Bay bulges into Stockton
Housing prices lure home buyers who see a bargain
By Bruce Spence
Record Staff Writer
Tom Turnrose and Cletus Mastilock are a couple of Bay Area neighbors who have found the good life.
Local traffic congestion? Pshaw. Exorbitant housing prices? Not here, they tsk.
Then again, on this fine spring afternoon, they're soaking up the rays not in the Silicon Valley or even the Tri-Valley area, but in the East Bay's newest enclave (and not even Tracy, that was the '90s.): Stockton.
That's right, the East Bay now reaches all the way to the city's northern-most subdivision, Spanos Park, where the busiest builder there now reports nine out of 10 new-home buyers are Bay Area residents.
"When we told people we were moving here, they asked, 'Why Stockton?,'" said Mastilock, whose family sold its Sunnyvale home for $347,000 and paid $161,000 cash for a new four-bedroom, three-car-garage home of nearly 1,900 square feet. "You can't touch a house in the Bay Area for that -- not even close. I almost couldn't afford not to do it."
On their stretch of freshly built neighborhood, nestled up against the southern edge of Oak Grove Regional Park at Interstate 5 and Eight Mile Road, Turnrose and Mastilock are among the 11 out of 14 homeowners on just their stretch of street who have migrated from the Bay Area for one reason: to buy Stockton homes that seem so cheap they feel as if they're thieves.
"We're killing the Stockton real estate market," Turnrose said with a laugh. "But to us it's a steal. The housing in the Bay Area is so outlandish now that it's either buy it now, if you can, or forget about it."
Or move to Stockton, which features comparable homes for up to $85,000 less than those available in Tracy, the traditional home-buying paradise for Bay Area commuters in the '90s.
"It was a no-brainer," said new Weston Ranch resident Michael Melton, who in February moved with wife and daughter from a San Jose rental into a 9-year-old home with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a whopping quarter-acre lot and a swimming pool.
"We saw that for $40,000 to $60,000 cheaper, we could get the same house just by going 20 minutes up the road from Tracy. And we still have access to the ACE train. It's the best thing we've done in our lives. We can't complain a bit, even with that much time on the road."
Prices drive frenzy
As Bay Area home prices began going, well, "insane," is the commonly heard description, frustrated would-be buyers turned to the Valley and started frenzy feeding in Stockton beginning in December, according to interviews with a cross-section of real-estate agents and home builders.
Most real-estate brokers and agents reported that between half and three-fourths of their calls nowadays are from Bay Area residents looking for affordable homes in Stockton.
This while the California Association of Realtors reported that housing affordability posted its sharpest decline in February in more than a decade, falling 11 points to 32 percent -- the percentage of California households that can afford a median-priced home.
The least-affordable counties in the state were San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties. According to the CAR index, 21 percent of households could afford median-priced homes there, while in San Joaquin County, 53 percent could afford the median-priced home of $120,000.
Sheri Partridge, a real-estate agent with Partners Real Estate who specializes in Spanos Park properties, said the Bay Area buyers seem so concerned about escalating prices where they live that they're looking to get in somewhere before it's too late.
That brings many of them to Stockton, past Tracy -- where the prices are 35 percent to 40 percent higher -- past even Manteca, where prices are at least 25 percent higher, she said.
"They seem to be so pleased with the prices here that there doesn't seem to be much negotiation required to make the sale," said Partridge, a board member with the Central Valley Assoc-iation of Realtors.
Most in demand by Bay Area buyers are higher-end properties starting at $170,000, said Partridge, who gets about half her calls nowadays from Bay Area residents.
Irv Heard, a sales representative for Forecast Homes' projects in southwest Stockton's Weston Ranch subdivision, said he's expected to sell six homes a month to keep his bosses happy.
Last year, he averaged 10 homes a month.
Then on March 4, Forecast opened a new development section called Riverbend, offering four models of home ranging from a four-bedroom, two-bath single story starting at $180,000 to a six-bedroom, 31Ž2 bath home from $218,000 up.
Sales quadrupled in March.
