Today I was reading an article about and once again it made me think about starting my own business.

When I think about it, I already have a lot of things that could help me in a business venture. Here’s a list:

• I am young and I could afford to take a bit of risk.
• I have quite a bit of experience working at startups.
• I have a degree in engineering and I am fairly capable with web technologies.
• I am fluent in Chinese and English and could possibly source products and services from China.
• My parents are financial professionals and could help me with the accounting
• I have a good network of contacts in the Silicon Valley through jobs and school.
• I have a hubby that is usually pretty supportive

Then there are the hurdles I need to overcome to actually go ahead and start something:

• I need an idea for a business that could be profitable
• I need to get over the fact that I would probably not make money right away.
• Eventually I need to give up my job and work on my business full time.
• I need to get over my fear of failure since most small businesses fail and I absolutely abhor losing or failing at anything .
• I need to get off my butt and execute my idea once I have one.

I think the biggest hurdles for me are that I may fail and I may lose a stable income while I focus my energy on my own business. Coming up with a business idea isn’t very hard because I firmly understand that I just have to sell a product or service that people want and it really doesn’t have to be a complex “web 2.0″ idea. The business could be as simple as buying useless cheap crap from China and selling it to people here at a markup. In fact, a lot of people and companies make billions of dollars doing this. My business doesn’t have to be huge and glamorous so coming up with an idea is easy. I have dabbled in quite a few “businesses” where I sold very mundane things and I did make small buckets of money. However, I always quit because they became too time consuming and my full time job paid much better. Running a business takes a lot of work and most of the time it is easier just collecting a stable salary. I think my mom also said that she always wants her own business, but after calculating everything she found that collecting a salary is just less of a hassle.

It is hard to convert from a wage-slave to a capitalist, and I think for me that is the hardest part about starting a business. If I did get really serious about having my own business I think I could do very well. The problem is that I may never get started.

So I started to look at San Mateo real estate in decline on Redfin. Today I did another scan of the San Mateo properties that have been listed on Redfin for less than 14 days. I found another 46 properties that have listing prices lower than their last selling prices. There were about 300 to 400 properties in San Mateo County that were listed on Redfin in the last 14 days, so that means 46 properties is a little more than 10% of all the new properties coming up for sale. After I looked through the properties it seems that at least a couple are old listings with new lower prices.generic levitraHere are some highlights of these listings.

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These properties are once again a mix of luxury homes, bank owned foreclosed properties, and other unfortunate homes. The averages definitely looks worse than the report two weeks ago. Basically, the losses are bigger and the homes are bigger. However, the first set of data had a larger sample size so it’s unfair to do a direct comparison. I have started a on this site to keep track of the data I have collected. Since the tables are quite big and break the flow of this blog I decided to put them in separate web pages. Feel free to link to the summary page!

First of all, many thanks to Patrick of for linking to this series. I have been reading Patrick’s site for about two years, ever since I contemplated buying a home. At that time everyone and their puppies were buying houses and I am so glad I found and did not follow the mania. Anyway, lets talk about “luxury” homes.

So the definition of “luxury homes” vary from person to person. Some people say that it’s a house that’s big and some say that it’s a house that’s over a certain price level. Some also say that size doesn’t matter but the amenities inside has to be glorious. The following are a list of homes in decline that I believe qualify as “luxury” by normal wage-slave standards.

Address:
Size: 3520 Sqft
Last Sale Date: 5/31/2006
Last Sale Price: 2,000,000
Current Asking: 1,998,000
Annualized Loss: -0.07%

Address:
Size: 2316 Sqft
Last Sale Date: 5/31/2006
Last Sale Price: 1,165,000
Current Asking: 1,149,000
Annualized Loss: -1.27%

Address:
Size: 2050 Sqft
Last Sale Date: 3/10/2005
Last Sale Price: 1,380,000
Current Asking: 1,379,000
Annualized Loss: -0.03%

