Inspired by family, Costa Mesa Realtor re-creates citywide holiday contest from 1960s

Inspired by family, Costa Mesa Realtor re-creates citywide holiday contest from 1960s

by Home Decoration

Kendra Fisher was clearing out the garage of her grandparents’ Costa Mesa home during the pandemic, when she discovered a box of trophies and Daily Pilot newspaper clippings that shed light on a lesser-known part of her family history.

From 1959 well into the ’60s, John and Rosalie O’Brien were recognized as the winners of a citywide holiday decoration competition, even nabbing top prizes in an “Inter-city Yule Contest,” for large-scale displays that would have families lining up around the block just to get a glimpse.

“My grandpa was super creative — they built a train set and a huge rocket — people knew he was going to do something special, so they looked forward to going to their house,” Fisher said.

The O'Brien family at their Molokai Place home in Costa Mesa, known for larger-than-life holiday displays in the 1960s.

The O’Brien family at their Molokai Place home in Costa Mesa, known for larger-than-life holiday displays in the 1960s.

(Courtesy of Kendra Fisher)

“I knew about it vaguely but didn’t realize the extent of it until I was cleaning out their garage,” she continued. “Then, I was like, wait, why don’t we do that now?”

A new member of the Torelli Realty team, Fisher decided to try and resurrect the contest by creating a brand-new holiday decoration competition in Costa Mesa.

“I feel like there’s this sense of tradition behind it, and tradition is so important in cities, neighborhoods and towns,” she said of her inspiration. “It’s an easy way to bring the community together.”

To help pull off the feat, Fisher enlisted the help from local business owners, including Ally Garvin, who owns Neat Coffee on Pomona Avenue. Together, the pair have been passing out fliers to let people know about the contest.

Kendra Fisher, right, with grandparents John and Rosalie O'Brien, of Costa Mesa.

Kendra Fisher, right, with grandparents John and Rosalie O’Brien, of Costa Mesa. Fisher was inspired to host a holiday home decoration contest after finding old trophies in the O’Brien’s garage from a similar competition in the ’60s.

(Courtesy of Kendra Fisher)

Families and individuals, or even entire streets, can enter the competition. But to cast an even wider net, judges have committed to driving through the streets of Costa Mesa on Friday, Dec. 10, in search of stunning holiday displays.

Individual trophies for Best Theme, Most Creative and Best Overall displays will be handed out Dec. 11 in a special ceremony and movie night with hot cocoa and refreshments at Neat Coffee. Winners will be announced at 6 p.m., and the movie will start at 7 p.m.

Garvin said she hopes to help Fisher create a new way for people from the local community to come together and celebrate.

“It sounded like a real fun to create a new tradition and make it feel a little bit more like a hometown,” she added. “A lot of people already decorate their homes for Christmas, and it brings so much joy to the neighborhood.”

In an interview Thursday, John O’Brien said he had no doubts his granddaughter would be successful in her attempt to resurrect, in some manner, the competitions of yore.

“She’s unique — she goes full speed ahead in everything she does,” he said.

A Daily Pilot clipping shows the O'Brien family of Costa Mesa receiving an award in an Inter-City Yule Contest in 1961.

A Daily Pilot clipping shows the O’Brien family of Costa Mesa receiving an award in an Inter-City Yule Contest in 1961 for the best holiday home display.

(Courtesy of Kendra Fisher)

He recalled the very first year he and his wife entered the citywide contest in 1959, having moved to a house on Costa Mesa’s Molokai Place from Glendale. He worked on the yard while Rosalie decorated the door and sewed clothes for the elves in the display.

Little did they know that decision would snowball into local fame.

“We saw an advertisement for it in the paper, so we got going on it and had really good success with it for a few years. It became like a tradition to enter,” O’Brien said, recalling the time he built a huge train in the yard.

“It had an engine and an open boxcar that had presents and toys coming out of it,” he said. “The locomotive had a smokestack with steam coming out of it and wheels turning. It brought joy to a lot of people.”

