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I have direct experience with just one house in California. Here's how it has gone:
1987: Bay Area housing is so expensive. We could hardly find anything under $100K!
1992: The market is so bad, nobody will pay $170K for this house.
2005: Prices are out of control, let's sell! (Went for $540K a week later.)
2008: Yikes, it was foreclosed and resold for $170K.
2013: Sold for $380K
2018: Oh my, it's worth $540K again!
2021: Zestimate $619K
So I'd say prices trend upward, with notable downswings. When interest rates go up, prices come down. Shop smart, and you can do well.
There are counties that rarely have a sale under 1 million dollars
They'll fluctuate up and down with the market, but long term they'll increase as has most of the country. Right now, people are leaving Cali, not moving there though.
Prices have gone up and down quite a bit just over the past 12-15 years; you can't say they have "never" gone down or will "never" go down again. But will there be a time when California housing prices will decline to a point where they are commensurate with housing prices in less desirable, low COL states like Arkansas? I highly doubt it, not in any of our lifetimes.
If California real estates fall to the level that Arkansas currently is, then Arkansas will really be a good deal. Only way I see that is inflation causing interest rates to spike way up making new loans a lot more expensive.
They went down in 2005-06. I offered $600,000 for a house in Vallejo the told me they were going for $1 million. Two months later it was auctioned for $280,000 a year after that it was almost a million again.
The long term trend has always been up, up, up, but there have been downturns, the most recent one lasting nearly a decade. So just don't get caught leveraged during one of said downturns and you should be OK. (However, last time around a lot of people were just in that sort of pickle).
Why would anyone settle for living in Needles or any other of the terrible cities (like Bakersfield, Fresno, etc.) in CA. I seriously don't get it.
I read someone say that when the "Oakies" settled in the Central Valley, it had to be that their cars broke down, because who would want to live in any of those places when the coast is so awesome.
While not awesome, neither Bakersfield nor Fresno is "terrible". I would find either of them to be far more tolerable than Las Vegas or Phoenix. Both have the Sierras in the backdrop and access to some of the most scenic country on the planet. Some of us actually do appreciate living in a state with both a good social safety net and access to beautiful scenery.
In addition to "Okies" settling the Central Valley, there were also a lot of Basque, Portugese, Italian (specifically Sicilians and Calabrians), Greeks, Armenians and Volga Germans. A lot of these communities still thrive up and down the Central Valley from Sacramento to Bakersfield. Mexican Americans, Hmong and Indians are just the latest to add to the valley's rich cultural mix.
Last edited by apple92680; 03-01-2021 at 11:26 AM..
Why would anyone settle for living in Needles or any other of the terrible cities (like Bakersfield, Fresno, etc.) in CA. I seriously don't get it.
I read someone say that when the "Oakies" settled in the Central Valley, it had to be that their cars broke down, because who would want to live in any of those places when the coast is so awesome.
They choice the central valley because its excellent farmland. These people were farmers. They also did not have much money. So buying acreage for farming near the coast was not possible.
They choice the central valley because its excellent farmland. These people were farmers. They also did not have much money. So buying acreage for farming near the coast was not possible.
The rhythm of seasonal and sometimes inland-sea type flooding of the great inland valleys of California over the millennia deposited rich nutrients in the soil that exist to this day regardless of the massive engineering projects that have taken place to shift water resources from one region to another. California was and still is an agricultural powerhouse and that’s what the Okies knew how to work with.
Have they ever gone down in Hawaii over the past 70 years? Very briefly and very little, if at all.
Sure, they dropped 2005-2008 or so. We waited it out and saved more than we paid in rent.
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