- Tom Brezsny7 Keys to Staging SuccessAugust 28, 2018 You know you are supposed to de-clutter, take down personal pictures, and ditch the doll collection. But staging goes much deeper than that. Good staging creates an ethos, a magnetic sense of wanting to stay in the room. We subscribe to the Wabi-Sabi school of staging and there is a good reason for it. Wabi Sabi is the aesthetic that is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete", and somehow more human. I spend a lot of my leisure...
- Tom BrezsnyWhat's 2019 Look Like?August 20, 2018What Does 2019 Look Like? Well, I am not an oracle but here's my opinion. In Santa Cruz County, there just aren’t enough homes listed for sale to meet the demand from buyers. Our county, the second smallest in the state, transitions only about 180-250 homes a month. Yet we have pre retirees buying now for later use, Millenials forming households, refugees from Silicon Valley seeking a more serene lifestyle here in Santa Cruz and overheated Central Valley folks seeking the coastal breezes. This is...
- Terry BallantyneMillenial UpdateAugust 17, 2018Millennial demand for housing will keep climbing. After a decade of decline the homeownership rate finally ticked up in 2017. By the third quarter, 63.9% of households were occupied by owners--up from a low of 62.9% in the second quarter of 2016. McLaughlin says 2017 will be remembered as “the year the bleeding stopped and the healing started.” As Millennials age this trend is expected to continue. The generation of adults born after 1980 were slow to enter the housing market, but as a growing share of...
- Terry BallantyneWhy Poor Pricing Choice Will Kill Your SaleAugust 17, 2018How To Price Your Home For Success In a market that has created the impression that every home sells, it's easy for sellers to fall victim to the fear of leaving money on the table. And some, who have not sold a home in a while, they still believe in the old "wiggle room" theory of home sales which went out the window in 1999. Today if your home is overpriced by even 10%, it will sit. For some reason, new to the business real...
- Tom BrezsnyWelcome to Good TimesAugust 16, 2018 This week feels like a homecoming for me. Let me count the ways. It’s been thirty years since a column of mine last appeared in the Good Times. In the 80s, I was the restaurant reviewer for the paper, a job that’s surely in much better hands these days. I think my last story panned Schlotzsky’s, a deli chain from Texas that tried to make a go of it in the historic Leonard Building on Cooper Street. Being completely unsuited to Santa Cruz, it...
- Tom BrezsnyDoldrums of SummerAugust 16, 2018 It’s that time again. The Dog Days of Summer. Or as some call them: the horse latitudes. That’s an old sailing term for the doldrums, a place where the wind dies down and the sails go slack. And even though I start off each year, knowing we’ll eventually arrive at this point, it’s always a surprise when we actually get here. As ready as I think I am, I’m never really ready to ratchet down from the torrid pace of the previous few months....
- Tom Brezsny
- Tom Brezsny
