Real Estate News: Home Prices Plummet in Downtown L.A.
As the property market sinks throughout Downtown and Greater Los Angeles, loft and condo buyers and sellers often receive information that is three months to a year late. For those who wish to take advantage of better market timing, the LA Loft Blog provides the fastest, most actionable real estate market updates for Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding loft communities. August 2019 showed a dramatic drop in prices, a worsening of the real estate market in nearly every way. The numbers provide confirmation that Downtown Los Angeles is now a buyer’s market.
PROPERTY MARKET ALERT: DTLA PRICES DOWN SHARPLY IN AUGUST
Aug 2019 Year-Over-Year Market Change – (Downtown and Nearby)
Total of completed transactions: Down 28%
Average Sold Price: Down 3.8% (Dropped by $27,369)
Median Sold Price: Down 7% from $692,500 to $647,000 (Dropped by $45,500) #losangeles #realestate #bubble
Taking longer to sell: Average days on market grew from 62 to 82 days (20 days longer on market) Properties selling 32% slower than same period previous year.
The market is diminishing some fortunes, while creating other opportunities.
Two Deadly Mistakes for Sellers to Avoid in a Buyer’s Market
One example of a struggling property is a large live/work condominium unit for sale in Los Angeles. The stylish industrial loft with rare character and natural light has been viewed by a substantial number of buyers. Several of the buyers have decided to purchase other properties that present a greater value. All buyers, along with just as many real estate professionals have concluded that the asking price is significantly too high, and that the presentation needs improvement. The unit appears smaller than its true grandeur because it is constricted by an added dark bedroom, long narrow entryway, and clutter. For the price, the unit is slightly insufficient in maintenance, cleanliness and polish, including the kitchens and bathrooms. | VIDEO
The main issues that need to be corrected are:
1. Asking price is too high
2. Tenants are creating poor presentation / reduction of value
Top national professional real estate coaches have been consulted by local loft specialist real estate professionals to ensure that the property and market have been analyzed thoroughly. The group has concluded that high asking price, along with occupancy by current tenants are the primary obstacles to a successful sale. The L.A. Loft Blog expects prices to continue to fall — financially hurting sellers while opening up more possibilities for home buyers.
Several local loft specialists have concluded that the asking price is much too high for the type of loft unit in its current state. The unit presents a rare opportunity for a creative, visionary buyer who is willing to patiently negotiate in order to get an amazing large loft and a very low price per square foot.
Local Real Estate Market: Prices continue to drop. Home value decrease has been accelerating.
Several Los Angeles loft specialists with dozens of years of experienced have warned: Sellers who choose a wait and see strategy during a falling market risk future price drops being outpaced by falling market prices, causing a much lower final sale amount.
The local real estate market economic downturn has been accelerating. August median price is down significantly year-over-year. Downtown Los Angeles and Nearby median sold price is down 7% for that period from 2018.
There are several ways to attract a higher selling price. The two key actions for sellers to achieve a successful sale in today’s Los Angeles housing market:
1. Set the asking price slightly below the comps.
2. Increase the perceived value by presenting the property fixed up, vacant and professionally staged.
Get a free list of live/work lofts. Fill out the online form:
You don’t have to be a weather person to predict the weather this time of year. We all know… it’s the hottest time of the year. But that’s not all that’s hot. The economy is red hot too. By all measures the best economy in 20 years or so. | NEWSLETTER PDF
This is GOOD for most reading this, but there will be some exceptions. There always are. For example, someone will sell a house and make out great, meaning a buyer pays a bit more than they would have not too long ago. And in some areas, the opposite happens. Seller does not make out that great, but the buyer does. Most homeowners who do NOT have to sell of course know this and will hold back on buying or selling. That will, of course, impact supply and demand. Results right now?
RED HOT Opportunities!
If you or a friend are thinking about selling, make sure to choose a real estate company you can trust!
Benefiting
Corey Chambers Team raising $25,000 for CHLA
A Real Estate Company That Gives Back!
