Celebrate ‘Your’ Independence… TOO!

July 4th, 1776 is a momentous day in history for all FREE countries across the globe – AND so is the day we buy our own home!!! Owning Real Estate, especially your own home, is a sure fire Celebration of Independence. In today’s market, many home owners really want to make a move, but are finding themselves in a catch 22 – whether
to sell first or buy first. They don’t want to end up getting stuck owning two
homes or none at all. I am sure you will join me in saying we can’t blame them. I also believe that you agree with me on this; home ownership is good for ALL. The more who can buy a home, the more who can sell a home, the more our economy benefits. And as John F. Kennedy said, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” | PDF

Thank you to everyone who came out to join the event to help raise money for Children’s Hospital !! #coreychambers #chla

In This Issue: Vol 4, Issue 6 July 2018
— Independence Day is for people like you
— Special LIFE TIME Guarantee you can share
— How Your Referrals Help the Kids
— And More!!

Fortunately, I have a special program for Home Owners wanting to move and Buyers wanting to buy in Today’s market that turns the tables on this CATCH 22.

Over the last 20+ years of marketing and selling real estate, I have been able to develop and successfully implement a program that allows me to guarantee the sale of a property. Yep, you read that right. Actually guarantee in writing the sale of a home. Obviously a program like this gives sellers GREAT PEACE OF MIND (a true celebration of independence from fear). I guarantee, up front and in writing, that if their home does not sell at their price and within their time frame – I will step in and buy it myself.

The conditions are simple: the seller and I must agree on price and possession date. Buyers benefit too, because we are able to ensure they get the home they want and back up their purchase with a satisfaction guarantee: if they are not happy with the home, we will buy it back. This obviously is a win-win for all involved.

This is where you come in.

Your friends, neighbors, work associates and family members who may be considering a move can now do so and celebrate true independence from the fear of getting stuck with two homes or none at all.

And remember… Your referrals help the Children…

As I share with you each month, we are on a mission to raise $25,000 for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Helping Hands Fund. We do this by donating a portion of our income. Children’s does great work in helping kids overcome cancer and other life threatening diseases. In fact Kids under their care are 300% more likely to enter into remission IF they can get into the recovery center. BUT the Recovery Center depends on Sponsorships and Donations to keep rolling. So, YOUR REFERRALS REALLY DO HELP THE KIDS…

Who do you know considering buying or selling a home you could refer to my real estate sales team?

Not only will they benefit from our award winning service, but we donate a portion of our income on every home sale to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Helping Hands Fund.

I want to make it easy to refer your friends, neighbors, associates or family members considering making a move, so here are your options:
1. You can go to www.ReferralsHelpKids.com and enter their contact info on line or forward the link to who you know considering a move.
2. Of course you can always call me direct as well at 888-240-2500.

You and your referrals mean more than ever to my team and I. As we move forward in this new season, please know we are extremely thankful for you and your being a special part of our business

With all my appreciation

P.S. The story of this young person enclosed may cause you to look at your loved ones differently. It did me.
Check it out.

It’s easy to refer those you know considering buying or selling a home.
Here are the Options Again:

You can go to www.ReferralsHelpKids.com and enter their contact info on line or forward the link to who you know considering a move.
Call me direct or pass my number on: 888-240-2500.

IMPACTFUL REAL ESTATE NEWS
Why I Support Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles I grew up right here in Los Angeles. Born right nearby at St. Francis Hospital. I remember when I first heard about a young person close to our family suffering from a nasty disease and getting treated for that at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. It was then that I began to pay closer attention to the work they do at that hospital. Since then, I have learned that it is a collection of hard working health care professionals, most making their home right here in the Los Angeles area, all coming together for a common cause. That cause is to help young people over come unfortunate health issues that life sometimes throws our way. Being a Los Angeles area, California native, I take pride in supporting in any way that I can the good work these people do at Children’s. My team rallys around our annual goal of raising money and donating portions of our income to help Children’s in their quest to heal young people when they need healing. My team and I are committed to providing outstanding results for buyers and sellers referred to us by our past clients. I have discovered that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shares similar commitments to their patients. And since their services survive on sponsorships and donations we are happy to contribute and proud to support them. Sincerely, Corey Chambers 213-880-9910