After selling 32 lots for construction, Heard said, he then added 10 more on a waiting list.
"I've totally outrun construction's ability to keep up," he said. "All the models went up $3,000 at the end of March just to try to slow things down. I've been in real estate for 26 years, and I've been through ups and downs. But I've never seen a market this hot."
And seldom indeed does he sell to someone from Stockton, he said. Ninety-five percent of the buyers are Bay Area residents.
This crush of Bay Area interest affects not only the hot subdivisions along Interstate 5 -- Weston Ranch south of downtown, west Stockton's mostly gated Brookside Community and Spanos Park.
Real estate agents and brokers report selling property all over town at a pace not seen since the late '80s, when a similar Stockton housing boom got snuffed out by a state recession that not only halted the boom but actually rolled back prices.
Since last summer, sell time dropped from the typical two to three months to easily less than 30 days.
Stockton real estate agent Lori Docter, of Docter & Docter Realtors, said the selection has gotten lean in the past few months.
"You can drive around and not see any homes for sale," she said. "In a given price range, there may be only a half-dozen homes for sale. I've been doing this for 35 years, and that's very unusually low."
Cynthia Boyd, agent with Coldwell Banker Grupe, said one recent home seeker not only put in an offer on a Weston Ranch home, she returned to put in a higher backup offer because she feared the home would get picked off by someone else who had already put in a bid.
"That's how hot the market is right now," Boyd said.
Buyers from the Bay
One of the busiest builders of new homes in Spanos Park is California Homes.
The Spanos Park area had long been primarily a Stockton market, though with some Bay Area presence, said California Homes sales representative Dondra Dingman. A year ago, Bay Area residents made up about 40 percent of the buyers for her company's new homes in Spanos Park, she said.
Since fall, Dingman said, that proportion has soared to 90 percent in the company's latest project there, which offers at its top scale a five-bedroom, 31/2-bath, 3,000-square-foot model listing for a base price of $230,000.
In California Home's 108-lot Masterpiece project, 85 have been sold since past August, she said. As the homes are "released" for sale in batches of a dozen about every 30 days, half to three-fourths are already sold to buyers on a waiting list -- an extraordinary market, said Dingman, a Stockton home-seller since 1981.
"The bottom line is that your home is your castle, and these people are paying $1,200 to $1,600 a month for apartments? They can come out here and own a home, get a tax write-off and start some equity build up."
But many Bay Area buyers don't worry about equity build-up.
Stories abound of all-cash purchases or at least large down payments using proceeds from Bay Area property sales.
Dorothy Hargrove moved into a new home in Spanos Park in October after selling her Bay Area home. So did her sister.
She paid cash. So did her sister.
"It feels great," Hargrove said. "Just great."
The Sixtos of Hayward grew to a family of six during the '90s.
"We love the Hayward area," said mom, Laura Sixtos. "But we need a larger home, and we can't afford it. The prices are already out of our range, and the prices are going up so quickly."
The family knew Stockton because they had bought a boat and started going to the Delta.
"So we started looking around at the houses and were shocked to see how low they were," she said.
In March, they were trying to buy an 11-year-old, five-bedroom, three-bath home with a swimming pool in north Stockton for under $180,000, Sixtos said.
"It's just great -- and we'd have to pay $600,000, easy, in Hayward," she said.
They were hoping to get about $100,000 equity cash from selling their Hayward home for $250,000-plus, putting down 25 percent on the Stockton home, and then use the rest to pay off bills and have working capital for the family's painting and waterproofing business.
But the family has since backed off a Stockton move, at least for now, Sixtos said. The commute likely would prove too horrendous for her husband, Genaro, she said.
"We're looking in Antioch now, because it's so much closer to his work," she said. "We still haven't found anything. We're looking in Antioch one week, Stockton one week, Antioch the next."
The family figures they'll have to pay $50,000 to $60,000 more for 500 to 1,000 square-feet less space if they indeed buy in Antioch.
"The prices in Stockton are so much lower, but it's the commute that keeps pulling us back to Antioch," she said.
