[schema type="organization" orgtype="LocalBusiness" url="http://4salebydonna.com" name="Real Estate Agent Donna Baker" description="Real Estate Agent showing homes for sale and available real estate in Monrovia, Pasadena, Arcadia the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California." city="Monrovia" state="Ca" postalcode="91016" email="donna@4salebydonna.com " phone="(626) 408-7766 "]

Sticking with Monrovia’s Thanksgiving History

This Thursday, at some point in the festivities we’ll be remembering the Pilgrims and their Indian guests on that first Thanksgiving Day in the New World. After all, that gathering was the genesis of today’s Monrovia Thanksgiving Day celebration.

Or was it?

This momentary doubt surfaced when someone mentioned the Canadian Thanksgiving celebration. When you think about it, how likely it is that our Neighbors to the North would create a national holiday to memorialize some ancient Massachusetts get-together? Pretty unlikely.  

So if their Thanksgiving doesn’t celebrate the day the Pilgrims feasted with their new Wampanoag friends, what does it celebrate?

The Canadian version is said to be offshoots of the Old World’s “Harvest Festivals.” According to England’s Metro News, “Harvest Festival in Britain is the ancient festival that celebrates a successful yield.” It’s a “Sunday of Thanksgiving” observed on the Sunday closest to the harvest moon (this year, it came on September 23). European Harvest Festivals are said to be remnants of pre-Christian harvest festivals, during which corn dolls are traditionally fashioned from “the last sheath of the harvest.” You can find many pictures of the corn dolls (they call them ‘dollies’). No Indian tribes. No turkeys.

Pagan festivals and dollies? Does this put the accuracy of all Monrovia elementary school bulletin boards with their Pilgrim hats and turkey displays in jeopardy? Fortunately, there’s a problem with the Pilgrim-less version.

According to the British press, the corn dolls are “meant to symbolize the pagan goddess of the grain”—which would definitely predate Christianity altogether. But the fact is, corn was unknown in Europe until it was brought by Columbus from the New World. So the corn doll/pre-Christian link doesn’t work, time-wise.

I think we can safely bypass other Thanksgiving legends and just stick to our own story. Monrovia’s Thanksgiving can continue to be the once-a-year occasion to remember its true spirit—a day we celebrate our gratitude for all we have and love.  

Here’s hoping your celebration is delightful and fulfilling.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Compared with Other News, Mortgage News is Welcome

Last week ended with such horrendous news in California that it was a blessed relief how in at least one narrow slice of the news—one of interest to Monrovia house hunters, among others—there was blessedly very little worrisome to report. Against the grim reality of how November 2018 was beginning in other areas of the news, Monrovia house hunters could relax for a moment.

This quiet corner of the public space was in what for house-hunters is an area of key concern—the slice of the financial sector focused on home loan originators and the residential mortgage market. The news from that quarter was, in brief, not much news.

The Tuesday election had held a high likelihood of affecting credit markets, and thus, mortgage interest rates. It’s usually true, and The Mortgage News Daily thought that the quiet on Monday “suggests traders are waiting to see if other traders care about the election results.” As it turned out, at least by Wednesday, they didn’t.

The MND predicted “Probably One More Day of Waiting for any Election Impact,” but it turned out to be a longer wait than that. On Wednesday a Federal Reserve Board Statement was scheduled for release. Days like that are known in the industry as “Fed Days”—they usually move rates. But what resulted, according to Mortgage News, was only “movement…that looked small if viewed by anything less powerful than a microscope.”

And so it went. Monrovia mortgage rates remained in historically lower-than-average territory when you take the past 40 years into account. Such good news for Monrovia house hunters looked to remain the case for a little while. As the week closed, the Mortgage News lead headline was “Mortgage Rates Steady Ahead of Holiday Weekend.” Especially compared with the rest of the news, it was a no news/good news situation.

In the meanwhile, for any and all your Monrovia real estate needs, I hope you’ll remember to give me a call!  

 

Monrovia’s Future Home Values: Up, Down, or Sideways?

Last week Monrovia homeowners’ peace of mind would have been strengthened by some words that received wide circulation throughout the financial press. Their author was a gentleman whose opinions are as close to bankable as anyone currently on the scene. If there were such a thing as a Nobel Prize in real estate, this guy would own one—come to think of it, he DOES have a Nobel prize (for economics), but his work largely centers on the U.S. real estate market.

We’re talking about Robert Shiller, the Yale professor who co-invented the Case-Shiller Index. It’s the most economically respected measure of U.S home prices. Monrovia homeowners who measure their own financial wherewithal usually consider the market price of their Monrovia home as a major contributor to their net worth—the personal financial ultimate bottom line. As Wall Street’s MarketWatch put it, “what’s more natural than wanting to know the value of our biggest assets?

That’s why the trajectory of home values in the months and years ahead are of more than passing interest—and why the views of Professor Shiller make headlines. Among other prescient pronouncements, he foresaw the past decade’s housing crash and subsequent financial meltdown—and penned an article predicting it a full year in advance.

The latest S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index did report some slowing—but that was a slowing in the rate of price increases, rather than a true slowdown. Still, after years of constantly upbeat statistical news, it’s not surprising that Shiller’s views on what’s next got wide coverage when CNBC interviewed him last week.

What the straight-talking economist had to say was welcome news for Monrovia homeowners. When the interviewer brought up possible fears of a major downturn in home equity like the previous decade’s housing bubble, Shiller replied, “it’s not the same.” On the contrary, addressing home values in the immediate future, he was definite: “I don’t expect a sharp turn in the housing market.”

Much of the U.S. slowdown in home sales has to do with a lack of inventory: homeowners willing to sell. If you are one of Monrovia’s homeowners, you can take that as a green light for listing your own property in today’s market. If that’s you, I hope you’ll give me a call!

 

 

        

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