Question: Will the Santiago Fire dissuade people from buying in Portola Springs and Orchard Hills?

NEW -> Contingent Buyer Assistance Program
<p>"Take take take then when it's time to pay, make excuses and pull out."</p>

<p>A very successful business model. It helped make Buffett rich(er) and he knows a thing or two about businesses that make money!</p>
 
AAA has a very good track record of paying...go check on the J.D. Power site, it ranks all the good insurance companies who pays quickly....



Good Point on Insurance Eval. From Fire protection prospective, I think Woodbury is very good:

a. you have to burn through the shopping center go reach any houses - shopping center's huge parking lot serve as a buffer.



b. once it burns through the parking lot, it has to burn through the baseball / soccer fields which is huge and the new school in order to reach the west half of the community.



c. everyone can quickly get out since there are four main entrances, and close to 5, 405, and 133 towards the beach.



Quail hill sites again the hills, and can be dangerous. Then it has a view, so it there is "reward".
 
"We're going to go from a credit crunch to an insurance crunch."



Does that mean homes not in harms way of these forest habitats will be more valuable???

C'mon, I think we're reaching here...



The best argument to bulls in terms of persuasion of this real estate downfall would be

"I can get more HOUSE today for this money!" and "I can get more HOUSE the longer I wait!"
 
<p><em>>>Does that mean homes not in harms way of these forest habitats will be more valuable???</em></p>

<p>I think you misunderstood my point. After the Northridge Quake, several insurance companies stopped writing any policies in either all of So Cal or all of California (can't recall which). Zip. Zero. None. It didn't matter that a particular home sat on solid ground and hadn't been affected by a strong quake in the past. They wouldn't write (and some would not renew) homeowner's policies.</p>

<p>Ah, here it is:</p>

<p>"At the height of the unavailability crisis, insurers representing over 93 percent of the homeowners market had severely restricted the sale of new policies or had stopped writing entirely. To further reduce their exposure many insurers also planned to non-renew thousands of their existing policyholders. " (<a href="http://www.pifc.org/insurance_manual/cea_fact.html">Source.</a>)</p>

<p>And it looks like <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/allstate-stop-writing-new-homeowners/story.aspx?guid={18C7BC16-CABA-4F61-97DD-56EA5F5B16D7}">Allstate was ahead of the curve</a>.</p>
 
<p>A picture of Portola Springs submitted by a reader of the LA Times.</p>

<p><img alt="" src="http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2007-10/33403484.jpg" /></p>
 
<p>Ah, insurance companies. We Floridians can tell you all about insurance companies. They paid after Hurricane Andrew. Thereafter--not.</p>

<p>Our residence on the space coast had the rates raised from $3100 for insurance to $7400a year ago.. We told them we had new hurricane shutters, which took it down $1000, and then only insured for 80%, thinking that they will never pay 100% anyway, which took it down another thou, so we are at $5400, and gosh, they are not going to raise it again this year. And they are not going to cancel us, even tho we live on a barrier island--literally miles away from any water however.</p>

<p>If it weren't for the fact that the hub wouldn't sleep at nite, I'd go bare and put the money in the bank, or now, maybe under the mattress. (our mtg will be paid off by the time our insurance is renewed, hence this alternative.)</p>

<p>There are still hurricane claims outstanding from the 8 hurricanes of '04 and '05. Still roofs with blue tarps, tho many fewer.</p>

<p>Insurance companies are scum squared. State Farm was caught either in the Florida panhandle or Ga, I forget which, shopping for contractors/adjusters, who would say what they wanted, and blacklisting honest ones.</p>

<p>Prudential treated us wonderfully after Andrew, then cancelled us. Still, thanks Pru for paying off full face value with no fight, about 10 minutes after the adjuster got to the trailer they provided for us to live in, in front of the house while it was being rebuilt. By the way don't trust a contractor to rebuild you as far as you can throw him/her, and dribble out the money in as many payments you can, so if they disappear, or are horrible, you only have one lost draw. And, if they say they are a good Christian (Jew/Muslim/Buddhist/Atheist), run, do not walk away from them; that's the sign of the Con.</p>

<p>Also, in the present situation, any bloggers who get burnt out should probably not rebuild. We would have done better financially not to rebuild. Pay off the mtg, rent somewhere (the insurance co will pay for that most likely for a few months at least, and bid looow on the house that you like. That's what this blog is about, right?</p>
 
thanks lawyerliz for sharing your own rebuilding experience. here's a question though... given that homes are currently priced around $300-400 per sf, would it still make more financial sense to rebuild when the typical coverage for dwellings is $100-200. that alone should be a good argument to share with people who are in the mkt.





i'm still curious if anyone knows how the rebuilding process would work in a planned community such as irvine. obviously the original builder could crank out them out since they use identical models in nearly every community. the cost to them is more like $50 per sf (a guesstimate based on what a friend who works for pulte said). then the question is how do they build them simultaneously when during a normal build-out, the construction is staggered. how is the build prioritized in this situation? would residents even be allowed to use outside contractors?
 
We were in a "de minimus" PUD. Meaning all they did was mow the lawn & take care of the entrance feature. So no rebuilding approvals were needed in our subdivision. We only had the horror of dealing with the county--or our builder did.