Corey Chambers Your Home Sold GUARANTEED or I’ll Buy It* 888-240-2500
How does this impact you? Well, it is a HOT time to invest in real estate. Single-family, multi-family, even loft condos. If you didn’t get the memo, here is a special clause from our Buyer and Seller Agreements of our VIP Client Program enabling past clients of ours to create additional wealth through real estate. VIP CLIENT PROGRAM: Seller ___ does OR ___ does not wish to participate in Broker’s VIP Client Real Estate Investor Program (REIP), whereby Seller will receive notices of free real estate investor training and notices of real estate investment opportunities by mail, email or phone at times when investment opportunities arise. Seller may opt-out of The REIP at any time. Seller is never obligated to invest in real estate. So, if you or anyone you know likes the idea of making money in real estate using other people’s money, please contact us right away… while these HOT investment opportunities are available. Making gains in assets and wealth are nice! I especially like it because it allows me the opportunity to GIVE more. How about you?
Go Serve Big Your Referrals Help Kids!
As you probably know, we donate a portion of our income to some AMAZING, worthy causes! Like Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, one of the country’s leading non-profit children’s hospitals. We are on a mission to raise $25,000 for CHLA. Their work in helping kids fight through and survive nasty debilitating diseases like cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia as well as their work inearly diagnosis of autism and spinal cord injuries is second to none! And as the leading not for profit hospital in our area, you probably know they need sponsorships and donations to continue their leading-edge care and keep family’s expenses to a minimum. We are committed to donating a portion of our income from home sales to this very worthy cause. So, YOUR REFERRALS really do HELP THE KIDS… Who do you know considering buying or selling a home, or investing in real estate you could refer to my team? Not only will they benefit from our award-winning service, but the kids at CHLA will benefit as well. Just give me a call or pass my number on to anyone you know considering buying or selling.
My number is 213-880-9910. You and your referrals mean more than ever to my team. As we move forward through this red-hot summer, please know we are extremely thankful for you and you being a special part of our business.
Corey Chambers
Your Home Sold Guaranteed
P.S. When you read the story enclosed your heart will warm! Mine sure did. Check it out.
A Real Estate Company that Gives Back!
When you hear me say, “YOUR REFERRALS HELP THE KIDS!” they really do!
Selling Your Home and Getting Top Dollar!
Call me TODAY for a free consultation.
Corey Chambers 213-880-9910
A real estate company with experience, proven results, and a give-back philosophy!Over the last two decades of helping thousands of families sell their home and/or buy another, we have met some wonderful, loving, caring people.People like you! So your referrals can rest assured that not only will they get the award-winning service we are known for and the guarantee to back it up, but that a solid portion of the income we receive will go toward a very worthy cause.Refer your friends, neighbors, associates or family members considering making a move:
You can go towww.ReferralsHelpKids.comenter their contact info on-line or forward the link to someone you know considering a move.
Of course, you can always call me direct as well at 213-880-9910.
Why I support Childrenʼs Hospital, Los Angeles
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
I grew up right here in the Greater Los Angeles Area, born in Los Angeles County 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 Area California native, I take pride in supporting in a way that I can the good work these people do at Children’s. My team rallies around our annual goal or
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 commitment 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
‘I Can See! I Can See!’
Story and photos courtesy Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
The dawning of gene therapy at CHLA saved a 5-year-old girl from inevitable blindness.
You will have to grant a parental pardon to Heather for her momentary excessive permissiveness, allowing her 5-year-old daughter to race down the block after dark, free from her mother’s hand. It wasn’t just that the cool house on the street was all done up for Halloween, or that it belonged to Heather’s sister. It was the dark itself that was the thrill.
“I can see in the dark!” Monroe roared as she ran, in that delirious hiccup-giggle a 5-year-old can do. “I see the houses! I see the cars! I can see in the dark!”Only a month earlier, Heather would have had Monroe virtually clamped to her side. As an infant, Monroe would always turn away from the dark, fixing her eyes on the recessed lighting installed near the ceiling in the family’s living room. No amount of silly faces, animal impersonations or got-your-nose tricks could get her to engage in eye contact, or to look away from the sunbeams coming through a window. For months Heather’s pediatrician told her nothing was out of the ordinary. Monroe was still “discovering” her eyes, she said. Over time she got a notion that autism was the source of Monroe’s symptoms, which grew to include multiple missed milestones that were consistent with the disorder. If you waved, Monroe didn’t wave back; she wouldn’t sit still, or look in the direction of a pointing finger.
