happy Holidays, Real Estate Fans! The Holidays are upon us. As usual, this brings our real estate market almost to a stop. With the cooler weather and lots of traveling, it seems every year we slow around this time. You might say it is tradition! Attached is the December Update. Since it is the holidays, I am not going to bore you with opinion. We can all read what the numbers tell us. Instead, I would like to offer you hope. I am an optimist. Hope rolls off my tongue easier than despair. Sure, this year will end with some of the lowest sales seen, nationwide and locally. But on…

Greetings Fans, “Now up is down, left is right, Day is night now, in is out, black is white.” –Eminem This sounds a lot like our local real estate market. Although I believe our national market is getting more and more like our local market. Take a look at this graph: The National Association of Realtors is about to disclose that 2024 will have the lowest real estate sales nationally since 1995! Read that again. The lowest sales in almost 30 years! Regardless of the reason, we all must agree the market is broken and needs to be restarted. How? My first guess is to make housing more affordable again…

Happy Fall Real Estate Fans, Finally, the weather has calmed down. It now looks like we will have about a three week fall and then a major drop in temperatures again. For now, it is nice to feel the fall desert weather. The market went sideways since the Feds dropped rates. It was assumed that T-bills (which mortgage interest rates are based) would follow, and they did for about a week or two. Then they climbed back up. Today they are higher than before the drop. And it’s only been a few weeks since the adjustment. In our local market, instead of buyers coming back we found Sellers jumped back…

Greetings Real Estate Fans, Whew!! Looks like summer is about to leave us. Thank goodness. I am a sun guy but enough is enough! I am ready for fall temperatures. As for our local real estate market, we melted in the heat. Last month we closed escrow on just 73 homes. At this pace we will not close over 1,000 homes in our communities for the year. This is a very poor showing for us. My opinion? We cannot rely on tourism to drive our economy. We need to produce real jobs to have a consistent real estate market. Restaurant and retail workers cannot afford a $500,000 plus home. We…

Warm Greetings Real Estate Fans, What other temperature greeting could I give? As far as the weather, July was the hottest month I have ever spent in our communities. I used to tell new residents you could count on your fingers how many times we break 100°. Not anymore! The whole month of July was over 100° every day. As far as our local real estate market is concerned, you could say we are ice cold. Only 86 homes closed last month. At this rate we will not sell over 1,000 homes this year. It is possible we will not break 900. What a fall we are experiencing. This is…

Hot Greetings Fans, WOW!! I am a 44 year resident of our Hi Desert. This is by far the hottest I have ever experienced living here. For years, I would tell new residents you could count on your fingers how many times we break 100°. In addition, I would explain that every night it cools down into the 60°s. No longer! According to my weather app, we will experience temperatures in the low 100°s at least until July 24th! The weather may be hot, but our real estate market is January cold. June and July closings are usually our highest. Not this year. 82 homes closed escrow in June. This…

Greetings Real Estate Fans, Summer has rolled in like a furnace. Even my pool temperature hit 89° over the weekend! I am excited to announce a new section to my monthly Updates. Over the years, I have had many questions about the health of our vacant land sales in our communities. Of course, we slowed down in vacant land sales because of the economy and the new Joshua Tree regulations. I added a vacant land summary as part of the Update with a breakdown in both inventory and sales for our local communities. You will find this section between residential sales information and the Alta Market Report. Should be interesting…

Greetings Fans, Attached, please find the May Hi Desert Real Estate Update. You will find some disappointing numbers for this month. In the “first time” category, I have been creating these Market Updates since 2013. In the beginning, they were a little simpler than they are now, but I did keep track of some major numbers. For the first time in my record keeping, Twentynine Palms had both the highest value home sold and the lowest value home sold! Other included highlights- We closed 80 escrows in April. This is the lowest number of closed escrows in April since I started keeping records. For the first time in years, Joshua…

Greetings, Fans! Over the last month the wheels have been thrown off any prior forecast on the future of our real estate market. First, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) settled several lawsuits. The media is talking about how this will change the way real estate is done in the future. President Biden even weighed in and told us the economy will be better because of all the money people will save in real estate transactions. This is a false statement. The simple important facts are real estate commissions have, in the last 50 years, been negotiable. The second fact is: the buyer has always paid the commission. Sellers build…