What Does “22 in 22” Have to do With Building a Kinder Community?
I have been tangling with the topic of our housing crisis for more than a year now. It is a complex problem that affects many different stakeholders in our community. The good news is that there are things we can do both individually and collectively as a community to nip this in the bud before it becomes a greater systemic crisis affecting industries other than just real estate.
Santa Barbara has been in a housing crisis for a number of years. But with COVID and the influx of people moving into Santa Barbara, the crisis has reached a breaking point.
Out-of-town buyers are moving into Santa Barbara at unprecedented rates, driving our housing prices above and beyond anything we ever imagined possible in Santa Barbara. We’ve simply never seen anything like this before. What makes this influx particularly problematic for Santa Barbara is that these buyers are coming from more expensive neighborhoods like Beverly Hills, Newport Beach and Silicon Valley, etc.. The significance of this is that the value of our homes look like great deals to them. This, in turn, means they are more than comfortable offering hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes more than a million dollars, over the asking price. To boot, these very wealthy buyers are also in a position to pay ALL CASH. This is making it increasingly more difficult for our local buyers – in most price ranges – to make competitive offers. Note: oftentimes these homes are the out-of-town buyers second, third, and in some cases fourth home or a retirement home they don’t plan on moving into for another 5-10 years.
What this means is that our local, well-qualified buyers can barely buy a home in Santa Barbara. Many of these same local buyers have lived here for many years and established deep roots in our community with the intention of investing their time, money and energy into a community they love and want to see flourish.
Many of them purchased their first home years ago with the realistic expectation that with proper planning and hard work they would, one day, be able to buy their dream home. They believed that by saving, moving up in their companies or scaling their businesses, they could make this happen.
Since COVID and with the ability for many to work remotely, folks everywhere have re-evaluated their housing preferences and have decided that Santa Barbara is one of the best places to live in the U.S. And it did not help when the Wall Street Journal reported last July that “Santa Barbara took the No. 1 spot on the Luxury Segment of the Second Wall Street Journal/Realtor.com Emerging Housing Markets Index.”
The unfortunate result of out-of-town buyers beating out our local buyers is that growing families, empty nesters and individuals who want, or need, to move up or down simply can’t. Many of them need to sell in order to buy, and contingent offers have no leverage in this market.
So, what can we do to help our local buyers? This, of course, is a loaded question, and not an easy one to answer. We recognize that to answer this intelligently we would need to hire an economist to do some modeling and forecasting. And since time is of the essence, and turning this ship around is a monumental task, I’m going to focus on one solution that we can act on now that can make a difference to at least 22 local buyers.
It’s my “22 in 22” Campaign. And it’s not my idea. It came from four of my clients who, over the last fourteen months, chose to sell local… and, believe it not, for less.
It was during the multiple offer processes on their homes that these sellers were able to connect with their values around community. They realized just how important their neighbors are to them and had been hearing about the struggle of local buyers to purchase homes in their own community.
It is their spirit of generosity and care that inspires me to inspire 22 sellers in 2022 to sell local.
I just know that my clients are not the only ones who care about their community and their neighbors. I’m certain that if we all continue to talk about the housing crisis, others will take this into consideration when making their choices about which offer to accept.
Imagine, if 22 sellers choose 22 local buyers, we’ve just created 22 homes for our neighbors! And if those 22 buyers are either selling their homes or relinquishing their rentals, then we’ve created additional housing at the same time!
If you love Santa Barbara, its people and its lifestyle, please consider joining our “22 in 22” campaign simply by spreading the word about the nature of our housing crisis.
Education is everything. Simply knowing and understanding what’s happening can turn the hearts of enough community-minded sellers to make a positive difference.
Thank you for your consideration,
Monica
P.S. If you’re wondering whether selling local is legal and in alignment with Fair Housing law, according to chief legal counsel at the California Association of Realtors, it is. I specifically asked and was told that out-of-town buyers are not a protected class and, therefore, a seller may choose a local buyer over a non-local one.