An oceanfront home at 2565 Altamar Drive in Laguna Beach sold to a buyer who had looked at the home 11 years earlier.
The 4,340-square-foot home in the exclusive Irvine Cove neighborhood sold for $4.3 million, down from $5.5 million in April.
Cheryl Marquis, an agent with Evergreen Realty’s Villa Park office, represented the sellers and the buyers.
The sellers, a couple who owned the home for 11 years, relocated to Virginia for a new job.
“The sellers were dear friends of mine,” Marquis said.
She had previously helped the couple sell another home.
The four-bedroom, four-bathroom home on Altamar Drive had quite a few lookers, including a baseball player for the New York Yankees. To sell the home, Marquis hosted a broker preview for more than 50 real estate agents, almost immediately attracting an offer on the home.
But the offer was lower than the seller had hoped, and the seller turned it down.
Marquis continued to show the home to brokers, as Irvine Cove is a gated neighborhood and doesn’t allow open houses, where people can drive up to the home and look around. The seller reduced the price to $4.9 million in July, attracting a solid offer within a month.
The home’s buyers—a local business owner and his wife—weren’t satisfied with their previous agent, so Marquis represented them.
“It’s not easy to work both sides of the transaction,” she said.
But Marquis said she and the buyers connected.
The buyer looked at the home July 8 and made an offer Aug. 11.
The buyers, who saw the home 11 years earlier, gave it a lot of thought and did their due diligence, Marquis said.
They were pleased, she said.
“They felt like their dreams came true,” the agent said.
Recent Activity
Thirteen homes priced $4 million and above sold in September, according to Redfin.com. August was the best month of the year so far, with 23 closings. It was revised from 20 sales due to three new August closings that were posted in September.
The Orange County home market continues to strengthen, with shrinking inventory and shorter time on the market.
There were 10,353 homes for sale in Orange County this time last year, according to analyst Steven Thomas of Ladera Ranch-based Reports On Housing.
The inventory shrunk to 8,114 homes at the beginning of this year.
Today the number of homes for sale has been cut in half to 3,698.
Homes are also taking a shorter time to sell, an average of 39 days on the market for all of OC, according to Reports On Housing.
Areas with multimillion-dollar listings such as Newport Beach, Newport Coast and Corona del Mar, are spending a longer time than some other listings but a shorter time compared to those communities’ listings from two years ago.
Homes in Newport Beach, for example, are currently taking 3.2 months to sell, compared to 8.1 months two years ago and 8.3 months one year ago.
There is a shrinking inventory, and Newport Beach-based Surterre Properties Inc. hopes to woo buyers with an open house weekend—Oct. 13 to 14—when agents will show more than 100 listings, including multimillion-dollar listings.
Among the homes to be shown: 19 High Water in Newport Beach, a 12,230-square-foot seven-bedroom, 11-bath home, selling for $14.9 million.
Foreclosure Sales
It’s no longer a buyer’s market for foreclosures, according to Reports On Housing.
“If a buyer wants to purchase a foreclosure in today’s market, they better bring along a very sharp pencil and a winning strategy to beat out the horde of buyers interested in the same home,” Thomas wrote recently.
Foreclosures made up 8% of sales in August, compared to 15% in August 2011 and 44% at the foreclosure peak in January 2009, according to the report.
Foreclosure sales made up just 1% of sales of homes priced $4 million and above in August.
More homes have been closed as short sales than foreclosures since August 2009.
A recent pending short sale is 2 Premiere Point in Newport Coast.
The 9,800-square-foot home was listed at $6 million for only a few days before it had an offer.
Foreclosed homes are selling 3% above their list price on average.