From the looks of it the expensive luxury homes in San Mateo didn’t decline very much because the people that buy these have so much money that they don’t care. I think for me any of these homes would be way too much of a hassle and require a lot of cleaning and energy costs. I just want something around 1400 Sqft that is manageable and reasonably priced. It seems that for most people, just the act of buying a home is a luxury in the sense that they could rent a place for much less money. In some ways, luxury is equivalent to waste because there is no point in buying something you don’t need, or spending more money for something of the same value. When you are in San Mateo, I can almost guarantee that a rental unit is always going to be cheaper than a comparable unit for sale. I think these homes in the 1 million to 2 million range will sink a bit more due to inventory piling up, but I think the homes in the 10 million plus category will probably not sink very much. It doesn’t matter much because most people don’t care about the 10 million dollar homes. Most of us just want a little abode to call home. Is that too much to ask for?

Lets continue looking at San Mateo home sellers in trouble. Just looking at the most depreciated homes in the previous post you may think that the losses incurred are not so bad. One person said to me that at least these home sellers aren’t losing 100%. The truth is they’re losing much more than 100%. Take the example of a home seller losing 24% of the price of his home and has only 20% of the home’s equity then he is really losing 120% of his equity plus all the interest payments he has made. Basically, all the homeowners who are losing more than what they have in equity are losing more than 100% of their money. I am not sure what amount of equity each of these homes have, but I am sure the statistics would look a lot uglier if we compared the value lost to the amount of equity owned.

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Belmont: 1

Burlingame: 2

Daly City: 13

East Palo Alto: 6

Foster City: 2

Menlo Park: 3

Pacifica: 1

Redwood City: 13

San Bruno: 4

San Carlos: 1

San Mateo: 27

South San Francisco: 29

The clear winner (or loser) is South San Francisco, followed closely by San Mateo. It seems that South San Francisco’s Westborough neighborhood near Skyline College has a lot of homes in close proximity to each other that have had drastic haircuts. For example, on Carter Drive alone there are six homes that are included in the list of troubled sellers. That area isn’t really horrible, but being on the edge of San Mateo County its real estate prices seems to be collapsing in on itself.

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As promised, the following are the five troubled homes with the lowest price per square foot. Several of them are on the aforementioned Carter Dr. in South San Francisco and it seems that these neighbors will drive their collective prices down as they compete for buyers. The last home on this list also showed up in the previous post as one of the biggest losers. Most of these homes have above average sizes and it shows that not only the starter homes are falling in price.

Address: 3550 Carter Dr #134, South San Francisco
Last Sale Date: 2/17/2006
Last Sale Price: 586,000
Current Asking Price: 450,000
Size: 1644 Sqft
Price per Sqft: $274

Address: 3550 Carter Dr #26, South San Francisco
Last Sale Date: 1/6/2006
Last Sale Price: 590,000
Current Asking Price: 590,000
Size: 1644 Sqft
Price per Sqft: $359

Address: 3231 Geoffrey Dr, San Bruno
Last Sale Date: 7/29/2005
Last Sale Price: 790000
Current Asking Price: 775000
Size: 2050 Sqft
Price per Sqft: $378

Address: 3875 Carter Dr #204, South San Francisco
Last Sale Date: 10/14/2005
Last Sale Price: 575000
Current Asking Price: 419999
Size: 1105
Price per Sqft: $380

Address: 2318 Flores St, San Mateo
Last Sale Date: 12/29/2006
Last Sale Price: 1,250,000
Current Asking Price: 888,000
Size: 2304
Price per Sqft: $385

Tomorrow we will look at some more of this data and look at some “luxury” homes.

This is a bit late notice, but I heard on that PG&E is giving away a million compact fluorescent lightbulbs this week in the Bay Area. These are the energy saving bulbs mentioned in the . You have to call PG&E’s Smarter Energy Line at 1-800-933-9555 to find out where to go. My coworker just asked me where to go buy compact fluorescent bulbs, and well, you can get them for free. Though you shouldn’t get too excited and drive a long time for these!