Why I Support Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles

I grew up right here in Los Angeles. Born right nearby at St. Francis Hospital. I remember when I first heard about a young person close to our family suffering from a nasty disease and getting treated for that at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. It was then that I began to pay closer attention to the work they do at that hospital. Since then, I have learned that it is a collection of hard working health care professionals, most making their home right here in the Los Angeles area, all coming together for a common cause. That cause is to help young people over come unfortunate health issues that life sometimes throws our way. Being a Los Angeles area, California native, I take pride in supporting in any way that I can the good work these people do at Children’s. My team rallys around our annual goal of raising money and donating portions of our income to help Children’s in their quest to heal young people when they need healing. My team and I are committed to providing outstanding results for buyers and sellers referred to us by our past clients. I have discovered that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shares similar commitments to their patients. And since their services survive on sponsorships and donations we are happy to contribute and proud to support them.

Sincerely,

Corey Chambers 213-880-9910

Contact Us
Your Home Sold GUARANTEED or I’ll Buy It*
Corey Chambers Team
200 N San Fernando Rd #119
Los Angeles, CA 90031
888-240-2500
coreychambers@yahoo.com
Visit us on the web at www.ReferralsHelpKids.com

Billy Becerra and the Unbearable Lightness of Grieving

In the wake of the first anniversary of his newborn son’s passing, a father finds solace in skydiving and triathlon training, making sure to never be far from the loss.

“Have you ever jumped out of an airplane?”

You got the wrong guy, buddy. Any points for parasailing?

No, none, Billy Becerra says. “That’s nothing compared to skydiving. It’s more like flying. When you’re falling, you can actually fly. You can move forward and back, and left and right. You can fly all over the sky.”

His first jump was with his wife, Elisha, several years ago. He got hooked, then certified, and now runs a side business leasing parachutes to other jumpers.

“It changed my perspective on life,” he says. “Life is pretty fragile, but at the same time, you just did something pretty cool, right? And my life has been pretty good. I have a really good job that I’ve had since I was 18 years old, and that has afforded me a lifestyle where I can buy a house. My wife’s dad’s a rock star and we get to travel all over the world. I have nothing to complain about. My life has been awesome! When I started skydiving, I became grateful for all that.”

He decided he would release his son’s ashes on a jump. He and Elisha would go to Hawaii on Rex Becerra’s first birthday, dive from a plane together, and cast Rex’s remains into the sky. Rex’s first birthday passed in March.

“I couldn’t,” Becerra says. “Couldn’t do it yet. Just wasn’t ready.”

Man plans, and God laughs

You know that one? Man plans, and God laughs?

“No, but I get it,” he says. “I wish I’d heard that long ago.”

In March 2017, Becerra had things all plotted out. He was getting back to his three hobbies. He was going to grab his drum kit and get his band, Rotus, back together, ramp up his skydiving, and play a lot more golf. He would get to all that right after polishing off his first L.A. Marathon in what he hoped would be under four hours.

“Google says that four hours is the breakpoint between runners and bucket listers,” he says. “If you’re under four hours, you’re a runner. If you’re over four hours, you’re a bucket lister.”

He checked off the first piece of the plan, finishing the marathon in three hours, 50 minutes. The race path took him right past Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “Literally, on foot, ran right down it.”

The next evening he would return to CHLA in an ambulance, his newborn son’s life imperiled.

Several hours earlier, on March 20, 2017, Rex was born at a community hospital, near Becerra’s home in Monrovia. He looked ill from the outset. His legs were purple, while his upper body was pink. The pediatrician who examined him heard a worrisome murmur in Rex’s heart and had him transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit at a nearby center, where he was seen by pediatric interventional cardiologist John Ho, MD.

Ho found that Rex had an incompetent aortic valve, too small to pump blood out to the aorta and on to the body, which explained the discoloration in his legs. Unable to flow outward, blood was jamming up inside Rex’s left atrium, causing it to swell like a water balloon.

