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Recycle Right! Boot Camp
The Recycle Right! Boot Camp is back and better than ever! For the first time we are hosting this class in-person, on-site at our Resource Recovery Facility. Saturday March 16th, 2024 from 10:00 am – 1:00 pm. Come join us if you can! Class is limited to 25 people. Children must be at least 8 years old. Youth ages 8 -18 must be accompanied by an adult. All participants must wear closed-toe shoes and long pants. Come prepared for the weather. Carpooling/biking is encouraged as parking is limited. You will learn about the history of recycling, what happens with your recycling, and how to move beyond the blue bin! Plus…
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A Rosy Spring for Real Estate?
The spring real estate market is about to come into full bloom, and from where I’m sitting, our local market is looking downright rosy. I’m guessing it may surprise you to see me write that, because it runs contrary to the narrative that’s we’re being fed in the media – that rising interest rates have snuffed out the real estate market, the Federal Reserve is working to bring about a recession, and the real estate market is circling the drain. There’s no question that the market has cooled – and cooled dramatically. Prices are down across the board throughout the Bay Area, to varying degrees. But Santa Cruz specifically is…
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Real Estate
Is the Santa Cruz Real Estate Market Toast? By Seb Frey What a difference a few months makes! It was just this past March when I wrote an article for Growing Up in Santa Cruz asking if the Santa Cruz real estate market was boiling over. As I write this in June, nobody’s asking that question anymore. Instead, everyone seems to be asking if the market is headed for some kind of crash. And that’s a fair question, because anecdotally and numerically, it’s apparent that the Santa Cruz County real estate market – and every market across the country that I’m aware of – has hit the brakes. Whether it…
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About to Pop?
The Santa Cruz Real Estate Bubble By Seb Frey The talk of a real estate bubble has been getting louder and louder for the past several years. Lately, it seems to have reached, if not a fevered pitch, something of a dull roar. Memories of the 2008 mortgage crisis and subsequent collapse of real estate prices linger. Prices are now considerably higher than they were at the prior peak, and housing affordability is as bad as it has ever been, and quite possibly worse. It seems everyone is asking, “Are these prices sustainable?” and “should I wait for the market to correct before I buy a home here?” Those are…
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Do REALTORS Even Matter
Do REALTORS Even Matter? By Seb Frey In a real estate market as hot as this, where homes appear to “sell themselves,” it’s a fair question: do REALTORS even matter? I’m going to give you an answer that may surprise you…considering that I myself am a REALTOR, and have been for 19 years. In fact, I was even President of the Santa Cruz County Association of REALTORS in 2019 so I consider myself something of an authority on the subject. I won’t bury the lede here. I’m going to come right out and say it: no, REALTORS do not matter…if you don’t believe they matter. When it comes to answering…
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Housing Market is Boiling Over
The Santa Cruz Housing Market is Boiling Over by Seb Frey This is my first column of 2022 for Growing Up in Santa Cruz, and it’s good to be back! I wrote several articles last year where I discussed buying a home in Santa Cruz. As everyone knows, the Santa Cruz real estate market in 2021 was a hot one, with the median sale price up about 25% compared to the year prior. Going into 2022, there was a sense that the market may have reached something approaching a plateau, with perhaps a modest 5-10% increase in sale prices. That may sound like something more than “modest,” but historically that’s…
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Home for the Holidays
Home for the Holidays Why December is the Best Time to Buy a Home By Seb Frey That pain in my neck must be whiplash, because here we are, staring once again at the end of the year, with a new year beckoning right around the corner. It has been one bonkers year for the real estate market, characterized more than anything else by exceedingly strong home price appreciation. I’m not sure if we’re in record territory for a single year’s home price increases, but if not, we must be very close. The market was strong going into December 2020, unusually so for so late in the year, but the…
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Santa Cruz Passenger Rail
Santa Cruz Passenger Rail Show Me the Money By Sebastion “Seb” Frey Normally in this space I write about our local real estate market – but this month’s column focuses on what has become one of the most contentious pieces of real estate in Santa Cruz County: the Santa Cruz Branch Line Rail Corridor.Nine years ago, in October of 2012, the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission (the RTC) completed the purchase of the rail corridor from Union Pacific Railroad. The corridor had fallen into disuse after the rail line’s sole significant customer, the Cemex cement factory in Davenport, shut down in May of 2010. The tussle over the future…
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Modern Realtor
The Modern Realtor’s Value Proposition by seb frey Don’t tell anyone, but I watch a fair amount of Reality TV. Not sure how it began – but I think it was Survivor. Then before you know it, I was watching forgettable season after forgettable season of the Bachelor(ette), and I’ve seen all the housewives from coast to coast, humiliating themselves and each other with wild abandon, for more years than I care to count. Of course, my true love is Million Dollar Listing New York. I just love looking at that gleaming Manhattan real estate. Million Dollar Listing L.A. is another show I watch every episode of, but the agents…
