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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(12/30/08)  We’ve been teaching 2-hour seminars for home sellers and buyers for the City of Lakewood’s Community Services Department for well over a decade, and we’ve got one of our most popular ones coming up on Saturday morning, January 24th.
The concept behind this particular class came from a casual remark about twenty years ago from [...]

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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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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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Today’s home selling market here in Lakewood is challenging, but it’s not impossible. We’ve seen worse–much worse. Like back in the late 1980s, in the months leading up to the first Gulf War.

Back then, buyers were virtually non existent in Lakewood. Today, the buyers are out there, but they have plenty of homes to choose from, and they’re not in any hurry. With the correct approach, Lakewood properties can be sold quickly without “giving them away.” A good illustration is provided by the southern half of one 50-home block in Lakewood’s 90712 zip code.

This past February year, six homes were on the market there. By the start of July, three of them had sold and closed escrow, one had been taken off the market and rented out, and two remained on the market unsold, even as their lender was in the process of foreclosing.

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