Housing what bubble, i don't see no bubble:)
<<For sale: Trailer w/ocean vu, $1 million obo By Michael Martinez Tribune national correspondent
Tue Aug 2, 9:40 AM ET
So wonderfully Californian, Marsha Weidman's home has it all--along the beach, far from noisy traffic, with a Jacuzzi used to watch sunsets over the Pacific.
For this, she and her husband recently paid $1.05 million.
For that, they got a trailer, built in 1971, without any land.
Plus, the family must pay "space rent," which at two Malibu parks dotted with seven-figure trailers ranges from $800 to $2,500 monthly.
The nation's frenzied housing boom has come to this: Even trailer parks, long the butt of jokes about tornado targets and redneck living, are enjoying fat greenback prices.
But, oh, what a mobile home it is, Weidman says.
"When people think of `mobile home,' they think of `trailer,'" said Weidman, 55, a former attorney who is the mother of two teenagers. "Mobile homes aren't what they were. They're not the little 9-by-15s on wheels. These are homes."
Indeed, virtually all trailers in such developments are not mobile at all. Some are on permanent foundations; their nomad days are over.
Such units in the Florida Keys are seeing prices approaching a cool million, including one waterfront trailer on Stock Island next to Key West that's on the market for $799,000, said listing real estate agent Larry Salas, 47, of Miami. That price includes land, however.
"It's crazy because these trailers, before, they would be like a bad neighborhood. There was a stigma being in a trailer park," Salas said. "But here it has gone through such a metamorphosis."
The seven-digit prices, touching only those trailers parked permanently beside the sea, have made for giddy moments with neighbors such as George Keossaian, 46, who with his wife and two children moved five years ago into the gated Point Dume Club mobile park, where Weidman also lives.
The mobile home he bought for $140,000 then will be worth $950,000 once he completes an 800-foot addition, Keossaian says. A reappraisal this year assigned a $750,000 value to his home, which has no ocean view.
"When I first saw this, I said, `There's no way I'm living in a mobile home--trailer trash,'" said Keossaian, a contractor now rebuilding a nearby million-dollar mobile home overlooking famous Zuma Beach.
"My wife said, `We live in a trailer!' I said, `If we build it to look like a house, will you stop calling it a trailer?' She doesn't call it a trailer any more."
Like other savvy owners seeking millionaire buyers, Keossaian's abode has been remodeled to resemble a Craftsman bungalow, with stucco walls covering the trailer's steel chassis, hitch, brake lights and license plate holder.
Increasingly, the residences are refashioned into more than a towed home.
When Weidman bought her double-wide, it already had been remodeled to evoke a cottage, with airy interior rooms illuminated by skylights, comfy outdoor wooden decks and a front-yard rose garden.
The Point Dume Club is a 297-unit mobile park built in 1970 that resembles a subdivision with winding streets, a clubhouse with a pool and tennis and basketball courts. There is also a guard in an entrance booth.
Buy 'em, raze 'em, rebuild
More recently, several trailers have been razed and rebuilt in stylish architecture with custom finishes, including Viking stoves, Sub-Zero refrigerators, Swarovski crystal lighting and travertine floors.
For example, developer Janet Levine of Maliblue Holdings paid $790,000 for an old trailer and built a new structure, selling it for $1.75 million this year in Point Dume Club.
She's doing two more reconstructions just down the drive, including one 3-decade-old trailer with surfboards stacked outside that she bought last week for $840,000 and will redevelop into a structure worth about $1.8 million. Another she bought for $800,000 will be listed for $1.6 million once it's redeveloped, she said. She is planning to install or has already built replacements with the architecture of traditional Japanese, 1960s Palm Springs and modern minimalist styles.
"We call them mobile villas," Levine said.
"If you were to ask longtime residents, they don't like it, they don't like the change," said Kirsten Ribnick, a mobile home owner in Malibu and interior designer who has seen her business prosper thanks to new, well-to-do neighbors. "What do I think? I think it's great."
Despite extravagant makeovers, a giveaway is often a floor and front door always 3 feet above ground.
Despite the outrageous price tags, the domiciles are a bargain for their location, according to owners. A house similarly positioned in celebrity-chocked Malibu--close to the surf with views of coastal mountains--would cost tens of millions of dollars, they say.
Idyll by the sea
Caressed by cool breezes on a small bluff, Weidman's home suffers no obstructed views. There is just water, sand and hillside flora including jade, pine and rosemary.
"That was the key reason for why what I spent," she said.
David Carter, a real estate agent specializing in Malibu's mobile home market the past 20 years, said the first million-dollar sale of a motor home in the city happened two years ago.
"There used to be only one or two," said Carter, 55. "We'll probably sell five or six in the million-dollar range this year. We've already sold three this year.
Million-plus prices also are posted in Malibu's Paradise Cove, a trailer park beside a surfers' beach where the 1970s television show "The Rockford Files" situated a ragtag trailer for James Garner's private eye character.
Cove resident Maggie Bright, 53, has put her family's double-wide up for sale for $875,000, and they plan to move to New Orleans, she said. Their coach sits six or seven trailers away from a bluff's rim with a commanding view of the coast.
She and her husband bought the 1,300-square-foot trailer for $159,000 five years ago and spent $45,000 remodeling the 3-decade-old coach with high-end appliances, skylights and tile, Bright said.
"Malibu has really gone nuts, as has most of California," she said.
Financing the dream trailer
Securing a mortgage for such high-end mobile homes can be difficult, but Clay Dickens, 45, vice president of Community West Bank in Goleta, Calif., has made a niche out of lending to mobile home buyers, extending $100 million in such loans the past seven years, he said.
"It's an unusual thing. There's no title to it. You're kind of lending somewhat--most banks don't like the verbiage--on blue sky," said Dickens, a native of Chicago's north suburbs.
The risk for buyers is whether park owners will redevelop their site into single-family homes, but Dickens said Malibu's two parks are unlikely to do so.
Deborah Miller, 43, property manager for Point Dume Club, said there is virtually no chance that park will be redeveloped. The 99-acre site is part of the original holdings of her great-great-grandfather Frederick H. Rindge, who owned what now is all of Malibu in the late 1800s. Miller's mother and grandmother own Point Dume (pronounced by the family as "do-MAY") Club, she said.
"That's always a questions that I'm asked when somebody buys here," Miller said. "Realistically there is no guarantee, but for us we have no desire or plans to change the park."
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mjmartinez@tribune.com
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