Roadmap with Irina - July 2024

Hope you are doing great and enjoying the summer. Sending you an update on the summer market to keep you posted. 

In June of this year, the median sale price in Santa Clara County for single-family homes and condos dropped by less than 1% compared to May. However, the number of closed sales declined by 12% for single-family homes and 14.5% for condos and townhouses. When comparing June 2023 to June 2024, it's evident that the market is still recovering from the drop experienced in 2023.

Currently, there are 1,731 homes for sale in Santa Clara County, just 2.3% more than last month, indicating a continuing increase in inventory. Historically, market activity tends to decrease during the summer months, with homes taking longer to sell and the market generally becoming calmer after the spring rush. It will be interesting to see how the market evolves next month when kids return to school.

If you are thinking about buying or selling, let’s connect, talk about your options, run some numbers, and see if this is the right time for you. Call me, I am always here for you.

As you probably know from my Facebook posts, this summer I went to Italy with my older daughter, just the two of us. This was a special treat for her for working hard during the school year, and it was special for me too because we haven’t spent so much time together since she was a toddler.
 
This was our first trip to Italy, so we did extensive planning and choosing where to go and what to see. There were so many places we wanted to visit, but we had to pick only a few and save the rest for the next time. So far, we’ve been to Rome, the Vatican, Napoli, Pompeii, climbed Vesuvius, Positano and Amalfi, Florence, Siena, Venice, and now we are in Milan. It’s a little bit too much moving from place to place every couple of days, and I guess I will need some time after the trip to get back to myself.

It is an unbelievable feeling to walk in cities and see places that I have known about since school and to connect history with actual places, people, and art. Knowing that this is the same statue of David that was created by Michelangelo, this is The Last Supper painted by Da Vinci, the Medici family lived in this palace, climbing the mountain that actually destroyed Pompeii, and walking through churches that are centuries old and have withstood wars, epidemics, triumphs, etc. I envy Europeans: history is around them, and they can enjoy all of this every day and visit new places all year round. Maybe in a few centuries, there will be more historical places in America, and Europeans will envy us.

It is crazy hot all the time here. Sometimes it feels a bit easier, but it is an illusion; it is hot anyway. We constantly drink water and sweat all the time. You don’t feel hungry when it is hot, and we walk a lot everywhere, so hopefully, I will lose a couple of pounds by the time I come back home. If I look fat in my pictures, it is just because I wear baggy clothes to feel better under the sun.

Florence is our favorite place so far. You really feel like you are in a medieval city with narrow and clean streets, live music everywhere, bells ringing, clay roofs, museums and galleries, lots of history! We went for a day trip to Tuscany with stops in Siena, San Gimignano, and Pisa, and had lunch and wine tasting at a local winery. It was a long but very comfortable trip with a great guide. If you follow my adventure on Facebook, you already know that the biggest surprise in Florence was finding out that our Russian-speaking guide to the Uffizi Gallery and the Accademia Gallery was the daughter of my university professors in Tomsk! She was recommended to me by my friend, but it turned out that we have a much closer connection. By the way, her name is Irina Terpugova, and she wrote a few books about the Medici family and Florence. You can find two of them on Amazon if you are interested, check them HERE.

Venice was quite an experience with all the canals, bridges, super narrow streets, humidity, tons of people, and shops. I imagined myself working as a realtor here and taking clients to show homes on my own boat; that would be fun.

If I could skip one place from our trip, it would be Napoli. It was dirty, had lots of graffiti in the historic center, and sometimes we didn’t feel safe. We chose it as a starting point for day trips to Pompeii, Vesuvius, and the Amalfi Coast, but if I did it again, I would stay in Salerno.

Milan was the most expensive city on our trip. Everything costs twice as much as in Rome. Even the walking tour was expensive. Milan is a big city, more like New York. It doesn’t have the charm of Rome or Florence, but I guess people have different purposes for visiting different cities. I wanted to see the Duomo di Milano and The Last Supper, and we did that.

Interestingly, all that we have seen and visited so far is not the main goal of our trip. On the way back to Rome, we will make a one-day stop in Reggio Emilia for the main attraction. Stay tuned to find out what we did there.

Enjoy your summer, and stay cool out there!

Always yours, 
Irina