Here’s what happened in L.A. urban real estate last month: Median home price dropped by $70,000 since the same month of the previous year. January 2020 median home price was $580,000. January 2021 median sold home price fell to $510,000. Based on MLS data from areas 23,42 and 1375.
Several Downtown specialist real estate agents report a significant uptick in new buyer requests in the past few days. Perhaps February might improve a bit.
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Corey Chambers SoCal Home Newsletter February 2021 – Impactful Real Estate News
February brings in Valentine’s Day, where many of us scramble to make sure those close to us KNOW we love them! After all – Love is a many splendored thing. While love for our family and friends is the most important, I think it’s also important to express my love for helping people to find a home where their heart is. #valentinesday #coreychambers #news
Valentine’s Day is the unofficial (yet very popular) holiday that reminds us to give cards, candy and gifts to those who are important to us. It stems from thousands of years of fond history around the courtly love tradition associated with Saint Valentine of Rome. #chla #realestate
My favorite love description is: Love is patient, Love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres. | BLOG VIDEO
I could go on with all kinds of examples like – Love Your Neighbor as Yourself, even go all business on you with accolades about how much we love doing business with you, or how much we love your referrals and more – but, the point is we do love helping people sell and buy real estate. And those people say we are good at it!
Also included with this month’s newsletter is a story about a very special child.
Please know that my team and I are eager to help anyone you know wanting to make a move, so much so, that we are willing to make an offer that they will LOVE – AND – the Kids at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles will love too.
For the month of February, for anyone considering making a move that you refer to me, we will guarantee them in writing their home will sell or we’ll buy it at a price acceptable to them. We just need to agree on the price and possession date with the seller.
Just like we are thankful for you and your business, I am confident your referrals will be thanking you for pointing them in the right direction to getting their home sold fast!
And remember: YOUR REFERRALS really do help Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles…
We are still on a mission to raise $25,000 for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. We do this by donating to them a portion of our income from homes we sell. As you may know, Children’s Hospital of LA does miraculous work in helping kids fight through and survive some of the worst life threatening diseases like cancer, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia and more.
BUT they rely on sponsorships and donations to continue providing a uniquely supportive and healing environment. Donations also benefit families by helping to keep overall expenses as low as possible.
So, YOUR REFERRALS REALLY DO HELP THESE KIDS!
Your Referrals Help the Kids!
We are on a mission to raise $25,000 for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (we have already raised over $2,500). Kids under the care of Children’s Hospital are more likely to survive serious diseases and cancer. BUT, Children’s survives because of our sponsorships and donations. So, the Corey Chamber’s Team makes it a point to donate a portion of our income from selling homes to help support the great work that they do. Your referrals REALLY DO help the kids!
Corey Chambers
With that in mind — who do you know that’s considering buying or selling a home? When you refer them to my real estate sales team, not only will they benefit from our award-winning service, but we donate a substantial portion of our income on every home sale to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. It’s easy to refer your friends, neighbors, associates or family members considering making a move. Go to www.ReferralsHelpKids.com and enter their contact info online or forward the link to those whom you know are considering a move OR you can always call me direct at 213-880-9910.
I want to make it easy for you to refer your friends, neighbors, business associates, or family members considering making a move, so here are some convenient options for you:
1. You can go online to www.ReferralsHelpKids.com and enter their contact info and we’ll take care of contacting them
2. Just pass along the internet address, www.ReferralsHelpKids.com, to anyone you know who might be considering a move
3. Contact us directly at 213-880-9910
I want you to know that you and your referrals mean more than ever to my team and me. As we continue to move forward in 2021, please know we are extremely thankful for you being a special part of our business.
With all my appreciation,
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 overcome unfortunate health issues that life sometimes throws our way. Being a Los Angeles, California native, I take pride in supporting in any way that I can the good work these people do at Children’s. My team rally’s 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.
And remember, I want to make it easy for you to refer your friends, neighbors, business associates, or family members considering making a move, so here are some convenient options for you:
You can go online to www.ReferralsHelpKids.com and enter their contact info and we’ll take care of contacting them, or pass along the internet address directly to them
Contact us directly at 213-880-9910
From Transplanted to Transformed
There are three-hanky stories, and then there are those that force you to make a run to Sam’s Club to buy Kleenex in bulk, like the one Oscar tells about his daughter Kairi in the moments before she was taken away for transplant surgery. By Jeff Weinstock
“I don’t know if I can get through this because it’s kind of hard,” he says preemptively, and then begins. “Kairi said she had some letters for us. She said, ‘You can’t read it! You can’t read it until I’m in the operating room.’ She gave one letter to me and one letter to my wife. She said, ‘Promise me you won’t read it until I’m in the operating room.’