As for Costa Mesa homeowner Alli Talley, she, her husband, Bobby, and 1-year-old son, Jude, are all in. They’ve decorated their 19th Street home with lights and inflatables — all the things as a young married couple they sweared they’d never do.

“We’re just embracing it all. It’s so fun,” she said Friday. “I don’t think we’ll win any awards with what we have, but we’ll totally be in it.”

Those interested in entering the holiday decoration competition can call Fisher directly at (714) 606-3376 or email Kendra@torellirealty.com. Participants can also sign up at Neat Coffee, 1922 Pomona Ave., in Costa Mesa, from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Bobby Talley, and his son, Jude, with an inflatable Frosty the Snowman at their house in Costa Mesa on Friday, Dec. 3.

Bobby Talley, and his son, Jude, with an inflatable Frosty the Snowman at their house in Costa Mesa on Friday, Dec. 3.

(Scott Smeltzer / Staff Photographer)

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Gardening principles | Home & Garden

Gardening principles | Home & Garden

by Home And Garden

Praying for rain!

Rosemary is a Mediterranean native that grows as a shrub in southern California, Texas and other areas with dry summers and mild winters. Its hardiness in other regions is iffy without protection, because cold, dry winds will quickly dehydrate the leaves. To be safe, grow some of your Rosemary in pots and bring it into a cool room during frigid weather. In any climate, Rosemary’s strong, resinous scent and delicious flavor are perfect with grilled fish, meats, and Mediterranean-style vegetables.

Light, well-drained soil is essential for Rosemary, especially for container-grown plants. Water only as often as needed to keep the soil slightly moist.

Plants need full sun in summer, and it is best to keep them indoors in winter near a sunny south or west-facing window.

Rosemary is ideal for simple topiary shapes. To make a tree-shaped standard, choose a plant with a straight central stalk. Prune off the lowest branches a few at a time and shorten branches near the top to keep them from becoming too heavy. When the plant reaches the height you want, trim the head into a bushy ball.

To store Rosemary for cooking, strip leaves from branches and freeze in a freezer bag. Or dry and store in airtight jars.

If you toss Rosemary sprigs on the coals or grate of the barbeque during the last 10 minutes of cooking it will impart a wonderful flavor and aroma to lamb, veal, or chicken. Rosemary branches can be used as skewers for kebabs or tied together to make an aromatic brush for applying sauce to the meat as it cooks.

Sage is a hardy yet often short-lived perennial. Garden sage is woody, with soft gray-green foliage. The most familiar of the culinary sages is used primarily as a sausage and stuffing ingredient, but it also adds great flavor to breads, cheese, poultry, and vegetable dishes.

Some sage varieties are variegated, which makes them ideal for large containers planted with an assortment of hers. ‘Aurea’ has gold and green leaves, ‘Purpurea’ has purple foliage and ‘Icterina’ has yellowish foliage blotched with green. All grow to 2 ½ feet tall.

Catalogs often describe sages as short-lived perennials or half-hardy annuals. In fact, some annual sages may survive mild winters, while extreme cold or hot, humid conditions may kill some perennials. When you try a new sage, mulch over its roots in late fall, then wait and see if it survives until spring.

Garden sage loves sun and well-drained soil. Water young plants regularly until they become established. After a few weeks, they can tolerate drier conditions.

Pinch individual leaves as you need them in the kitchen. In addition to chopping them into dishes, lay whole sage leaves over roasted meats or reads. To use sage in salads, lightly fry whole leaves in a little olive oil, drain on paper towels and crumble the crisp leaves over the finished salad.

Sage tea is good medicine and has a history as an antiseptic mouthwash and digestive aid. To dry sage for wreaths or potpourri, cut flowering stems about eight inches long, secure a bunch with a rubber band and hang it upside down in a cool place to dry.

Metaverse real estate is now being sold for cryptocurrency

Metaverse real estate is now being sold for cryptocurrency

by Real Estate News

The metaverse is getting hotter. Not hot, like a delicious meal or a Finnish sauna. This mostly fictional, virtual world is getting hot like a real estate market. Because lately, it is one.

