On the Road: Jacksonville

Early in the new year, we paid a visit to Jacksonville, Florida, one of the fastest growing cities in the country, and toured new developments in different areas. One of those areas is Nocatee, a 6,000-acre development with more than 10,000 housing units located in Ponte Vedra, a short drive from Jacksonville. The development also features commercial space — retail and offices — schools, and parks.

The 3,700 sq ft home pictured here was built by David Weekley Homes and is listed at an accessible price of $1.167M. The median home price per square foot in Jacksonville is around $200, compared to an average of $900 in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco counties). But remember, we get what we pay for in the Bay Area — and the grass is always greener, as they say…

Santa Clara County Market Update - December 2023

The numbers from December are in, and it’s a familiar story. But while sales of homes and condos are still below the same time last year, the gap is narrowing as inventory slowly returns. But buyers still need to act fast with homes spending an average of 23 days on the market. As far as the bottom line, median sales prices were up year-over-year, more so for homes (16%) than condos (5%).

Another Look at New Laws

Let’s take a deeper dive into state legislation coming on the books this year that will impact the real estate industry.

CHIC (Pearl)

Thanks to AB 968, which takes effect July 1, if you sell a property with one to four dwellings within 18 months of acquiring the title, you’ll need to disclose information about any repairs or renovations you’ve had done, in addition to contact info for your contractors and any permits you obtained. Most of this is already covered under existing disclosures in the Seller Property Questionnaire (SPQ), which may be updated to add specific disclosures for flippers.

GEEK (Kevin)

AB 1033 allows for ADUs (aka Accessory Dwelling Units or “Granny Flats”) to be transferred as stand-alone properties, separate from the main dwelling. The property must be classified as a condo, and each lienholder must consent to establishing the condominium. Making matters more complicated, if the property lies in an HOA, the HOA must also approve the condo classification. Fwiw, experts don’t expect this law to be used too often.

Helping the helpers.

According to research noted in Psychology Today, helping others may “benefit the giver more than the recipient on a neurobiological level.” With that lingering in our minds, Kevin and I had a chance to visit our client's new hospitality business early this year in Costa Rica. Their retreat is in a jungle — literally next to a waterfall, where they get all of their water.

We had a chance to help them fix up the water system and refurbish some furniture. Now Kevin is thinking of creating renewable electricity from the waterfall as well.

We loved being invited by our clients to be part of their super cool project!

Doing more by throwing out less.

Did you know? The United States is home to 4% of the world’s population, yet produces more than 12% of the trash — to the tune of 4.9 pounds per person per day – and over 28% of our garbage is packaging. That means we throw out 82 million tons of material every year.

Want a scarier number? Every 15.5 hours, we throw out enough plastic to fill the stadium where the Dallas Cowboys play, and 91% of it isn’t recycled. It’s enough to make you want to refill that olive oil bottle instead of buying a new one.

It’s no secret our groceries come with a lot more packaging every day, but we probably don’t think about it more than once a week when we take out the trash. The Almanac takes a look at two Peninsula “refilleries” trying to reduce our collective climate footprint.