Where the Real Estate Market’s Highs and Lows Have Hit Home

Bert and Lynda Duzy always dreamed of owning their own home.

And now, thanks to the depressed real estate market, they do.

“Before, there were high interest rates and high prices,” said Bert Duzy, 38, sitting in the living room of the Simi Valley home the couple purchased for $157,000 in August. “But I watched the classifieds, the business news, the real estate sections, you know. And then everything else fell together and the interest rates fell down to 6%.”

The recession has been good to Bert, who owns a land-maintenance company, homemaker Lynda, 30, and their two daughters. As they settle into their 1,500-square-foot house on half an acre, they can’t help but be grateful to the housing market that made it all possible.

Across the county, however, Helen (Mickey) Westbrook, 66, and Lu Pasqua, 64, are silently cursing the same market.

Westbrook bought the Ventura Keys home they share five years ago for $500,000. The couple thought the 3,000-square-foot home would be ideal for her seven grandchildren and his four grandchildren to visit.

But the grandchildren didn’t stay over that often, and the place seemed too big for two people. So they put the house on the market in January for $850,000, intending to look for a condominium in Oxnard.

It’s been marked down to $700,000, and nearly a year has passed and it still hasn’t sold. Pasqua, a real estate agent, ticks off a list of neighbors forced to unload similar houses for about $400,000, and shakes his head with worry.

“This house, three or four years ago, would have gone for close to $1 million,” said a rueful Pasqua, enjoying a sunset on the house’s picturesque patio above a canal.

“Used to be, no matter what price you put on it, they just kept comparing it to L.A. and saying, ‘This is a steal,’ ” he said. “So everybody just raised the price, raised the price, and everything was just selling, selling, selling.”

Then the recession set in, he said, “and everything came to a standstill.”

The Duzys and Westbrook and Pasqua are typical buyers and sellers in the current real estate market in Ventura County, where large homes languish and cheaper houses are snatched up by bargain-hungry first-time buyers.

Sellers and real estate agents looking for signs of hope take comfort that sales of single-family houses in Ventura County are projected to have risen 2.3% in 1993, according to a report prepared by TRW-REDI Property Data, a national real estate information firm.

Among houses priced between $100,000 and $175,000, the increase in sales is dramatic: 18%.

But when cheaper homes sell faster than more expensive ones, the average price drops. Thus, from 1992 to 1993, county house prices are projected to have dropped 1.4%, the report states.

While lower-priced homes are selling better than in 1992, the middle of the market is slower and the high end only marginally improved.

Mark Schniepp, director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecasting Project, said most of the market activity is coming from renters who can now afford to buy houses and discontented suburbanites fleeing Los Angeles for safer, less congested pastures. Missing, he said, is “internal activity” in the Ventura County market, with local homeowners selling houses and buying up to larger, pricier homes.

“Real estate sales should nearly be at an all-time high because of the low interest rates,” he said.

Schniepp predicts that the real estate sales will continue to sputter along for at least another year, perhaps not falling as low as they have been in the recent past but not improving markedly.

Indeed, residential and commercial foreclosures in the county--which tend to drag down home prices--are projected to have reached about 1,600 in 1993, a 53% increase over 1992 and a 13-year high, according to TRW-REDI figures.

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House prices have declined precipitously since the recession began in 1990.

The average price in Oxnard, for example, at the peak of the most recent real estate boom in February, 1990, was $271,620, according to figures compiled by the UCSB forecasting project. By June, 1993, according to the UCSB group, the average price was $178,173--a 34% drop.

The local market, however, is at least improving, while sales elsewhere in the state and region are declining.

Home sales in California are projected to have dropped 2.5% in 1993 compared to 1992, while the decline is expected to be 4.4% in Los Angeles County and 8.9% in San Bernardino County.

Many real estate agents are optimistic.

“It is beginning to change,” said Gayle Caughey of Jon Douglas Realtors in Westlake. “Early (in 1993), March and April, is when the market started to turn.”

Alan Cusick, a real estate agent with Century 21 County Center Realty in Ventura, also senses renewed energy in the local market. “I feel Ventura County has fantastic potential,” Cusick said. “I think we’re going to be looking at a much healthier market in 1994.” He and his colleagues clearly hope so. The last few years have been devastating for real estate agents as well.

A year and a half ago, there were 1,600 agents in the Moorpark-Simi Valley Assn. of Realtors, said Dan Dudek, the group’s president. Today, there are about 1,050.

“I’ve seen a number of realtors’ homes that come up on the default list,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of people comment, ‘Dear Lord, give me one good market, and I promise not to throw it all away this time.’ ”

Shari LeKander, an agent with Bob Ely Realty in Westlake, said that even when she has eager buyers on the high or low ends of the market, there isn’t much good stuff to show them. Builders aren’t building and many prospective sellers are holding onto their homes as long as possible, hoping prices will pick up again.

“There are so many ho-hum products on the market,” she said. “It’s like pouncing on a June bug when a sharp one comes along.”

If any house looks like the proverbial June bug, it would be Donna Cottam’s three-bedroom, two-bath Camarillo home, marked down to $229,950 from $237,900, its living room newly redecorated in a cheery floral pattern.

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Cottam, 46, and her husband, Richard, 52, put the house on the market in early September. So far, the only visitors have been “looky-loos” and picky buyers who make time-wasting, low-ball offers while they continue to search for the perfect deal.

“We haven’t heard a bad comment about the house,” Cottam said, “but it’s a buyers’ market and they seem to offer whatever seems reasonable to them.”

The Cottams had no plans to sell their house as recently as a year ago. Then the Canoga Park plant where Richard worked as a supervisor closed, and he was transferred to Tucson, Ariz.

So when Richard started his new job in Tucson in the summer, Donna, an accountant in Newbury Park, put the Camarillo house on the market--and waited.

“I thought there would be more people coming through,” Donna said with a sigh.

LeKander, the Westlake real estate agent, knows only too well the kind of buyers traipsing through the Cottam house.

“I think if anything, buyers are becoming a bit spoiled,” she said. “Because they hear constantly that prices are down, they’ve upped their expectations of what they are going to get.”

Most realtors long for clients like the Duzys. Sick of their former San Fernando Valley neighborhood, eager to buy and totally unencumbered by any need to sell their previous house, they started looking for a home in April, put an offer on a house in May and closed escrow by the end of August.

In fact, as Linda listed the cornucopia of fruit trees growing in their expansive back yard (“five pomegranate trees, peaches, apricots, grapefruit, figs, persimmons”), Bert shakes his head in wonder at the great deal they landed.

“At this price, I would’ve expected it to be some shack,” he said. “We didn’t want to move to Palmdale, you know what I mean?”