Housing prices lure home buyers who see a bargain
By Bruce Spence
Record Staff Writer
Tom Turnrose and Cletus Mastilock are a couple of Bay Area neighbors who have found the good life.
Local traffic congestion? Pshaw. Exorbitant housing prices? Not here, they tsk.
Then again, on this fine spring afternoon, they're soaking up the rays not in the Silicon Valley or even the Tri-Valley area, but in the East Bay's newest enclave (and not even Tracy, that was the '90s.): Stockton.
That's right, the East Bay now reaches all the way to the city's northern-most subdivision, Spanos Park, where the busiest builder there now reports nine out of 10 new-home buyers are Bay Area residents.
"When we told people we were moving here, they asked, 'Why Stockton?,'" said Mastilock, whose family sold its Sunnyvale home for $347,000 and paid $161,000 cash for a new four-bedroom, three-car-garage home of nearly 1,900 square feet. "You can't touch a house in the Bay Area for that -- not even close. I almost couldn't afford not to do it."
On their stretch of freshly built neighborhood, nestled up against the southern edge of Oak Grove Regional Park at Interstate 5 and Eight Mile Road, Turnrose and Mastilock are among the 11 out of 14 homeowners on just their stretch of street who have migrated from the Bay Area for one reason: to buy Stockton homes that seem so cheap they feel as if they're thieves.
"We're killing the Stockton real estate market," Turnrose said with a laugh. "But to us it's a steal. The housing in the Bay Area is so outlandish now that it's either buy it now, if you can, or forget about it."
Or move to Stockton, which features comparable homes for up to $85,000 less than those available in Tracy, the traditional home-buying paradise for Bay Area commuters in the '90s.
"It was a no-brainer," said new Weston Ranch resident Michael Melton, who in February moved with wife and daughter from a San Jose rental into a 9-year-old home with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a whopping quarter-acre lot and a swimming pool.
"We saw that for $40,000 to $60,000 cheaper, we could get the same house just by going 20 minutes up the road from Tracy. And we still have access to the ACE train. It's the best thing we've done in our lives. We can't complain a bit, even with that much time on the road."
Prices drive frenzy
As Bay Area home prices began going, well, "insane," is the commonly heard description, frustrated would-be buyers turned to the Valley and started frenzy feeding in Stockton beginning in December, according to interviews with a cross-section of real-estate agents and home builders.
Most real-estate brokers and agents reported that between half and three-fourths of their calls nowadays are from Bay Area residents looking for affordable homes in Stockton.
This while the California Association of Realtors reported that housing affordability posted its sharpest decline in February in more than a decade, falling 11 points to 32 percent -- the percentage of California households that can afford a median-priced home.
The least-affordable counties in the state were San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties. According to the CAR index, 21 percent of households could afford median-priced homes there, while in San Joaquin County, 53 percent could afford the median-priced home of $120,000.
Sheri Partridge, a real-estate agent with Partners Real Estate who specializes in Spanos Park properties, said the Bay Area buyers seem so concerned about escalating prices where they live that they're looking to get in somewhere before it's too late.
That brings many of them to Stockton, past Tracy -- where the prices are 35 percent to 40 percent higher -- past even Manteca, where prices are at least 25 percent higher, she said.
"They seem to be so pleased with the prices here that there doesn't seem to be much negotiation required to make the sale," said Partridge, a board member with the Central Valley Assoc-iation of Realtors.
Most in demand by Bay Area buyers are higher-end properties starting at $170,000, said Partridge, who gets about half her calls nowadays from Bay Area residents.
Irv Heard, a sales representative for Forecast Homes' projects in southwest Stockton's Weston Ranch subdivision, said he's expected to sell six homes a month to keep his bosses happy.
Last year, he averaged 10 homes a month.
Then on March 4, Forecast opened a new development section called Riverbend, offering four models of home ranging from a four-bedroom, two-bath single story starting at $180,000 to a six-bedroom, 31Ž2 bath home from $218,000 up.
Sales quadrupled in March.
