Best Place Real Estate

Enjoy “A Taste of Lake Forest” and try your luck at “Casino Night”, Saturday, April 5.  The event will be at the Sun & Sail Club (corner of Lake Forest and Toledo) from 6PM to 10PM.  You will have an opportunity to win many great prizes while you taste delicious food provided by our local restaurants.  This is the annual fundraiser for Soroptimist International of Lake Forest, a women’s service organization supporting the community since 1973.  Tickets are $45 and include $200 in chips, 2 drink tickets and your “Taste of Lake Forest”. For reservations and more information, you can call me or email: SoroptimistsLakeForest@yahoo.com .

I found a recent article about staging in the Orange County Register rather disturbing. While the author, Babara Ballinger, admits that staging is done to help homeowners sell a home more quickly, she gives the idea that many sellers do it to cover up defects in the home. I have earned the ASP designation (Accredited Staging Professional) and I found her article to be very insulting. The article cites scenarios such as sellers using an area rug to cover up damaged flooring or curtains to hide rotted window sills. Covering up defects and misleading buyers is not staging!!! It is wrong and a real estate professional, with or without the ASP designation, will advise a seller not to even consider doing such a thing.

In addition, the seller is required to complete the Real Estate Transfer Disclosure Statement and most agents are requesting that the seller also complete the Seller Property Questionnaire. The agents on both sides of the transaction are also required to do a visual inspection of the property. The purpose of all these forms is to make the buyer aware of any known material defects in the property. On top of this, it is always recommended that a buyer get a professional third party inspection.

One of the things staging does is to depersonalize a home. This not only helps to sell the house faster, it also makes it easier for buyers to picture themselves in the home.

Staging a home is a good thing.  Covering up or concealing known defects is very bad.

(more̷

Apparently the Orange County Board of Supervisors is now branding Orange County as the “OC”.   The thing is, I have never heard anyone from Orange County refer to it as the “OC”.  Maybe the Supervisors got the idea from the TV show, “The OC”.  I never saw the show, but I heard that it gave a very false idea of what people here are like.

We now have departments such as OC Public Works, OC Waste and Recycling, OC Community Resources, OC This and OC That.  It seems they were building on their new slogan “OC: Our Community, Our Commitment”.   While I don’t know about the commitment, I do know that our community calls it “Orange County”.  It is like San Francisco.  People who live in San Francisco don’t refer to it as “SF” or “Frisco”.  They call it “San Francisco”.  When I tell people where I live or where I am from, I say I live in Orange County or I am from Orange County.  I like the name “Orange County”.

The title of my blog site is “Best Place Real Estate”, “because Orange County is the best place in the world to live”.  And that is  “Orange County”, not the”OC”.

My sister who lives up in the San Francisco Bay Area called me yesterday.  Her oldest son is a junior in high school and they are coming down to Southern California this week to look at colleges.  We have so many great universities here that it would be difficult to see them all in a week.

But, what a great investment opportunity for us.  Universities are always short on housing.  Even if they have on campus housing, the students usually like to move off campus after a year or so. With housing prices down and mortgage rates low, an investor has the perfect opportunity.

We did this when our daughter moved off campus a UC San Diego.  And, what a great investment this has been for us.  She graduated several years ago and we still rent to students.  Many people worry about the kids destroying the place.  Don’t worry.  They are not bad at all and we have never had a payment problem.  This investment has been one of our best, if not the best!

I attended the City of Lake Forest Leadership Luncheon a couple of weeks ago.  The City holds this event every year to thank volunteers for their community service for Lake Forest.  I was invited because I am a member of the 4th of July Parade Committee.  Every year there is a guest speaker and this year it was Chief Chip Prather of the Orange County Fire Authority.  After his speech, Chief Prather answered questions from the audience.  And then he said, “Now I want to ask you some questions”.  He started out asking why people do not change the batteries in their smoke detectors or even worse, remove the batteries.  Why do some people not even have smoke detectors in their homes?  He said that of the 11 fire related deaths in Orange County, all the homes had either inoperable smoke detectors or no smoke detectors at all.  Chief Prather stressed the importance of having smoke detectors and of changing the batteries twice a year.  He also said that if you are unable to do it yourself, contact the OCFA and they will send someone out to help you.

The following week I read an article in the Orange County Register on the death of a woman whose house caught on fire in San Juan Capistrano.  Apparently, there was a smoke detector in the home but it was not working properly.  It is believed that she would be alive today if the smoke detector had been operating properly so as to warn her of the fire.  She was living in a home that was built in 1973.  Other homes in the tract were checked and although most of them had smoke detectors, many were not working properly.

The article advised that over time the sensors in the smoke detector may weaken and therefore may not work as well as they should, even if the alarms beeps when tested.  The article stressed that all smoke detectors should be replaced every 8 to 10 years.

Smoke detectors are very inexpensive and they do save lives.  So I ask you, please:

1.  Change the batteries in your smoke detectors twice a year.  An easy way to remember is to change the batteries when you change your clocks to and from day-light savings time.

2.  Install new smoke detectors about every 8 years.

3.  If you don’t have smoke detectors in your home, install them today!

Don’t put it off.  Please just do it.  It could save your life and the lives of your family.