Belvedere Real Estate Update

20 May Belvedere Real Estate Update

Belvedere homes and home prices are similar to Tiburon (or vice versa). Troubled Belvedere homeowners as well as sellers that simply want to move for ANY reason, have been holding out for 20 months now. But they can’t hold out forever; and we are now finally seeing homes trade at more reasonable prices.

Like every town in the county, loans were taken for a variety of reasons (remodel, vacation, new cars etc) leveraging real estate like it was a Treasury Bond with a guaranteed return. The middle chapters of this story are now complete: these real estate return assumptions were faulty, but the money was already spent (growing our economy at an unsustainable GDP rate). And now after years and years of living in Belvedere, as well as months (or years) spent on remodel with very high input costs (wages & materials), these homes that are finally coming to the market are priced to “get their investment out”. Homes priced this way rarely sell in a declining market where other comparable homes nearby are “priced to sell”.

There are $200,000,000 worth of homes for sale on and off the MLS in Belvedere alone. The longer these homes site on the market, the lower they will sell for. The average list price of a home in Belvedere is $5,000,000.

We have entered a period of much slower growth due primarily to 2 things: the demographic reality of the baby boomer generation on the down slope of its generational spending cycle, and second—a glut of debt on every level: consumer, municipality, state, region and nation.

Homes sold for very high prices in 2005-2007 during the peak spending years of the baby boomers and the peaking lending years by banks. There may be a few homes purchased by buyers at prices where money is less important than finding the perfect house; but most of these homes will likely sell at lower prices. The longer sellers wait to drop their prices the less they will get for their homes.