Lakewood Real Estate News

(2/13/09) In a report released earlier this month, Moody’s “Economy.com” predicts a nationwide home price bottom in metropolitan areas in the 4th quarter of 2009.
While we think that may be possible, we think there are a number of red flags Moody’s may be neglecting. We’ll explain our own theory of when to buy [...]

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(12/18/08) by Dave Emerson Note: There is increasing evidence that the Lakewood, California real estate market is passing a price bottom this December.  This post explains one of the reasons I think the bottom is most likely to come during the winter.  In a few days I’ll explain the reasoning why this might be the [...]

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(12/6/08, by Dave Emerson) Today I’m writing not as a Realtor but primarily as a native Southern Californian who’s lived here all of my 58 years, most of them in Lakewood, starting at age 1.
Every now and then it hits me what a very special place I’m privileged to live in. Today’s one [...]

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(10/8/08) We ‘ve been teaching brief buyers’ and sellers’ classes for the city of Lakewood for about 20 years now. I like to do a buyers’ class early in the fall each year in anticipation of the market bottom that usually occurs during the winter months (see “Real Estate 101: Our 2 market cycles.”)

Several months ago we scheduled this year’s class with Lakewood’s Community Services Department for this Saturday, October 11, from 9 - 11 a.m. at Lakewood’s Mayfair Park (details & registration link here). At the time, we were anticipating at least the annual market bottom and possibly a cyclical bottom as well, but we weren’t exactly anticipating the events of the last few weeks!

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“ECONOMY HAS HEADS SPINNING” the newspaper screamed at me a few days back before I’d even picked it up off the driveway. Stocks tanking, huge firms failing or being bailed out, DataQuick medians show yet another home price drop, and now the “$700 trillion dollar Federal Bailout.”

And we decide now’s the time to tell you it’s a sellers’ market in Lakewood?

Sort of.

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Knowing school district lines in Lakewood is trickier than it seems. In our case, if the home was just three tenths of a mile to the south or to the east, it would have been in the Long Beach school district. 200 yards to the east, & we’d have been in a third district. The lines were drawn sixty years ago, and are a little tricky.

“Lakewood City” was the name of a tract on both sides of Carson west of Bellflower Blvd. Two thirds of the “Lakewood City” tract and MLS area are actually in the city of Long Beach. Yet dozens of listing agents list dozens of Lakewood homes as being in “Lakewood City” when they’re actually miles away from there. That’s only one of the most common mistakes.

When a home’s listed in the wrong area, it’s invisible to any agent who’s searching for it under the area it’s actually in. Yet I routinely find that about 35% of Lakewood homes are listed in the wrong MLS area of Lakewood. You’d think an agent who was going to make thousands of dollars if his listing sold would spend $5 for a MLS map to be sure it was listed in the right area. . . but you’d be wrong! That $5 mistake could cost his seller thousands of dollars, or even a sale.

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