Irvine Real Estate And Life Styles

The Real Estate Market is improving. We are actually seeing multiple offers and homes selling over the listed price. But, these are short sales and foreclosures. The short sale listings are going into the Multiple Listing Service approximately 10% below the last sales and the buyers who have been waiting for good deals are making offers.

This is good and bad news. It is good to have active sales but difficult on the sellers who need to sell but are not pushed to the wall. They cannot compete with the short sale prices. There are negatives to short sales and I will be explaing more about short sales in subsequent posts.

In the meantime, if you are ready to buy and want the best buys available then short sales are for you.

There are wonderful hiking opportunities in the city of Irvine. The open space areas offer fantastic reasons to explore and enjoy. A few of the interesting hikes include the Night Hike which is offered to more advanced hikers and happens during a full moon period with flashlights and is between two to four miles. Another challenging hike is the Hick’s Sunday Evening Wilderness Hke. This one is a self-guided tour of Hick’s Canyon with awesome sunset views. It is aproximately two miles and fine for the entire family.

Pre registration is required on some of the tours and I will be writing about several of the other tours in subsequent posts.

My offering this Friday is another time saving hint. It is also a finger saving one for those of you that text a lot.

Next time you want to send a short text, send them a text message by using your email . How you may ask and I am happy to tell you.

Send an email to the ten digit phone number @ teleflip.com. Try it by using me as a sample. Send your email to: 7143372817@teleflip.com.

To my knowledge, this can be sent to any cell phone number anywhere. If your recipient  can receive a text message they will have your message in less than a minute.

Irvine began with a dream of a master planned development surrounding the campus of The University of California, Irvine.  This planning has served Irvine well as Irvine continues to be beautifully built and one of the most popular cities in Orange County.

My husband, Bob, and I moved to Irvine in 1971 just prior to cityhood. We picked  Irvine because of the reputation of the schools and we wanted our three children to get he best education available. Both Bob and I were teachers at the time and knew the value of an excellent education.

The first communities built by the Irvine Company were Turtle Rock and University Park and they were built in the 1960’s. At that time, neighboring cities like Santa Ana was trying to annex Irvine and that mobilized the goal for cityhood. Irivne was incorporated as the city of Irvine in December of 1971.

The original goal that has served us well was to have a master plan wherein the neighborhoods would be designed to be self contained villages within the city.  The plan was to have business and shopping centers near the villages, excellent schools, open spaces, parks, and trails. Many of the villages would also have greenbelts, tot lots, pools and in some cases tennis courts.

“Another Day In Paradise” became the official motto. Irvine attracted businesses and families from neighboring cities and states. The city continues to develop new villages and they continue to have the same integrity as the very first villages.

We have enjoyed living in Irvine and continue to reside here. Our three children all attended Universities  so the excellent education they received through the schools and the programs they offered served them well. As you can tell, I Love Irvine.

I received this tidbit about Easter from a friend in the real estate business and found it interesting and enlightning. I knew that Easter this year had been early but I didn’t know the significance of this particular early date.

Hope you find this as interesting as I did.

Early Easter Date
Why March 23, 2008 is a special day…

Do you realize how early Easter is this year? As you may know, Easter is always the 1st Sunday after the 1st full moon after the Spring Equinox (which is March 19/20 in 2008, depending where you live in the world). This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around on our Roman calendar.Based on the above, Easter can actually be one day earlier (March 22) but that is pretty rare. Here’s the interesting info: this year is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives (March 23, 2008)! And only the most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95 years old or above!). And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier!

Thank you Sue Jackson, http://nat.com, for sharing.

Regardless of the doom and gloom from the newpaper articles, it is actually a good time to BUY if you are selective.

From now until the beginning of next year may be the best time to buy. With the election coming up everyone tries to paint a rosy picture so therefore the market improves.

The new home developers want to sell their inventory so they offer fantastic incentives. Take advantage of that if a new development works for you.

Always remember the old real estate adage Location! Location! Location! In a difficult market good locations hold their value and in a down market a good location sells first and fastest.

Sign up on a search list, which I offer at www.darleneherman.com, to be emailed homes the day they come on the market and to be notified when prices are lowered on homes.

Remember you can usually save money if you are willing to do some of the repairs and remodeling yourself as some sellers do not have the time or money to fix up their home when they put it on the market and pass the savings to the buyer.

So save money and find your dream home now when the price is right.

Here is another fun web site that helps you a lot. This one www.jott.com is your own personal secretary who works for free. You sign up for this and they give you a toll free 866 number to call and you can register your own contacts or just leave a reminder message. Today I called and gave myself a reminder to make a call at 5:00 P.M. and at 5:00 P.M. on the button a message came up as a text on my phone to make the call. Awesome. Try it you will like it.

Woodbridge is one of the beautiful villages in Irvine. The bridge that crosses over Barranca is truly made of wood & connects the North Lake to the original shopping area of Woodbridge.  This village was the first one built in Irvine north of the 405 freeway.  The city of Irvine didn’t have to worry about moving inland from the Turtle Rock and University Park areas as the village was immediately popular & there are now approximately 9,500 diverse homes in the village.  

Woodbridge is one of the best areas for walking & biking.  There are churches, shopping areas, a senior community, top schools, the north & south lake, pools, spas, tennis courts and so much more to enjoy in this great community.

I love Sunday Brunches…BUT they must have champagne to meet my criteria of a good  brunch.

My top favorites are Bayside Inn, Five Crowns, El Torito Grill and Muldoons.

Runner-ups are Taco Rosa and Don Jose

To help keep you informed of outstanding brunches, I plan to try new ones as many Sundays as possible to find some more that I can recommend. I may actually even enjoy doing that.

I just found a really great website if you would like to view free movies or TV shows you missed during the week, your favorite sports or featured videos. I heard about it on a news report and they said it was an excellent website and a legal one for watching. When I searched it I did find some TV shows I had wanted to see as well as some older movies I had missed. Of course you do have to watch it on your monitor but it is so clear you would think you had HDTV.

Have FUN and enjoy. Hope you find something you had been wanting to see.

clipped from www.hulu.com

Hulu offers U.S. consumers a vast selection of premium video content, on demand, free and ad-supported: full episodes of TV shows, both current and classic, full-length movies, thousands of clips, and much more.