The doctor referred Heather to a facility near her house in San Diego, where Monroe was given the standard circuit of tests and therapies. Heather was inclined to believe what she was told, even if it didn’t match what she witnessed at home. “The doctor had me convinced she was autistic,” she says. “I was like, ‘Well, then that’s it. That’s what it is.’” But after starting therapy Monroe began walking—and bumping right into walls. “We had a stair in our house—just one stair,” Heather says. “She would always miss it. She would always fall.”
On what turned out to be her last appearance at the autism center, a staff member put Monroe in a dark, tent-like space, as Heather describes it, employing it as a calming safe zone. It was just the opposite. Monroe came scampering out toward the light, bawling.
That was enough. Unable to get through to her pediatrician, Heather found a new, more amenable one, who sent her to an ophthalmologist at the local children’s hospital. The ophthalmologist found that Monroe’s pupils would enlarge when encountering bright spaces and shrink in darker surroundings—the opposite of how they’re supposed to behave. He had her undergo an electroretinogram, a sophisticated vision test that checks the response of the light-detecting cells in the retina. All of Monroe’s mystifying behavior—walking into walls, glaring at the glow of the TV set, failing to respond to a wave—was about to be explained.
The test showed Monroe had Leber’s congenital amaurosis (LCA), a rare, inherited eye disease that disrupts the retina’s capacity to respond to light. Overall eyesight deteriorates, but the main impairment in children is to the rod photoreceptors, the part of the eye that’s called on in dim surroundings, leaving the LCA patient unable to see in the dark, or even in soft light.
A blood sample confirmed that Monroe had a mutation in the RPE65 gene, which governs the production of a protein that provides for healthy vision. “I asked the doctor, ‘Well, what does this mean?’” Heather says. “He said, ‘Your daughter at some point is going to lose her vision.’” He said the condition had no remedy but offered a vague, insinuated hope. “Maybe there will be something available at some point,” he told Heather, “but right now we have nothing.
”News of a breakthrough”
What Heather did not know was that a group of researchers had reached the final phase of a clinical trial on a drug that would soon land like a cannon shot across the medical field. The drug, called Luxturna, carries a healthy, functioning copy of the RPE65 gene in liquid form that gets injected below the patient’s retina. Once the replacement gene arrives, the retinal cells have what they need to produce the protein that enables normal vision. When the FDA approved the drug in December 2017, it represented a monumental breakthrough—the first federally approved therapy to replace a defective gene responsible for an inherited disease of any kind. The cryptic hint of optimism that her ophthalmologist seemed to suggest was transformed into genuine possibility.
“I never thought I’d see the day,” Heather says. “I wanted Monroe to be the first one.” She reached out to the drug’s developer, and the company worked with her on submitting all of the necessary records, getting insurance coverage—without insurance, the cost of the procedure was $425,000 per eye—and finding a doctor who could perform the procedure. The latter effort led Heather on a 98-mile drive north of her home, to see Aaron Nagiel, MD, an ophthalmologist at The Vision Center at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, one of a select group of physicians who had been trained and approved in the use of the new medication. He was open with Heather about the risks, but also about the realities. Monroe’s vision was certain to degenerate if nothing were done.
GO SERVE BIG! YOUR REFERRALS HELP THE KIDS!
“One of the biggest things I tell families is that we know the natural history of this condition, and it’s always a steady decline,” Dr. Nagiel says. “It’s not like some patients do OK and other patients do poorly. They all do poorly.” Monroe’s daytime vision was starting to fail, and she had already been designated legally blind. The results from the phase 3 clinical trial indicated that Luxturna could not provide perfect vision, but now three years out from treatment, those patients had reported enduring improvements, including the ability to see better in the dark, without any major side effects. “That’s as far out as we know,” Dr. Nagiel says. He may not have had 20 years of data to lean on, but Dr. Nagiel could provide an assurance that he had done the procedure, called a vitrectomy, countless times. He just hadn’t done it for the purposes of conducting gene therapy. Virtually any time that eye surgery requires manipulating the retina, a vitrectomy is done. The technique involves making small incisions through the white part of the eye to clear out the vitreous gel inside. This instance would be no different, yet he couldn’t block out the magnitude of it. “I didn’t sleep very well the night before the first surgery, in March,” he says. Monroe was set to be the third CHLA patient to have the procedure. Her surgeries were scheduled a week apart, the left eye—the worse one—on Aug. 14, the right eye on Aug. 21. In the meantime, Heather set out to prepare for the worst-case scenario. “I didn’t know if I’d wake up the next day and Monroe wouldn’t have her sight,” she says. “Whatever she wanted to do, we did. Time was ticking.” They made weekly trips to Disneyland, and regular outings to Monroe’s other favorite pastime: the racetrack. She couldn’t see the horses run, but she could hear them rumbling down the final stretch of track. She started calling them go-gos after hearing her mother and sister cheering “Go, go, go!” She would yell out, “Mama, the go-gos are coming! The go-go’s are coming!” “I just thought, if she loses her vision tomorrow,” Heather says, “at least I could say I did all that Monroe wanted.”