After selling 32 lots for construction, Heard said, he then added 10 more on a waiting list.
"I've totally outrun construction's ability to keep up," he said. "All the models went up $3,000 at the end of March just to try to slow things down. I've been in real estate for 26 years, and I've been through ups and downs. But I've never seen a market this hot."
And seldom indeed does he sell to someone from Stockton, he said. Ninety-five percent of the buyers are Bay Area residents.
This crush of Bay Area interest affects not only the hot subdivisions along Interstate 5 -- Weston Ranch south of downtown, west Stockton's mostly gated Brookside Community and Spanos Park.
Real estate agents and brokers report selling property all over town at a pace not seen since the late '80s, when a similar Stockton housing boom got snuffed out by a state recession that not only halted the boom but actually rolled back prices.
Since last summer, sell time dropped from the typical two to three months to easily less than 30 days.
Stockton real estate agent Lori Docter, of Docter & Docter Realtors, said the selection has gotten lean in the past few months.
"You can drive around and not see any homes for sale," she said. "In a given price range, there may be only a half-dozen homes for sale. I've been doing this for 35 years, and that's very unusually low."
Cynthia Boyd, agent with Coldwell Banker Grupe, said one recent home seeker not only put in an offer on a Weston Ranch home, she returned to put in a higher backup offer because she feared the home would get picked off by someone else who had already put in a bid.
"That's how hot the market is right now," Boyd said.
Buyers from the Bay
One of the busiest builders of new homes in Spanos Park is California Homes.
The Spanos Park area had long been primarily a Stockton market, though with some Bay Area presence, said California Homes sales representative Dondra Dingman. A year ago, Bay Area residents made up about 40 percent of the buyers for her company's new homes in Spanos Park, she said.
Since fall, Dingman said, that proportion has soared to 90 percent in the company's latest project there, which offers at its top scale a five-bedroom, 31/2-bath, 3,000-square-foot model listing for a base price of $230,000.
In California Home's 108-lot Masterpiece project, 85 have been sold since past August, she said. As the homes are "released" for sale in batches of a dozen about every 30 days, half to three-fourths are already sold to buyers on a waiting list -- an extraordinary market, said Dingman, a Stockton home-seller since 1981.
"The bottom line is that your home is your castle, and these people are paying $1,200 to $1,600 a month for apartments? They can come out here and own a home, get a tax write-off and start some equity build up."
But many Bay Area buyers don't worry about equity build-up.
Stories abound of all-cash purchases or at least large down payments using proceeds from Bay Area property sales.
Dorothy Hargrove moved into a new home in Spanos Park in October after selling her Bay Area home. So did her sister.
She paid cash. So did her sister.
"It feels great," Hargrove said. "Just great."
The Sixtos of Hayward grew to a family of six during the '90s.
"We love the Hayward area," said mom, Laura Sixtos. "But we need a larger home, and we can't afford it. The prices are already out of our range, and the prices are going up so quickly."
The family knew Stockton because they had bought a boat and started going to the Delta.
"So we started looking around at the houses and were shocked to see how low they were," she said.
In March, they were trying to buy an 11-year-old, five-bedroom, three-bath home with a swimming pool in north Stockton for under $180,000, Sixtos said.
"It's just great -- and we'd have to pay $600,000, easy, in Hayward," she said.
They were hoping to get about $100,000 equity cash from selling their Hayward home for $250,000-plus, putting down 25 percent on the Stockton home, and then use the rest to pay off bills and have working capital for the family's painting and waterproofing business.
But the family has since backed off a Stockton move, at least for now, Sixtos said. The commute likely would prove too horrendous for her husband, Genaro, she said.
"We're looking in Antioch now, because it's so much closer to his work," she said. "We still haven't found anything. We're looking in Antioch one week, Stockton one week, Antioch the next."
The family figures they'll have to pay $50,000 to $60,000 more for 500 to 1,000 square-feet less space if they indeed buy in Antioch.
"The prices in Stockton are so much lower, but it's the commute that keeps pulling us back to Antioch," she said.