Ho had Rex transported to CHLA. Once there, Ho performed an emergency catheterization procedure to forge a hole between the left and right sides of Rex’s heart, enabling blood flow between the two and deflating the swollen left atrium.

But the procedure was a stopgap measure. Rex needed an intricate open-heart surgery known as a Ross procedure to address his aorta’s structural defects. The surgery removes the diseased aortic valve and in its place is sewn in the pulmonary valve, borrowed from the opposite side of the heart, where it ushers blood into the lungs. A donor pulmonary valve is then implanted to take over for the original.

“I told Billy, on a scale of 1 to 10, this is pretty much an 8 or a 9,” Ho says. “This is about as complicated and as difficult of a surgery as you can get.”

Cardiothoracic surgeon Vaughn Starnes, MD, co-director of CHLA’s Heart Institute, would operate on Rex, and he is widely known for his expertise in the procedure, shared by few other surgeons, Ho says. But Becerra saw a drawback in Starnes’ participation.

“I would hope they could say, ‘We got Joe the intern over here and he can do this on the back of his hand,’” he says, “than to know I’ve got such a serious condition that I have to have the best in the world.”

Mechanically, the surgery was a success, the valves replaced and the aorta opened. But even with its anatomy repaired, Rex’s heart was unable to perform on its own, having been so stressed in those initial 24 hours after birth. It never managed to regain the strength to sustain Rex’s life, and he passed away April 4, 2017.

Becerra says he was determined not to disintegrate from the loss. His perspective was framed by the two weeks he spent residing in his son’s hospital room.

“You get humbled really quick when you sit in that room and there are 30 other rooms on the floor, and there are 30 other families who are going through the same thing. I had seen people fall apart, and there was no way I was going to let that happen.”

He says that looking after his daughter, Nina, who turns 3 in June, has kept him occupied and centered.

“If I keep myself busy, then I don’t have time to have a breakdown. I can’t break down—I’m the father of the family. I’ve been a tough guy my whole life. There’s no way I’m going to let something crush me. There’s just no way.”

An open wound

“I’m not really a tough guy,” he says, quieting. He played football in high school, a wide receiver on a team whose offense struggled. He mostly served as a tackling dummy for opponents to get in their licks.

“I was the small guy on the team. I got crushed. The only way I could play was if I was dumb enough to take hit after hit after hit. There might’ve been a guy who was bigger, stronger, faster than me, but he didn’t want to get hit.”

He keeps his pain close now, afraid to part from it as if it were a material possession. He has chased it through nuisances like rain and heat, pursued it in ocean swims, run after it up mountain trails.

To keep Rex’s memory burnished and present, Becerra has dedicated himself to triathloning. In the first year since Rex’s death, he competed in five races, with a sixth up ahead, the Nautica Malibu Triathlon, a fundraising event for CHLA, offering Becerra another avenue to support the hospital. (He and his wife are also participating in Walk and Play L.A. on June 2. They were the top fundraisers at last year’s event, fueled by donations from fans of Van Halen, Elisha’s father’s former band. See sidebar below.)

Becerra has found his own course for grieving. The physical suffering of training straps him to the emotional anguish over his son’s passing, which he never wants to let far from his thoughts, lest one day he can’t recall it.

“I don’t want it to go away, you know?” he says. “I had a dog that I really loved, and my dog died. I’ve had two dead dogs, and that doesn’t bother me at all now. I do not want to ever feel that way about my son. That’s why I like to tell his story, because it keeps the pain real. I’m afraid the wound will heal.”

Training forces the wound open. He exhorts himself to bear up because his son endured far more. “When you’re thinking, man, I’m getting tired, it’s really easy to think back. Like, this is nothing.”

He increased his race distance as the triathlons became too easy. In April, Becerra did the Ironman 70.3 in Oceanside, the number signifying the full length of the race in miles. “I had to take the next step,” he says. “I can push harder, I can run faster, I can go further.”

When he’s not training, he still makes sure the pain doesn’t get far from view. He looks off to his right and starts to mime an illustration of the inside of his home.

