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Reply #1: I always tell people to buy houses when interest rates are high [View All]

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JDPriestly Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-07-11 03:10 AM
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1. I always tell people to buy houses when interest rates are high
and then refinance when the rates go down.

The prices in Los Angeles are too high.

But the weather, oh, the weather, will always attract a lot of new buyers. In the current economy, people are hesitating to buy. But the market in LA has gone down before. We were almost under water back in the early '90s, and we paid way under today's worst nightmare of a market for it.

The fact is that, while housing prices are high in LA, we save on heating costs. And if your house is well insulated and surrounded by trees, it may not get all that hot in the summer. We live on the east side of LA and do not need air conditioning nearly as much as people in a lot of places in the Midwest do.

So, LA will always be a very, very desirable place to live, especially for the well-to-do. Also, LA is cosmopolitan and welcomes people from around the world. The LA real estate market may not return to what it was at its peak (and that might be a very good thing), but it will hold its own.

The weather today was just beautiful. We ate delicious chard from my backyard container garden tonight. My lettuce is coming up. I plan to plant tomatoes before long. So much as I would prefer living in a rural community, I probably won't be leaving LA until they turn the lights out.

The big danger for people is buying a house and then trying to leverage their equity to "move up." Very often the move up proves too steep for the family budget. When you look at the houses in places like Pasadena, Beverly Hills, etc. decent, ordinary houses just seem shabby. That's the danger for homebuyers in Los Aneles. Houses like some of the outsized mansions in expensive areas just don't exist in most of America.
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