Jose Mares, 38, a Huntington Park police officer, said he'd been searching for eight years for a house. To him, the dark-shingled house needed too much renovation to justify the tab. He thinks he knows why it's priced where it is: There's not a glut of quality competition close by, and the owner and listing agent know their edge.
"Some want to charge $550,000 for a starter house," Mares said.
King, the agent, said she'd heard earfuls about that, and noted that this was not your father's housing crash. Today, everyone is savvier, able to analyze properties with a few keystrokes or see a street view using Google.
Instant information, though, also means fiercer competition and fewer hidden gems. As an example, King cited a 1,625-square-foot, midcentury-style fixer-upper in La Crescenta priced at $299,000. Forty people were standing on the front lawn within an hour of its listing, she said. Ultimately, there were 80 bids, 15 of them exceeding $400,000. The winning bid was $480,000.
"What I'm seeing is that perceived bargains are going in multiple offers for more than the asking, and buyers are very disappointed," King said. "Real estate is hyperlocal, so a [regional] $250,000 median price is meaningless here."
Predicting where values are headed is hardly a science either, no matter what the cable-TV experts or the galaxy of websites with every imaginable statistic say. For one thing, people selling costlier homes tend to have deep pockets buffering them from needing a fire sale to stay afloat. If they don't like the bids, they can pull their property off the market.
Banks are an even bigger X factor, and not just because of their stricter lending requirements and bailout havoc. USC real estate professor Tracey Seslen said she'd heard that lenders were carefully timing the release of homes they'd repossessed to avoid further flooding the market and driving prices down more. Those institutions also know that a fresh avalanche of foreclosures from people with resetting loans may be looming.
"So the banks are playing this game too," Seslen said. "They're keeping prices artificially high."
Rivero, the soon-to-be-married business-development exec, wishes that weren't so, and hopes his tenacity pays off.
"We've learned not to get our hopes up because it sets us up for heartbreak," he said. "What's driving me is that I actually want a house."
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realestate@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Blogs for house hunters
Southland home shoppers reckoned they could exploit the supposed buyer's market caused by plunging values and surplus inventory -- until they actually got out there and discovered bidding wars and experienced sticker shock over mid-priced houses. Fortunately, the local blogosphere is overflowing with megabytes of market data about pricing trends, housing stock and neighborhood conditions. The heated readers' comments almost make the confusion worth it too. Here are some local sites to check out:
* www.redfin.com
* www.doctorhousingbubble.com
* http://terrafirmala.com
* www.westsideremeltdown.blogspot.com
* http://sbbeachbubble.blogspot.com
* www.bubbleinfo.com
* http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laland
-- Chip Jacobs
