Ultra-low mortgage rates and pent-up demand for single-family homes will offset continued economic uncertainty and a supply shortage in 2021, with the net result being a 3.3% increase in California home sales and a modest 1.3% increase in the median price next year versus 2020, according to a California Association of Realtors forecast published Tuesday.

With only a few months left to go, sales this year are expected to be

SANTA ANA  — A former Orange County sheriff’s deputy has been charged with burglarizing the home of a dead man, prosecutors said Thursday.

Steve Hortz, a 12-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department, was called to a Yorba Linda home on July 20 to check on the welfare of the owner. He discovered the man, who was in his 70s, had died of natural causes, according to a statement from the county district attorney’s office.

Home surveillance video showed Hortz breaking into the home about a week later while on duty and in uniform, authorities alleged. He left the door open and returned twice more in August in civilian clothes, authorities contend.

The stolen goods included ceiling fans and safes containing 15 guns, prosecutors alleged.

The Sheriff’s Department began investigating after the probate attorney handling the homeowner’s estate reported items were missing and provided the surveillance video, authorities said.

Hortz, 42,

A family that lives in a home where a child star was murdered 32 years ago believes the girl’s murderer has been haunting their house since they moved in.

The Bernal family moved into their home in Canoga Park, California, in 2001, not knowing anything about the home’s former residents until a neighbor told them.

In 1988, 10-year-old Judith Barsi — who starred in countless commercials and movies like “Jaws: The Revenge,” “All Dogs Go to Heaven,” and “The Land Before Time” — was murdered in her bed by her father, Jozsef Barsi, who went on to kill his wife Maria and then himself, according to an episode of Quibi’s “Murder House Flip.”

Soon after the Bernals moved into their home, they said they started experiencing strange phenomena.

AMERICANS SAY MOVING IS MORE STRESSFUL THAN DIVORCE, HAVING CHILDREN, SURVEY CLAIMS

“The house had a bad energy when we moved in,”

Firefighter Grant Newnom was driving home after a 60-hour shift with the San Jose Fire Department when his girlfriend, Elise Jones, called to tell him a wildfire was threatening her parents’ home.

© Courtesy Grant Newnom
Firefighters arrived as Grant Newnom was working to protect his girlfriend’s parents’ home in Santa Rosa, California.

She was having Sunday dinner with her parents, John and Ardys Jones, at their house in Santa Rosa when they got the order to evacuate, Newnom said.

They were playing board games and cards when “all their phones went off at the exact same time,” he said.

“They looked outside and they could actually see the glow,” Newnom said.

The wildfire became part of the Glass Fire — a rapidly-moving blaze that has burned about 42,600 acres since Sunday and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate in the wine country of Napa and Sonoma

The most contentious issue California voters face on Nov. 3 is not the Presidential election—polls show voters are firmly decided. Rather, it is a tax measure, Proposition 15, which has heavy hitters for it and against it.

Proposition 15 would amend the California constitution to change the way commercial and industrial real estate is taxed, basing it on current market value. Presently, all property, residential and commercial, is taxed based on its last purchase price.

The measure, sometimes called the “split-roll initiative,” excludes commercial agricultural land and commercial properties worth less than $3 million from being reassessed at current market value. The non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s office estimates that Proposition 15 could bring between $6.5 billion to $11.5 billion per year when it is fully implemented in 2025.

Sixty percent of the revenues from Proposition 15 (after it pays the state and local tax assessors for the costs of implementing the

SACRAMENTO, Calif.

Tenants, affordable housing groups and local governments will get first crack at buying foreclosed homes under a measure approved Monday by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The bill is designed to keep corporations from snapping up homes and letting some fall into disrepair as they did during the Great Recession. The issue drew national attention a year ago when several homeless mothers calling themselves Moms 4 Housing moved

Most empty nesters downsize. Not this couple: Rebuilding on the same Southern California property where they’d raised their three children, the duo upsized from around 6,000 square feet to 10,500—and did a complete about-face design-wise. Leading the clients on their journey from traditional to contemporary were L.A.–based architecture firm KAA Design and San Diego’s Pamela Smith Interiors. A full-fledged collaboration gave rise to what’s been dubbed the Tree House. 

The trapezoidal site was, in a word, spectacular. Set on a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean about a mile away, the two acres were filled with mature oaks, Torrey pines, and magnolia trees—ergo

– Existing, single-family home sales totaled 465,400 in August on a seasonally adjusted annualized rate, up 6.3 percent from July and up 14.6 percent from August 2019.

– August’s statewide median home price was $706,900 up 6.1 percent from July and up 14.5 percent from August 2019.

– Year-to-date statewide home sales were down 6.8 percent in August.

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — California’s housing market continued to improve in August as home sales climbed to their highest level in more than a decade as the median home price broke last month’s record and hit another high, the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS^® (C.A.R.) said today. 

Closed escrow sales of existing, single-family detached homes in California totaled a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 465,400 units in August, according to information collected by C.A.R. from more than 90 local REALTOR^® associations and MLSs statewide. The statewide annualized

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