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Sales Slowing
Are Real Estate Sales Slowing Down? By Sebastian Frey If you’re in the market to buy or sell a home, you may be paying particularly close attention to the headline news about real estate. If so, you may have seen some news stories about a cooling real estate market. Many of these stories were based off a report from Redfin, showing somewhat declining sales activity, coast to coast. But all real estate is local, so national trends aren’t necessarily reflected in our local real estate market. But even locally, today we are seeing a modest decline in homes going under contract, and homes sold in June, compared to March, April,…
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Santa Cruz is a Top Housing Market
Santa Cruz is a Top Housing Market But That’s Not Necessarily Good News by Seb Frey …areas with strong housing demand and rising prices combined with robust economies, lots of good-paying jobs, and the amenities that make a place desirable. These markets have lots of restaurants, bars, and shops as well as reasonable commutes to work. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that the Santa Cruz real estate market has gone completely bonkers. Prices are skyrocketing, supply remains very constrained, and buyers are in a world of hurt. And it’s not just first-time buyers who are feeling the burn (although they do feel it most acutely).…
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Santa Cruz Housing Market HOT
Santa Cruz Housing Market: Hot, Hot, Hot! By Seb Frey It’s no secret that right now the real estate market in Santa Cruz is hot. Actually, you could say it’s overheated! There’s no shortage of stories of homes receiving dozens of offers and selling hundreds of thousands of dollars over asking price. But in a way, that’s yesterday’s news. The thing to know about the real estate market is that it’s dynamic. What’s true yesterday may not be true today, or what’s true today may not apply tomorrow. For example, interest rates have risen substantially over the past several weeks – up about 0.75% give or take. That might not…
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Benefits of Home Ownership
Non-Financial Benefits of Home Ownership BY seb frey Spring is in the air, a time when everyone’s fancy is turning to looking at homes for sale. Or so it seems to me, anyway! The last two articles I wrote for Growing Up in Santa Cruz dealt with some of the financial aspects of home ownership – specifically, how to actually get the money together to buy a home, and why renting a home is, in the long run, calamitously more expensive than owning one. So much of the discussion around homeownership revolves around the money, but there are many other well-documented, but less well-known, benefits to homeownership. In this month’s…
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Paying for your Santa Cruz Home
The Santa Cruz real estate market is being reshaped by out-of-towners moving in now that so many people can work anywhere they choose. However, it seems not to have occurred to many people here that they can do the same thing: get an “out of town” job without the commute out of town. There are many well-paying jobs “over the hill” that no longer require a daily commute.
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You Can’t Afford Not to Own a Home in Santa Cruz
You Can’t Afford Not to Own a Home in Santa Cruz By Sebastian “Seb” Frey In the column I wrote last month for Growing up in Santa Cruz, I shared a lot of information that would-be Santa Cruz homebuyers need to know right now. Yes, the market is hot, and prices are up…but what else is new? I’ve been a Realtor in Santa Cruz since 2003, and while I can say that this market is more difficult for buyers than any market I have known – it’s not that much harder. People – people who are not so different than you – are buying homes every day in Santa Cruz,…
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Buying a Home in Santa Cruz
What to Know About Buying a Home in Santa Cruz by Seb Frey One of the most popular pieces I’ve written in 17+ years selling real estate in Santa Cruz county is one where I take buyers through the whole process of buying a house in Santa Cruz, from start to finish. But with prices surging to astronomical heights, this real estate market feels so much different than anything I’ve seen before. But what, exactly, is so different about today’s Santa Cruz real estate market? To get a perspective, the median sale price for single family homes in the third quarter of 2020 was $1,050,000 – that compares with a…
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The State of the Santa Cruz Real Estate Market
The State of the Santa Cruz Real Estate Market BY seb frey 2020 has proven to be a year like none in living memory, and with a contentious presidential election right around the corner, you know it’s going to get stranger. Yet in the midst of a global pandemic, nationwide civil unrest, and the sudden loss of many millions of jobs…a strange thing has happened to the Santa Cruz real estate market. The year started off strong. The fourth quarter of 2019 saw a market that was flagging–homes were taking longer to sell, and many sellers were making painful price reductions to get their homes sold before the holidays. But…
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Fires and Real Estate
What’s the Future of Real Estate After the Fires? BY SEB FREY It’s a nightmare. That’s really the best word I can come up with to describe the fire burning still in Santa Cruz as I write this. Cal Fire calls it the CZU Lighting Complex Fire, but I find that name really cumbersome, and too clinical. Calling it that, for me, disassociates the inferno from the communities and the lives that it’s torched. A week or so ago, an acquaintance of mine posted on Facebook that he thought this fire would be remembered as the worst thing to happen to Santa Cruz county since the Loma Prieta Earthquake of…
