LOOKIN' GOOD SO FAR!
Written by James Frangella on July 7th, 2010 at 6:00am

The first six months of the year is now behind us and the sales averages for most Peninsula cities are showing signs of improvement. Click HERE to see the most recent stats.

Pebble Beach experienced a remarkable increase but it does help that a couple of “big boys” sold for over 10 million each. For instance, a property was listed for $25 million and sold for $18 million and another for $14 million sold for $10 million. Considering that 46 Pebble Beach properties sold in the first six months, the averages can’t do anything but move upward when just only three listings represent 34.5% of the entire sales volume for the first six months.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Pebble Beach by year’s end. Maybe more of the “big boys” will sell and less of the much-lower priced ones. Speaking of lower-priced ones, did you know that you could have bought a single family dwelling in PB for $438,000? Wow, we haven’t seen that price in Pebble in the last several years!

Kudos to Monterey as her average sale price is moving upward from the low of 2009. I just love this town. One of the few Peninsula cities where a buyer can spend big bucks for an estate home or buy something in the $250,000 price range. Variety is the spice of life as they say. Pretty much the same idea applies to Pacific Grove but her average just can’t seem to get past last year’s. Maybe things will improve for PG by year’s end.

The affordable community of Seaside is breathing sighs of relief, I’m sure. They should be very thankful for the neighborhood of Seaside Highlands. This area of larger and newer homes is still selling in the $650,000 price range. Long gone are the days of million dollar homes in Seaside. I think one could buy in the Highlands for under $600,000!

Interesting note is that the older parts of Seaside have experienced a number of sales in the $400,000 plus price range since the first of the year. One in particular sold for $480,000 in the Upper Mescal neighborhood. This is a good sign as it has been a while since old Seaside could even sell anything over $400,000.

On a further note, I’d like to change subjects - let’s talk about appraisals. I’ve had some rather unpleasant experiences with appraisers and their values. As you may know, buying a house requires obtaining a loan (unless, of course, it’s all cash!) and obtaining a loan requires an appraisal. Regardless of the agreed purchase price, no appraised value means no loan. No loan means no sale. The buyer can be out several hundred dollars and then realize they’re still renters! This really irks the heck out of me and riles me to a level of total frustration. It is a rather deep topic and I’ll need to expound on this subject in the next few weeks. All I can say is that it has to do with the alphabet soup of toxic appraisal waste - Cuomo’s HVCC and the business sector’s AMC. Stay tuned.