Real Estate Values in Santa Clarita Valley Fuel Frenzy of House-Hopping

In the Santa Clarita Valley, the upwardly mobile are truly mobile.

With gold-rush enthusiasm, people are selling their homes and hopscotching from house to house as new developments open--urban nomads in search of an extra bedroom or a bigger tax deduction. In the last five years, residents, real estate brokers and developers say, frequent moves have become second nature to homeowners in the valley.

“It seems like people move all the time,” said Jim Lewis, executive director of the Santa Clarita Valley Board of Realtors.

“This isn’t the way our parents lived,” said David Angulo, a Valencia homeowner who in four years has purchased two homes less than a mile apart. “When I was growing up, people bought a home, and they stayed the rest of their lives.”

Rapidly appreciating land values, favorable interest rates, an upbeat economy and the 1986 tax law have fueled house-hopping in other growing communities in Southern California. But in Santa Clarita, many residents have been moving around the valley, not out of it, at a pace that some real estate experts say is twice the national average.

‘An Interim Move’

Although the pattern is apparent elsewhere, to Santa Clarita Valley residents, it seems more pronounced, especially in Valencia and Newhall. Many of the homeowners are young professionals who hop down the road or even to the house next door as they parlay rising home equity into down payments on larger or more exclusive residences.

“You don’t want to be left behind,” said one homeowner, who has purchased two homes and is already eyeing a third.

“We all know that where we’re living right now is just an interim move,” he added, requesting anonymity for fear that neighbors will brand him a speculator. “We want to be in position for the next development. . . . There’s no end to it.”

For the moment, apparently not.

In Santa Clarita, the economic climate has forged a community that is savvy, knowledgeable and, at times, obsessed about housing.

“You stand in line at the market--they talk about real estate,” Lewis said. “You hear people walking down the street talking about real estate.”

Jeannette Sharar, a Santa Clarita planning commissioner and a real estate broker in the valley for 18 years, said she has noticed that many valley homeowners wait only two or three years before buying again.

Small-Town Sense

Nationally, people move about every five years, said Michael Carney, professor of finance and real estate at Cal Poly Pomona and executive director of the Real Estate Research Council, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the university.

Many residents said they choose to remain in the Santa Clarita Valley because it has a small-town sense of community that they couldn’t find in the San Fernando Valley or elsewhere in the Los Angeles area.

“Nobody likes to leave the valley,” said Laurene Weste, a Santa Clarita parks commissioner and vice president of the Placerita Canyon Homeowners Assn. “They just seem to move around it.”

“They’re also conscious that it is a profitable place to live,” said Steve Bottfeld, a marketing and communications consultant for First Financial Group, builder of American Beauty Classics houses in the valley.

Consider Sam and Karen Herr, owners of J.S. Mulligan’s, a family-style restaurant in Valencia.

“We’ve purchased three homes in five years,” Karen Herr said Friday as movers loaded a van for the family’s latest move, a 1-mile trip west to a four-bedroom house in Valencia. “We were Gypsies in another life,” her husband said jokingly.

Families Make Money

The Herrs, who plan to stay put for a while, said some people don’t understand how they can afford to upgrade their homes so frequently. More than once, Sam Herr’s mother has told him, “You spend so much money.”

“But they don’t understand we’re making so much money” in buying and selling the houses, Karen Herr said. The Herrs’ former three-bedroom house on Moreno Drive, purchased for $238,000 two years ago, just sold for $329,000.

Mike and Jane Derderian made an even shorter move in a housing tract just north of the Herrs. They bought the house next door.

“I don’t believe the United States Postal Service has figured it out yet,” Mike Derderian said.

The 1,300-square-foot house that the Derderians purchased on Sabado Court for $130,000 in 1985 was worth $160,000 in 1987. They sold it to buy the 1,860-square-foot home next door for $230,000. “This is a house I never anticipated having,” said Mike Derderian, an electrical contractor.

Revealing Statistics

Derderian said he has no plans to leave. He has seen six of 12 families come and go on Sabado Court in three years. A seventh family plans to move in the spring.

