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So you have gotten the phone call and heard "Congratulations, you have an accepted offer and you’re in escrow." Now if you watched the clip from Porlandia, escrow is not an ancient god! Escrow is a transaction where one person delivers something of value to a third person, to be held until the ...
07/13/2015
Blood Sweat and Tears: The Peril of Being a First Time Buyer in Los Angeles. How to find Your First Home that you can Afford. Be open to the area that you choose. Don’t be afraid to move into an area that is up and coming. It’s your first home and not your forever home. As long as it’s near ano...
04/18/2015
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So you have just purchased a house and the prior owner bought the house for much less than you did. It’s time to prepare for what we call a Supplemental Tax Bill or Assessment. When you pay for your taxes via escrow, you are paying for them based on the prior owner’s value/assessment. If the prio...
04/16/2015
So you are waiting to buy your first home in Los Angeles as you need to save up for a down payment. The wait maybe over as Fannie Mae has launched a new first time homebuyer program that allows you to buy a house or condo with as little as 3% down. Here is the low down… Key components: · O...
04/06/2015
So you are planning on selling a home in Los Angeles and you hear from your Real Estate Agent/Realtor that you are responsible for “retrofit” in the City of Los Angeles. You ask, what is retrofit? Retrofit includes things like safety glazing on the glass for sliding doors, seismic/earthquake valv...
03/26/2015
Baby Boomers a Fun Property Tax Benefit in California: One Time Benefit to Senior Citizens: Propositions 60 and 90 Explained Now that the kids are off to and out of college and having grandchildren it may be time to move and leave that empty nest or should we say, find a loft in Downtown or a ...
03/13/2015
With every buyer and seller in a real estate transaction, inevitably the question comes up: what exactly is a contingency? Contingency can be defined as “a future event or circumstance that is possible but cannot be predicted with certainty.” That definition doesn’t do us much good but it does s...
01/09/2015
I have been in this perplexing situation: Wanting to buy a home in a good area but only able to afford a small home on a small lot. For LA this is a lot under 5,000 square feet and a home under 1,000 square feet. My second home was in Picfair Village. Priced at $245,000 in 2002, we purchased b...
01/07/2015
"You ungrateful little brat! Just look at everything you have. When I was your age, we...lived in a duplex! We didn't even have our own house!" A great line from Annette Bening's character, a Realtor, in American Beauty. In Los Angeles, home prices are always going to rise and so are rents. A d...
01/06/2015
Walkability In Los Angeles There is a popular song from the 1980s called “Walking in LA” by the band Missing Persons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_UpLtGEWoY Catchy tune but it can be very true as Los Angeles is a culture of cars. Over the years however we have created pockets of walka...
03/10/2012