If you have enough money and courage, you can now buy up digital tracts of land in the metaverse. Of course, there isn’t just one metaverse. Much like a website is part of the larger World Wide Web, there are countless companies, including Meta (née Facebook), building their own virtual realms where they hope people will soon gather as their digital avatars to play games, buy things, and interact with ads. The emerging real estate market for these three-dimensional spaces in virtual reality — including everything from virtual concert venues and shopping malls to houses and monuments — anticipates a future in which digital property owners can work with brands that want a presence in the various iterations of the metaverse.

One of the first companies to get into the digital real estate business is Metaverse Group, which operates a virtual world called Decentraland. Last week, Metaverse Group’s parent company, Token.com, announced that a “116 parcel estate in the heart of the Fashion Street district within Decentraland” sold for the equivalent of about $2.5 million — a record! The new owner of this estate near Fashion Street could presumably profit if Louis Vuitton wants to open a store there: They could effectively be the brand’s virtual landlord.

This Decentraland deal did not, strictly speaking, involve real money. The digital estate sold for 618,000 mana, a type of cryptocurrency used in Decentraland. When you say it out loud, “mana” actually sounds a lot like the first couple syllables of “Monopoly money.”

“Imagine if you came to New York when it was farmland, and you had the option to get a block of SoHo,” Metaverse Group co-founder Michael Gord recently told the New York Times. “If someone wants to buy a block of real estate in SoHo today, it’s priceless, it’s not on the market. That same experience is going to happen in the metaverse.”

All this probably sounds a bit mind-bending. Who would pay real money for the rights to a piece of a virtual world that doesn’t entirely exist yet and will never exist in the real world? Well, if you’ve been paying any attention to the NFT craze or the cryptocurrency boom in recent years, plenty of people are pouring millions of dollars into digital assets with the expectation that others might be willing to pay even more for them in the future. This metaverse land grab is happening under a similar assumption. What makes the metaverse real estate boom all the more enticing, though, is the idea that once you own a piece of digital land, you might be able to make money by leasing it out or selling ads.

Users can wander around Decentraland to find stores and activities. They can also buy land and build their own.

Users can wander around Decentraland to find stores and activities. They can also buy land and build.
Decentraland

In its most basic form, the metaverse concept is not that different from the early days of the web. Starting in the late ‘80s, a common programming language for the web (HTML) enabled people to build websites that hosted content or offered services to users, and eventually, when websites attracted enough of these users, the site owners could sell ads or charge fees to make money off it all. The big difference, of course, is that the web was designed to be free while the metaverse seems destined to be owned by big companies. Just before announcing that Facebook would change its name to Meta, for example, Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the company expected to spend more than $10 billion on its metaverse projects this year alone. It’s hard for anyone to compete with that kind of cash.

Still, plenty of companies are trying. In addition to Decentraland, you can now buy digital land in metaverses with names like Somnium Space, the Sandbox, and Upland. One company called Spotselfie, which currently operates an augmented reality app, will soon let you buy virtual real estate that’s associated with GPS coordinates in the real world through a new feature called Spotland. The idea is that by using tokens issued by Spotselfie — these are effectively cryptocurrency that’s specific to this metaverse, much like the mana used in Decentraland — you’ll buy the rights to a radius around a GPS coordinate, and then if Spotselfie decides to sell ads at that location, you get a cut. The big difference here is that Spotselfie’s metaverse is designed for augmented reality, not virtual reality. To see the metaverse, you just point your phone’s camera at the real-world location, and the Spotland software overlays a digital world onto your screen, ads and all.

This could be the future. If and when mixed reality glasses become a thing — some analysts think that Apple will release a version of them in 2022 — we could be walking around looking at an overwhelming collision of real and digital worlds. And even though a lot of companies are scrambling to stake their claim, it’s unclear exactly who will own that space. Spotselfie co-founder Ray Shingler, for one, hopes that by offering users the option to buy now, his technology will bring some of that democratic, web 1.0 spirit to the nascent metaverse.