“We’ve got these three shelves that go right into the corner of the wall. On the top shelf is him, his ashes, in a box that I made for him. I pack my own parachute; there’s no way I’m going to let someone else make an urn for my son, right? It’s four pieces of wood that are nailed together, but I made it, right? So. I made it. We baptized him in the hospital, so we have the holy water from that. Then the next shelf down is a picture of him in a frame that somebody gave us, I think it was my sister, that says, ‘You were here for a moment, but you left an effect on the world forever.’

“And then there’s a little bowl. My wife and my daughter once a week change out the flowers. My daughter loves that part.”

It didn’t happen this year, but there will be an April 4 when Becerra steps to the open door of an airplane, checks to see he has his wife alongside, and leaps, and then spreads Rex’s ashes in every direction, left and right, forward and back, trusting his pain to a sky that’s wide enough to hold it.

‘I Wanted There to Be Purpose to His Life, and There Was’

Billy and Elisha Becerra figured they could use last year’s Walk L.A. event on behalf of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles as a “platform for therapy,” Billy says. They signed up for the walk while their son, Rex, was receiving critical care at CHLA for a congenital heart defect.

“We thought, regardless of what happens here, we see good things happening and we want to support the hospital,” Billy says. “The only way really to do that is to help raise money.”

After Rex passed away, they planned a low-key walk together. Billy named the team Rex and the Heartbeaters and set up a website to accept donations. It began seeing more activity than he ever anticipated. A remarkable $50,000 came in from family and friends. His employer, a civil construction company, pitched in another $5,000.

The total then surged after a social media post by Elisha’s father, Michael Anthony, former bass player for Van Halen. Donations began appearing from Van Halen fans, in small increments of $5 and $10. “Like $30,000 from people all over the country,” Billy says. “I could never tell you who they were.”

Sammy Hagar, Van Halen’s former lead singer who remains close friends with Anthony, contributed a few thousand as well. And then one morning contributions jumped $10,000. “We just woke up one day,” Elisha says, “and were like, ‘What? $10,000? From who?’”

The source turned out to be Hagar’s Van Halen predecessor, David Lee Roth, whom Anthony hadn’t seen since the two were in the band together. “That was out of the blue,” Elisha says. “It was amazing. My dad hasn’t talked to him in probably 16 years.”

In all, Rex and the Heartbreakers raised just under $107,000, more than a quarter of the event’s overall fundraising take.

The breadth of Becerra supporters cut quite a presence at the walk. “I think we made up more than half of the people there,” Billy says. “It went all the way down to friends of cousins.”

The entourage included a former employee of Anthony’s who drove in from Bakersfield. If you’re browsing through pictures from the walk, he’s the one in the Buzz Lightyear costume riding an inflatable dinosaur.

The entire group was powered by Rex, Billy says. “I wanted there to be purpose to his life, and there was. His struggle is what got everybody to open their wallet and donate to the hospital. It was a memorial for Rex; it was his funeral. Since he didn’t have a normal life, he didn’t have a normal funeral.

“If there’s a benefactor to his memorial, it would be Children’s Hospital. They did everything they could to save his life.”

He and Elisha will be at this year’s event, refashioned as Walk and Play L.A., on June 2. They don’t expect the same level of fundraising, but there will be no dip in their ongoing commitment to supporting CHLA patients.

“Our story didn’t end very well,” Elisha says, “but there are kids out there, their story is going to continue, and we want in any way we can to help it continue.”

To donate to Walk and Play L.A., or to sign up for the event, visit www.WalkandPlayLA.org

Courtesy Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

How you can help:

Refer your friends, neighbors, associates or family members considering making a move:

www.ReferralsHelpKids.com or call Corey at 888-240-2500.

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Copyright © This free information provided courtesy L.A. Loft Blog and LAcondoInfo.com with information provided by Corey Chambers, Realty Source Inc, BRE#01889449 We are not associated with the homeowner’s association or developer. For more information, contact (213) 880-9910 or visit LAcondoInfo.com Licensed in California. All information provided is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed and should be independently verified. Properties subject to prior sale or rental. This is not a solicitation if buyer or seller is already under contract with another broker. | PDF

Corey Chambers SoCal Home Newsletter July 2018