Your Exceptional Life

I’ve been in the real estate sector since 1976. Longer if you consider that my Dad was a real estate broker and as a kid I used to sit in his office and answer his phone for him. And page through the old MLS books. Sometimes it seemed like his idea of [...]

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The new housing bill has passed and the President is expected to sign it.  It has some interesting components.   If you asked me a year ago about a $7500 credit for first time buyers, I would have just laughed at you.  $7500 didn’t begin to cover closing costs in Contra Costa County.  It’s a different [...]

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Mea culpa
You know, when you’re wrong you need to fess up. I was quoted for an article by Janis Mara in February 2007 and I was wrong. I missed the mark. Majorly. In my defense I didn’t expect banks to fail. Several have failed since then including the most [...]

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I’ve just read a couple of interesting commentaries on the current state of money, mortgage money in particular. Brian Brady has written on numerous blogs that the interest rates are equal to what they were in July of 2007. And he backed it up. Nice job Brian.  The Federal Funds rate [...]

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In recent years a couple of automated real estate valuation websites have cropped up. The two biggies are Zillow.com and Cyberhomes.com. The way they are set up they take recent sales in your area and factor that into your most recent sale and “guesstimate” what your home is worth. They are chock [...]

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With the way the economy is going, everyone is cutting costs. As part of my body for life regiment, I eat a snack of beef jerky daily. Yesterday I bought a slab of brisket to make my own. I’m planting my own vegetable garden so I don’t have to buy them this [...]

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We had our first grass fire today. Originally I heard Sherman Island out in the Delta, but now they’re saying some other island. There’s a slew of ‘em up in the Delta, so who knows. April 11 is sure pretty early to be coming home to this kind of smoke in the [...]

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I saw this on the Mortgage Cicerone this morning.  It’s actually not an April Fools joke, it’s pretty well thought out.
I was sitting in a bond closing a couple of months ago and the guys were playing with maps.live.com.  Most of them were high powered attorneys and had never seen it.  It’s something their paralegals [...]

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And I feel fine.

Thanks to the Chronicle for the graphic. I thought it was important because of the mild uptick last month. It is my opinion that if the Bay Area real estate market hasn’t hit the bottom, we’ve touched it. One of the real estate blogs (I would quote them if [...]

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