“We went to get some coffee because we knew it was going to be a long night. We sat down and started reading the notes. On my note it said, ‘Daddy, don’t worry. Don’t get anxious. Everything’s going to be OK. I’ll see you after the operation.’ I still have it. I carry it with me all the time. She knew I get anxious when it comes to her. That put me at ease.”
When she handed him the note, it was folded and sealed with hospital tape, the kind used for binding up wounds, or securing a father for a long night ahead.
Fourth time’s the charm
By his own admission, Oscar frets easily. He wasn’t built for the strenuous wait that transplant candidates go through, drawn out to 18 months by the need to find a double-organ match to replace Kairi’s diseased kidney and liver. He’s the one who fielded the three previous phone calls from the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles transplant coordinator, with word that a donor had been found.
On each occasion, as the family was warned could happen, the offer fell apart, once because Kairi was second in line and the patient ahead of her accepted it; another time because the organs after investigation were deemed flawed; and the last time because the donor family had a change of heart.
But Oscar sensed this call was the one. “For some reason, I don’t know what it was,” he says, “it was a little bit different.”
Confirmation came when the transplant surgeon himself, Kambiz Etesami, MD, walked into the end of Kairi’s dialysis session with the consent forms for the family to sign. The operation was set for the following day.
Walking to the OR, “I couldn’t even talk,” Kairi’s mother, Roxana, says. “I was so overwhelmed. I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is it.’”
The surgery began on the evening of July 17 and ended the morning of July 18, spanning 14 hours in all. Outside of bathroom breaks, the only time Dr. Etesami stepped back from the operating table was to check that blood flow to the new organs wasn’t “kinking,” he says, and to see if the implanted kidney and liver were functioning. The donor was a small adult, so he had some concern about the fit in Kairi’s 11-year-old body.
“We thought she had enough room,” he says, “but you never know until you’re there. Her abdomen actually closed smoothly at the end.”
Finally, an answer
The follow-up on the procedure has been intensive and shared. Dr. Etesami stayed on for the first two precarious weeks, but his part has mostly ended, as Kairi’s kidney and liver specialists, Rachel Lestz, MD, and George Yanni, MD, respectively, now see Kairi in clinic frequently to monitor her organ function and her lab work.
The most significant result to come since the surgery was the apparent pinpointing of the source of Kairi’s liver and kidney failure, which had eluded the two doctors’ painstaking efforts to uncover it, having not surfaced in the earlier biopsies or genetic testing. The pathology on the explanted liver—the one that was removed—indicated autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease, or ARPKD, a congenital kidney disorder that also affects the liver and, Dr. Yanni says, necessitates a double transplant in 20-40% of patients.
Adding things up retrospectively, both doctors had belated aha moments.
“I went back and looked at my original consult, and ARPKD was in my differential as a possible solution as to what could bring all these things together,” Dr. Lestz says. “I thought, ‘Oh, OK. That makes sense now.’”
If the finding can be corroborated by CHLA geneticists, as Dr. Lestz hopes, it’s an ideal outcome, as ARPKD can do no further harm to Kairi. It was erased for good once her native liver was taken out. There’s no threat of a post-transplant recurrence.
In fact, there’s a decent chance Kairi can stay out of harm’s way entirely if she keeps to her medication. She will have to take immunosuppressant drugs indefinitely to restrain her immune system from feasting on the new liver and kidneys it sees as trespassers. Dr. Etesami says some patients are fortunate to achieve tolerance, where their bodies come to accept the new organs as their own. But the majority can only hope for a workable truce. After a year or two of cohabitating, “usually the body and organs start to get along,” Dr. Yanni says.
Certainly Kairi has welcomed them like they were her adopted kin. She named them after her doctors. Naming your transplanted organs “is sort of a thing,” Dr. Lestz says.
The new organs both saved Kairi and revived her. It’s more than metaphor to say she seems to inhabit a new skin. Always dry and itchy, her skin is now a robust pink. She bounces from one thing to another, writing stories, playing with her dogs. Before, she stayed mostly in bed, tired and glum. She’s still too vulnerable to infection to get back to her sixth-grade class, so she’s being taught at home, with the intention for her to return to school in January.
She has returned to two of her favorite things that had been denied her. One was chocolate, whose high phosphorus content her diseased kidney could not filter out and made it a strict no. The second was swimming, which was forbidden because she couldn’t get her dialysis port wet. The family pool had been shuttered altogether since January 2017. If one couldn’t swim, then they all weren’t going to.
Soon after returning home from the transplant surgery, she went in the pool with her sister, though went in may be a little gracious. “She pushed me in,” Kairi says.
Dan Thomas, MD, Director of CHLA’s Liver Transplant Program, says in his visits with Kairi he has seen a total transformation. “She was a child who had no real purpose. She wasn’t very confident. She didn’t feel very well. Now she has direction, purpose. She feels good. The glass slipper fits.” — Courtesy Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
How you can help
Who do you know making a move? Refer them to my real estate sales team 213-880-9910 Corey
