Cook's Corner is an iconic Orange County institution in Trabuco Canyon, California, named for a farmer and Civil War veteran named Andrew Jackson Cook, who acquired land and built a building on the site in 1884, converted to a restaurant in 1926 and a bar following the end of Prohibition.

The 2018 sale of the Brady Bunch house in Studio City is an interesting study in the disconnect that sometimes happens between price and value (at least value as it relates to the market). As stated so eloquently by Warren Buffet, “price is what you pay, value is what you get.”

Many people are familiar with this famous photo, titled “Poolside Gossip” by photographer Slim Aarons in 1970. The property pictured is the Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs, commissioned by department store magnate Edgar Kaufmann and designed by Richard Neutra in 1946.

I’ve reviewed a lot of appraisal reports over my nearly four decades in practice. What I’m increasingly aware of over the years is that the appraisal report has taken over the valuation process – the cart before the horse, so to speak.

Last week PricewaterhouseCoopers published a special update to their quarterly Real Estate Investor Survey, looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on commercial real estate, specifically the retail, office, industrial and apartment sectors of the market.

Are Recycled Shipping Containers the Answer to Affordable Housing? I recently reposted an article from the Long Beach Business Journal about CRATE Modular, a company that repurposes shipping containers for habitable use.

Residential price trends are often reported for large geographical areas, like MSA’s and counties; a popular index tracks the six-county Southern California market, an area of more than 20 million people.

What on earth does the decidedly ordinary-looking home in the photo have to do with the future of transportation, you might ask. In 2016, Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, was stuck in traffic and decided to start digging – tunnels – to offer yet another transportation alternative.

Manhattan Beach has an ordinance banning short-term rentals for less than 30 days in residential zones. The photo above is a property whose owner apparently didn’t get the memo, generating complaints from the neighbors, and a $4,000 fine by the city.

Appraisers have been in the crosshairs of the lending industry and regulators for decades – licensing, de minimis thresholds, HVCC and Appraisal Management Companies (AMC’s), Automated Valuation Models (AVM’s), Collateral Underwriter, evaluations, appraisal waivers and hybrid appraisals.

Most of us remember where we were when life-changing world events happened. I’m old enough to remember being on an elementary school playground when a voice over the loudspeaker announced the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Late last year I had the opportunity to tour this amazing property with Laguna Friends of Architecture, a non-profit group dedicated to the appreciation and understanding of fine architecture and design

I normally write about stuff related to real estate, however remote the connection might be. I suppose this is about real property in a sense – the 160-foot wide area inside the 13-yard line at the Superdome in New Orleans (about 6,200 square feet). But more specifically, it’s about sports and the integrity of our sporting events.

The recent sale of the Brady Bunch house in Studio City is an interesting study in the disconnect that sometimes happens between price and value (at least value as it relates to the market).

The term adaptive reuse is defined as “the process of reusing an old site or building for a purpose other than which it was built or designed for” [Wikipedia]. Basically, it is the idea of repurposing an older building for a new or different use, as an alternative to demolition and redevelopment.

I’ve befriended a homeless guy. His name is Kenny – a Vietnam vet with family out of state, lived in his own apartment and worked decades for an aerospace company before retiring in 2012.

I stopped at a yard sale and picked up an architectural guide for Los Angeles County (published in 1994) for 25¢. It turned out to be a good inventory of accessible architectural gems, so I browsed online for a more recent edition.

Tax reform legislation signed into law just before Christmas will have ramifications for virtually every taxpayer. Two features are particularly important with respect to their direct impact on the housing market.

Talk of a housing bubble is starting to rear its ugly head, as reminders of the last market crash still linger. Media coverage has been extensive over the past several months. In particular, a couple of recent articles in the Orange County Register caught my attention, one by Jonathan Lansner, and another by Jeff Collins.

PACE ia an acronym for Property Assessed Clean Energy, a relatively new and somewhat innovative financing mechanism for energy efficiency, renewable energy and water conservation projects (think insulation, replacement windows and photo-voltaic solar systems as typical examples).