“I’m trying to figure out a way,” Shingler told Recode, “where the users are actually getting something out of being in the app, and they actually control the metaverse. Because if you don’t control it soon enough, it’ll be lost to Facebook, or be lost to the Gemini Brothers.” (He’s referring to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who recently received $400 million in funding for metaverse projects.)

Then again, Mark Zuckerberg might be wrong about the metaverse. It’s entirely possible that not that many people actually want to wander around a virtual world, meeting other avatars and buying NFTs with cryptocurrency. Maybe we don’t want to inhabit some boundless digital space filled with ads and designed to track our behavior in ways we haven’t imagined yet.

But if indeed the metaverse is the 21st century’s answer to the web, you can buy your piece of it now. Hurry up, though. The market is virtually hot.

This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Sarasota’s Luxury Real Estate Market Is Booming

Sarasota’s Luxury Real Estate Market Is Booming

by Luxury Real Estate
Large, waterfront luxury home



It might be a chapter from the book of the obvious: Sarasota, with its luxury cars and mansions, has for years been known for its affluence. This year, however, that affluence has exploded and with it the demand for luxury housing.

The annual “A Look at Wealth 2021: Real Estate’s New Power Players” report, recently published by international real estate company Coldwell Banker, points to new standouts in the market and significant growth in real estate wealth from 2019 to 2021. Led largely by baby boomers, (ages 57 to 75), Sarasota was called out as one of its top three “Power Player” markets.

Due in part to the pandemic, affluent boomers gravitated toward locations that offer a balance of outdoor activities, luxury property inventory, a strong community of retirees and low tax burden. Sarasota, with its year-round sunny weather, thriving arts scene and relaxed, beachy charm, fit the bill. 

As affluent Gen Xers battle it out for large, single-family homes in the suburbs, many boomers have cashed in on the equity of their primary residence and relocated to rural spaces and resort towns.   

Nationally, the $1-million to $5-million range saw the highest number of properties sold. Today, nearly three times as many individuals with a $5-million-plus net worth own in that $1-million to $5-million real estate bucket, compared to 2019 – a 180 percent increase in luxury property ownership.

Sarasota numbers tell a similar story. More than half–60.6 percent–of properties in that price range are owned by baby boomers.

“In the last 12 months, 112 houses with more than a $5-million price tag in Sarasota and Manatee sold. The year before that it was just 23,” says longtime real estate agent Roger Pettingell of Coldwell Banker Realty in Sarasota, who specializes in luxury home sales.

In Sarasota County, houses in the $1-million to $5-million range saw a big uptick in demand: 2019 saw 466 properties in that price range sell, in 2020 that number grew to 735 and year to date, there have been 1,107. And those increases are expected to stay their course. It’s projected that by the end of 2021 there will be a 171 percent increase of sales in the $1 million-$5 million range (based on the rate of sales that occurred between January and August 2021). 

The report also highlights trends in the luxury market, among them that of skipping out on the downsizing phase as a result of the pandemic.

Pettingell says the “less is more” movement has faded out. “Bigger and better” is the preference among his affluent clients. 

“The memory of a pandemic is fresh, and people want office space, workout rooms and media rooms. They want home entertainment spaces and as much outdoor space as they can afford,” he says. “They also want room to host family. Many kids stayed with parents while colleges were shut down, and they want to be able to do that again. They’re also adding anything that makes the home your castle again, so items like resort-style pools are huge.”

Other than the weather and the low tax burden,” people are looking for family health and safety,” Pettingell says. 

That’s why gated communities are popular and all the latest security monitor systems are a must. Many of his clients also want to be near a hospital and doctors’ offices in case of emergency.

There are more expensive homes to choose from these days, but that wouldn’t exist without demand. “We didn’t have that inventory before. Within the last five years, we just started having the product people want, like the Ritz Residences and The Epoch,” he says. “That’s why we’re seeing a lot of high-end building going up.”