A number of people went back to the builder who had done a reasonably decent job & asked him to rebuild. He--wisely--declined. In dealing with the county, the contractors were shooting at a moving target. They would build to code, call for an inspection, and then found that the code had changed the previous week, so the work had to be redone. It wasn't fair. In one case, the contractor had to send the carpenter back 3 times to make some changes on the gable bracing, because it changed twice. Now, I'm all in favor of making things strong against hurricanes, but this should have been done all at once, and not every month another change.



Nobody sued my builder. Lennar was sued. They had a develpment about a mile due west of us where the houses were not make of CBS and they folded up like accordians. Remarkable that nobody died.



My subjective impression was that areas with no HOA, or a minimal one like ours that did not require proof of architectural plans rebuilt more quickly.



I gather that the Irvine Company has some sort of residual control, in addition to the HOAs? Our equivalent, Arvida, which is mostly not in business any more, kept no finger in the pie, so I don't know how that would work with you guys.



Since you say the builders built crap, why go back to the same builders for more crap? Even at the worst, except for Lennar, our crap was far less crappy than your crap. Only some of our roof blew off, and the anamometer (sp?) at the zoo a couple of miles away blew off at umm, 190. Or was it 164? Anyway a lot. We would have lived, had we stayed.

We didn't. We had a small house on the space coast, which we went to and only endured a 7 hour traffic jam. No problem. Our neighbors were traumatized. We were slightly annoyed.
 
<p>I believe your HOA would probably dictate how rebuilding would be done.</p>

<p>No origninal builder would want to rebuild because they make no money off of it. They cannot build at $50-100/sq ft and sell it for $200-300 sq/ft. Not to mention they would reopen themselves to construction defect issues (another ten years).</p>
 
The cost for materials for a builder is approximately $50 a sqft. In fact on Centex's conference call the CFO said that the sticks and bricks cost is about that. Factor in labor and depending on the area the costs for labor and materials can vary making the cost for a builder $100 - $175 a sqft. I think the true cost for Irvine would be around the $150 range.





I would imagine if some tragedy happened that the builders would step up to the plate to rebuild. I think the issue would be the insurance coverage more so than the builder making a profit. Using the $400 a sqft sale number a 2000 sqft home would have a value of $800k and the cost for the builder would be $300k. So say they squeeze in a small profit of $25k a home if they needed to build 500 homes that's a nice $12.5mil profit. But do most people have $325k worth of replacement cost in their insurance? It makes me want to go double check my insurance.





As for how fast they can crank out the homes, I think most would be surprised how fast they can build when they need to. This wouldn't be about profits and keeping the shareholders happy but more of a PR campaign. Depending on how quickly the clean up can begin and the availability of materials and if three builders were involved 500 homes probably could be built in 3-4 months.
 
Graphix, you are forgeting about the construct defect liability. In California, builders are on the hook for 10 years (basically). 12.5 million is nice but may not be enough to risk a 10 year liability.
 
<p><em>"our crap was far less crappy than your crap".</em> lawyerliz</p>

<p>OK, you are funny ! Seems you've gotten addicted to IHB finally, we all knew it would happen. It's kinda like crack.</p>

<p>Anywho, if you hadn't rebuilt, what would you have done...just sold your land as a buildable lot ? Just curious. </p>

<p> </p>
 
<p>Yep, just sold the land as a buildable lot. After all, it had a slab, and 4 CBS walls, and the trusses that didn't blow off were still there. And the pool was dug, just needed to be resurfaced, and of course all the pool plumbing needed to be cleaned and or replaced. Our across the street neighbor was actually sorta happy that the hurricane happened, since they'd been trying to sell for forever, and now they got their insurance money, plus they sold the lot with slab, cbs and trusses for some reasonable amount. Had we sold and then bought up on the space coast, in 1993, instead of late 1996, we could have gotten something even fancier than what we got. But that would be greedy, and who knew.</p>

<p>It was fun rebuilding a house that we had chosen to begin with, with all the doodads that after you move in, you wish you had. And all the furniture to fit into the specific rooms. And everything harmonizing. So I got to feel rich for a while, and that was interesting. And I got shopped out. When every single (almost) thing you have is detroyed and has to be replaced, you actually get tired of shopping and replacing things. We rescued a few things, and still haven't gotten rid of them--ie a stuffed triceratops that was bought for my son, now nearly 27 is still around. What do I miss most? My cookbooks. After 15 years, there are still some cookbooks I wish I had.</p>

<p>I must say, I think that fire is far worse than wind and water. I was an art major and some arsonist burnt down the art building just before I graduated, and somehow that was far more depressing than the hurricane destruction. Tho the fire didn't burn the whole building the way I've seen pictures of your destruction..</p>

<p>And the insurance companies will never, ever be so generous again.</p>

<p>We have some interesting hurricane and post hurricane stories. Somebody wanna create a thread to compare disasters?</p>

<p> </p>
 
<p>Oh, and thanks for the complement.</p>

<p>Sometimes I crack wise in court and humorless judges give me the fish eye. Sigh. I can't stop myself. Some laugh.</p>

<p>I am posting a lot today, because the hub is doing a ham radio contest, and I am bored.</p>

<p> </p>

<p> </p>
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top