No place to go
When Dave and Julie Haas put their one-bedroom Long Beach condominium on the market in mid-September, they figured they’d have a few months to look around and find another place to live.
But their modest 600-square-foot condo off Ocean Boulevard sold in just three days for $155,000, $6,000 more than the asking price. The catch? “The new buyers wanted to close escrow in just 21 days,” said Dave Haas, 31.
Given the care of their 2 1/2-year-old daughter, the pressure of their jobs (Julie is a registered nurse, Dave a property manager) and the frantic packing, a reasoned search for a new property was out of the question. Even finding a rental property proved difficult. The day before they had to vacate, the Haases finally found a rental house in Rossmoor for $2,000 per month.
The Haases aren’t alone in being all moved out with no place to go. Southern California’s sizzling real estate market has resulted in many displaced homeowners, whose giddiness at a lucrative sale quickly turns to dismay when they have to scramble for temporary quarters. Short supply, rising prices, escrow problems and remodeling delays are among the reasons for glitches in timing.
Lack of houses to buy is one of the major culprits. On average, a home was on the market for 24 days in November in Los Angeles County, a near record for fast turnover, according to the California Assn. of Realtors. And the unsold inventory in Los Angeles County -- that is, the number of months it would take to deplete the supply of homes for sale at the current sales rate -- was at 1.5 months, a steep drop from the 10-month average since the association began keeping statistics in 1982. And it is dramatically lower than the all-time high of 27.9 months in February 1991.
Sherman Oaks writer B.B. McGarry had no problem selling the two-bedroom, one-bath home in the quaint neighborhood where she had lived for 10 years. But moving on has proved difficult.
“I had forgotten how long I had looked to buy my house,” said McGarry, who bought a foreclosure in 1993 for $288,000 and sold it in June for nearly $700,000. “And I was surprised by the tight market.”
Six months and two rental apartments later, she’s back in Sherman Oaks -- renting but undaunted. “I’m just in between,” she said. “In this market, you don’t just pop out there and find the house you want.”
Apparently not. When their Chino Hills home sold within 30 days for $550,000, Gilbert and Stephanie Dominquez searched to find another place to buy but came up empty when moving day arrived. Since mid-September, the family of four has been living with Stephanie Dominquez’s parents in north Whittier.
After looking at more than 60 houses, they closed on a home in West Covina in mid-December and plan to move in after the first of the year.
“It was a long process,” said Stephanie Dominquez, an administrative assistant at AM Electric in Hacienda Heights. “The hard part was just waiting.”
In addition to a lack of housing inventory, rapidly rising prices also are challenging sellers turned buyers. The median price for a home in Southern California was $336,000 in November, up 16.7% from a year ago, according to DataQuick Information Systems.
The Haas family, for example, finally will be moving after the first of the year into a four-bedroom, two-bath house in Cypress they found at the end of November. But they had to spend $100,000 more than the $400,000 they budgeted. Still, Dave Haas said they will be glad to leave their rental, where they have just space heaters, and the Christmas tree lights keep blowing the fuse.
“It’s been an experience that we hope we don’t have to repeat for a long time,” he said. “It was incredibly stressful. We thought it would be fun finding a new house.”
With the move-up-move-on market tight, chain reactions of displacement are increasingly common.
“I helped a couple sell their old house in one community and find a new one in a better locale,” said Michael Baietti, an agent with Jim Dickson Realtors in Pasadena. But when the sellers of the new house ran into problems with their move, they refused to vacate the premises.
“At the last minute, my clients were left scrambling for a place to go,” she said. “They ended up camping in a hotel with a moving truck parked outside at $71 an hour.”
In some cases, potential sellers are getting cold feet.
“They’re fence-sitting,” said Anaheim Hills Prudential California real estate agent Pam Minier. “Clients are putting on hold the sale of their houses. I can’t find them anyplace to move. They’re frustrated.”
Other times, problems arise during escrow that derail or delay a deal.
“With interest rates so low recently, banks were inundated with paperwork, and 30-day closings got pushed back to 45 days, 60 days or longer,” said Anne Marie Rose of Tri-City Escrow Co. in Torrance.
Other escrow problems, including bad title, previously undisclosed liens and judgments, and home inspections gone awry, can also kill deals and leave participants hanging.
“My whole life is in storage except for my computer and clothes,” said David Rosenman, a 35-year-old sales and promotion marketer who has been living in a one-bedroom apartment since September, when he sold his Beverlywood home.
Rosenman intended to move into a larger house with girlfriend Rachel Raptis. After his offer was accepted, though, a home inspection disclosed structural defects. “It killed the deal,” Rosenman said. So he ended up moving into Raptis’ one-bedroom Westside apartment.
“I’m prepared to stay here as long as I have to until I find something,” said Rosenman, who looks for houses twice a week and figures he has seen as many as 80 this fall. “They say not to look at your home as an investment, but when you’re spending just under $1 million, it had better be an investment.”
Enhancing that investment can also cause delays. Mark Luni, director of resources at Gemini Moving Specialists in North Hollywood, frequently sees timing problems when remodeling projects drag past deadline.
“Someone’s got a house they’re expecting to move into and the remodeling takes a lot longer than expected,” Luni said. “It happens all the time.”
Minier agrees. “I have a client right now who is essentially homeless because the builders haven’t finished construction of their new house. They promised occupancy on a certain day, and that didn’t happen.”
Until a few days before closing, everything seemed to be going smoothly with Marco and Chelsea Sessa’s anticipated move last April from their old home in East Del Mar to their new property in La Jolla. Then, as the termite inspector went through to give his final clearance, he noticed a leak in the laundry room wall from which the washer and dryer had recently been removed.
The wall was opened, revealing a mold problem.
“Before taking possession, we wanted a mold clearance letter, to avoid problems down the road,” Chelsea said. “But we were closing on our old home, the movers were already set to come and the new buyers wouldn’t rent back to us.”
The Sessas, waiting for the clearance letter, moved their possessions to storage and moved in, “temporarily,” with Chelsea’s parents, Tom and Cookie Sudberry, who themselves were between houses and living in a La Jolla rental.
“We really love our daughter and our son-in-law and our granddaughter and their dog,” Tom Sudberry said. “The only thing that was tough was that everyone was living out of a box, since our things were in storage too.”
Meanwhile, attempts to remedy the mold problem at the Sessas’ new home bogged down. As more and more walls were ripped out, it eventually became apparent that mold clearance would take months, not weeks, permanently derailing the deal.
Back at the Sudberrys’, “it was cramped and uncomfortable,” Chelsea recalled. Worried that the baby’s crying was keeping everyone awake, the Sessas decided to move into a house Chelsea’s parents had purchased as a tear-down.
“It had major plumbing problems, the roof was leaking and the landscaping had grown wild,” Chelsea recalled. But without knowing how long it would take to find a new home, they called the movers in again.
That was May. Throughout the summer, the Sessas watched with dismay as housing prices seemed to spiral out of sight.
“We were really concerned because every time we looked, homes that were priced right were selling so fast and the prices were going up and up,” Chelsea said. “We were afraid if we waited too long, we’d be completely priced out of the market.”
Last month the couple closed a deal on another home, but for more than they originally planned to spend. “It was a much better fit,” she said, “so it all worked out in the long run.”