Other top “Power Player” luxury real estate markets in the report include South Carolina Lowcountry; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. As the pandemic subsides, bigger cities like Chicago and San Francisco are also roaring back to life.

Why Rental Property Investing Is a Top Passive Income Strategy

Why Rental Property Investing Is a Top Passive Income Strategy

by Investment Property

Investing in real estate is one of the most powerful wealth-building tools. The great thing about it is that you do not have to be a millionaire to tap into the industry; any ordinary Joe or Jane can become a real estate investor. One of the simplest ways to get into the market is to hop into the versatile world of rental real estate. 

If you are interested in becoming one of the more than 10 million Americans who own rental real estate, there are many investing options and strategies that you can explore. Let’s take a look at how you can start your journey, as well as why this strategy can be a winner. 

Rent out part of your home

When it comes to real estate, way more than charity begins at home. Your next stream of income can start there too. You can use your residential property, i.e., your home, to increase your cash flow without much effort by renting out a room or your basement or turning your garage into an investment gold mine.

According to Census data cited by Pew Research, 36{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9} of the nation’s 122.8 million households were renters in 2019, so turning your home into an investment property will give you a large stream of consumers to tap into and you won’t have to go further than your front door to start generating an income from rental real estate. You will also do not have to quit your day job! This is why rental real estate is so great — any homeowner can turn their home into a wealth-building machine.

Two people standing in front of a house.

Image source: Getty Images.

Purchase a rental property

If living with your tenants is not your cup of tea, purchasing an investment property may be the next best thing. Whether it is a commercial property, an apartment building, or a house, purchasing an investment property is a great strategy to use. Much like when renting out a portion of your home, when it comes to purchasing an investment property, you can start as small or large as you like. In fact, 72.5{d4d1dfc03659490934346f23c59135b993ced5bc8cc26281e129c43fe68630c9} of single-unit rental properties are owned by individuals, according to that same Pew Research report. 

As a property owner, you can even decide whether to accept tenants who receive HUD’s housing choice voucher, thereby guaranteeing a portion of your income every month, or accept tenants who will pay via cash or check.

Whatever you decide, when it comes to investment property ownership, you do not have to go big or go home — you simply need to acquire a property that matches your budget and risk tolerance.

Hop into the short-term rental market

If leasing to long-term tenants is not for you, working with short-term rental platforms like Airbnb or VRBO, which is owned by Expedia, may just be the best option.

Investing in a short-term rental provides a great deal of freedom and flexibility. Investors can rent out their property and produce an income whenever they want, choosing to rent out the property every weekend or year round.

Whatever decision you make, investing in a short-term rental offers peace of mind because property owners have the opportunity to collect payments directly from the online platform, saving the property owner from the hassle of collecting rent. 

A great tool for tax savings

Investing in rental real estate can also be a winner when it comes to tax savings. There are several sections of the tax code that favor real estate investors that may help them retain their rental income.

Rental real estate investors may be able to take advantage of the following strategies:

  • Tax deductions for mortgage interest paid.
  • Tax deductions for repairs made.
  • Ability to amortize certain expenses.
  • Depreciation of rental property.
  • Deduction for qualified business income.
  • Investing in a “qualified opportunity fund.”
  • Investing in a “qualified opportunity zone.”

Check with a tax professional to see what strategies you can use.

Generate passive income

One of the greatest benefits of investing in rental real estate can be the generation of passive income. This allows investors to earn an income that does not involve the exchange of time and money, which ultimately leads to more free time.

Having free time is the real pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If you are strategic enough, you may be able to retire early and have more time to create the life of your dreams.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the “official” recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. We’re motley! Questioning an investing thesis — even one of our own — helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

Home goods, decoration gift ideas from Shop Localish Deals and Steals Holiday Special 2021

Home goods, decoration gift ideas from Shop Localish Deals and Steals Holiday Special 2021

by Home Decoration
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