Summer is upon us! The crowds have returned and tourism is up again. I waited 2 minutes at the corner of Dolores and Ocean today, just to take a left turn! I suppose that is a good sign.. As I write this, I'm sitting an open house at the corner of 8th and Casanova in downtown Carmel-by-the-Sea, getting plenty of activity from local renters looking to buy, and a lot of Silicon Valley, tech types looking to...

Memorial Day saw the best week in sales in several years for many Carmel retailers. Some of my friends in the jewelry business even reported staggering activity, and not the usual "looky lous" from years past. Carmel Real Estate itself received generous activity from many well-qualified buyers. There were 5 total closed sales of  Carmel homes, 2 of which were in Carmel-by-the-Sea, proper, all between...

The Monterey Peninsula, specifically Carmel and Pebble Beach, has reached a very consistent level of real estate activity. Homes that have been sitting on our market for one and two years, have been selling steadily over the last quarter, leaving some hot areas with very little inventory. Carmel Valley and Carmel-by-the-Sea are two such examples, with property under $2M, remaining very popular. Pebble...

These days, it’s hard not to be enticed by the historically low mortgage refinancing rates. Now could be the perfect time to refinance, but is refinancing your loan right for you? Here are a few points to take into consideration if you’re thinking about refinancing your home loan. The Benefits of Refinancing Beyond potentially saving you thousands of dollars, refinancing your mortgage can also...

We all are thinking about it and some of us are actually taking action and getting their hands on real estate investment properties. The longer the NY Stock Exchanges doesn't produce desirable returns the more people are starting with real estate investments. For most of us the obvious choice of properties are single family homes. Although you can invest in real estate without owning a home, most people...

Owning a home is the original American dream. It's the old frontier spirit, wanting to claim your own tuft of the New World. Then again, these days it also makes perfect economic sense. Experts estimate that all of the homes in the United States alone are worth a combined $14 trillion. That goes a long way to explain why a housing boom has been sweeping the globe. Where there is a boom, though, there...

"Home staging" was coined by Barb Schwarz back in the early '70s, and the concept has become well known as "house fluffing," "dressing to sell," and "home presentation" to name a few, but the concept has not taken hold among home owners when selling a home because many people do not understand the idea or cannot create a workable plan for staging their home correctly. The focus of staging is to make a...