Then there’s Susan and Tom Edwards. In eight years, they have purchased three Valencia homes, all within 2 miles of each other. They started with three bedrooms; now they have five.

Real estate experts said there is no way to document the trend precisely, but some of the Santa Clarita Valley’s major developers offer some revealing statistics.

Newhall Land and Farming Co., developer of Valencia and the valley’s major builder, said Santa Clarita residents looking for their second or third home buy 70% to 85% of the houses sold in its more expensive developments, where prices range from $215,950 to $617,950. Gloria Casvin, a Newhall Land vice president, said that in the company’s other tracts, where prices begin just under $100,000 for some condominiums, the figure is at least 40%.

Bottfeld said First Financial sells about 40% of its new homes to Santa Clarita residents moving up the housing ladder. “This trend . . . really began in 1983 and has grown since then,” he said.

Bottfeld recalled when 4,000 people walked through model homes that American Beauty Classics opened one weekend in 1984. American Beauty interviewed the visitors and found that “more than half were local,” he said. “The percentage was 55%.”

Homeowners said it’s almost a waste of money not to take advantage of rapidly appreciating property values. In August, the most recent month for which statistics are available, the average Santa Clarita Valley house sold for $183,000. A year earlier, the same house sold for $155,000.

Sharar knows of a family that sold its 1,800-square-foot home in rural Castaic to buy a slightly smaller house in a more affluent neighborhood in Santa Clarita. They paid $185,000 for the new home, stayed six months and sold it for $218,900. The family is returning to Castaic, purchasing their largest home yet, a 2,400-square-foot dwelling, for $214,000.

The story of David Angulo and his wife, Erminia, and their 1-year-old daughter, Amanda, is probably more typical.

The Angulos moved from an apartment in Pasadena to a two-story, four-bedroom house on Laguna Court in Valencia in May, 1985. They thought they would never move again.

Law Encourages Mobility

But this year, Angulo, a dentist in Toluca Lake, watched as the Edwards and two other families on the block put their houses on the market. “All of a sudden, everybody found out their homes had appreciated 50% in two years,” he said.

So the Angulos moved in September to a larger, five-bedroom home less than a mile away. Their first home, purchased for $178,000 four years ago, sold for $293,000 this summer.

The 1986 tax reform law encourages such mobility because it took away most deductions for the “great middle class,” prompting people to invest more in homes than they might have earlier, Bottfeld said.

“Nowadays, all your tax shelters are in your home loan, not your charge cards,” Susan Edwards said.

Moreover, many lots are not big enough to add a bedroom for a new arrival in the family, said Joyce Newell, a real estate agent for Valencia Realty.

The downside of the trend, many residents fear, is that it creates a community without roots.

“Who gets to know anybody?” Sharar asked.

Neighborhoods Move

Derderian, who moved next door, said he still keeps in touch with four of the families that left his block but thinks that these friendships are the exception. It saddens him, he said, that his children will not grow up in a stable neighborhood the way he did in Culver City. “My parents stayed 37 years in the same house,” he said.

Edwards said that in some instances, whole neighborhoods move, not just individuals, so families--especially children--are able to maintain old friendships. Her old neighbors, the Angulos, live five houses from the Edwards in their new neighborhood, the Summit development. And the family that lived across the street from the Angulos on Laguna Court now lives in a house directly opposite them on Park View Road.

Weste said the house-hopping molds citizens with a broad interest in their community because they know so many parts of it firsthand.

But when the American dream becomes only a smart investment, or is perceived as greed, those left behind sometimes turn bitter. “There’s some bad blood,” one homeowner said.

“You know what it boils down to? Keeping up with the Joneses,” said Barbara Fernandez, a nine-year resident of Faisan Court who has watched all but four of her original neighbors leave her street for other parts of Valencia and Newhall.

As for the future, real estate agents said, the Santa Clarita Valley’s roving residents could be slowed if interest rates rise. But, for now, homeowners are still poised to catch the next moving van.

An acquaintance of Derderian’s just bought a home in a new tract. “He’s already talking about moving,” Derderian said. “He hasn’t even moved in.”