Ca. wildfires....talked with my son...
 

Called to say hello today, 1030AM his time, talking about stuff, and he mentioned that Ca. real estate is taking a hit due to that huge territory being wiped out in wildfires last year.....being as it's twice the size of his region, Nevada City and Grass Valley.....and the reason is that insurance companies just can't take the hit on such a disASSter, like the hurry-cains here in Florida, or Houston even, much less New Orleans flooding/etc......

so folks are finding it hard to collect, banks taking hits on loans, payments necessarily stop, and the whole financial sector goes unstable on account of huge high dollar losses like that......take a bunch of 100k houses, ok loss is X amount, take similar houses and count at 500k each, and all of a sudden, shit hits the FAN......:issues:

So an interesting shituation there has hit the RE market in Ca......that and folks moving out, while freeloaders moving IN.....going to be cute to watch all this shit happen, and the failure to have a proper reaction on part of the Ca. .gov types......

Watt say yawl that live out in them thar regions?? :issues:

Sounds like a buying opportunity to me. :yesnod:

The way I figure it, it'll be 20 - 30 years before those burn areas burn again. If you buy now and wait until after the mudslides are done you can build a really nice place for fire sale prices (pun intended). As long as you can hold on to it for a few years everyone will forget about the fires.

I don't really have an opinion either way, but what I can tell you is it's a massive pain in the ass to insure a house in an area that has a higher than average risk for wildfires.

My cabin for instance (San Bernardino Mountains), being within a few hundred yards of the National Forest, was a bit of work getting insured. Your traditional insurance agencies like Farmers and State Farm won't touch it. We ended up getting a broker that lives on the mountain to help us out, there are only a few insurance agencies that will cover up there. Lloyds of London being one of them. :island14:

In certain areas, it is making buyers more wary. But conversely, when a fire takes out a lot of homes in an area, it makes the value of existing homes go up because of the laws of supply and demand. We sold our larger house about six months after the Valley Fire took out about 1200 homes in our county for about 40K over what realtors recommended for a selling price, and had multiple offers the first day it was listed.

The last fire, up in the town of Paradise, was a long way from here, but it still sent some buyers our way. The manager in our mobile home park, who is also a realtor, sold her place for about 20% more than she would have asked before that fire. I think I could do the same with ours.

Well, I'm not going to purchase any property while I'm out here. Just waiting to get back the f out.

What I'm worried about short-term is that the state will need to provide a bail out because PG&E will threaten to shut down if they're held fiscally responsible. Sadly, I say that they should just declare bankruptcy and let the insurers eat the loss.

OK, PGE/any power company puts in wires, HV wires on cross country runs, they buy a right of way wide enough to keep clean under it, and I would THINK any laws about trees and such would apply to the prop owners to keep the lines safe, IE that they can't start fires.....

:issues:

If California spent half as much on forest fire prevention as they do on illegals the place would be a much better place to live .