Tables turned
Afterward, Dr. Nagiel could only wait for Monroe’s response. Diagnostic tests wouldn’t be done for a few months. The proof would be in the patient’s feedback. On Aug. 19, five days after the surgery, Heather dropped the lid to a tube of ointment on the carpeted floor of her hotel room. It was a dark blueprint, not conducive to finding a tiny black cap. Heather was fishing around for it when Monroe told her to hang on a moment. She covered up her right eye, and using only her left, surgically treated eye, she nabbed the cap on the floor and handed it to her mother. It was a hallelujah, aha and Eureka-I-have-found-it revelation all forged together. She cried out, “I found the cap! I can see! I can see!” Till that point, Heather was always picking up after Monroe, who would drop things and be unable to find them. “A Starburst,” she recalls as an example. “A pink Starburst. And we have a tan carpet.” The tables had turned in an ironic but exhilarating way. As Heather stifled her tears, Monroe turned into a human Roomba, cleaning things off the floor and delighting in her new vision. Hey, there’s the remote! The second surgery was only two days later, and now the anticipation for fixing the other eye grew. Another five days after the procedure, Monroe and her mother and sister went to Disneyland. As their boat sailed through the darkened “It’s a Small World,” Monroe began pointing out what she thought were new attractions: Jasmine and Aladdin, along with Lilo and Stitch. Heather was happy to play along, but her elder daughter, Destiny, wouldn’t cooperate. “Monroe, you’re not right,” she told her. “Those have always been there. You just couldn’t see them.”
‘A very special thing’
In his office, Dr. Nagiel glances at his phone. It’s Heather. “She just texted me,” he says. He reads aloud: “This is Thursday at 7:30 at night. We were at a street fair and Monroe was walking around all by herself without any help. That would’ve never happened before.”
He receives a running ticker of updates from Heather and other LCA families testifying to sights newly seen: clouds, fireworks, birds flying overhead. The stories are more than gratifying; they serve as evidence of the treatment’s effectiveness, which is “in some ways a lot more meaningful than whatever number or quantitative data we could get,” Dr. Nagiel says. “You’ve seen that video of her running through the street?” he asks. “That’s just like … ” He waits for a word to cover the enormity of it. “It’s like biblical. It’s from the Old Testament, the improvements that these patients have.
“It’s a very special thing for me,” he says, noting that CHLA is one of only 10 institutions approved to perform the procedure, the only one in California, and has done more than any other site since the FDA moved the drug forward. “For all of the medicine this is the first gene-replacement therapy, and we’re the ones doing it.” He says vision tends to improve up to eight weeks after the surgery and then levels off. Monroe’s will probably stay where it is today. Earlier she had been complaining of headaches and problems seeing; a visit to CHLA showed that her improved eyesight was to blame. She had gone from 20-300 to 20-125 and her eyeglass prescription needed a reset. A while back, she went to Movie Night at school. Heather thought of joining her but backed off. “I have to give her her wings,” she says. When the lights went down before the movie began, Monroe turned to her friend with concern. “I can’t see,” she whispered. The girl answered back, “I can’t see either.” Well, that was good to know. She felt relieved. Sometimes the dark is just the dark. — By Jeff Weinstock
How You Can Help
Refer your friends, neighbors, associates or family members considering making a move: www.ReferralsHelpKids.com or call Corey at 213-880-9910
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