Marketplace - Selling a “completely destroyed” home

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Terri Bromberg lost her home of 20 years in the Los Angeles fires. Rather than rebuild, the artist and professor chose to sell and move elsewhere. Prospective buyers put in bids without being able to see the plot of land in person. In this episode, Bromberg and her real estate agent tell us about the process of selling in the Pacific Palisades since the wildfires. Plus: China announces retaliatory tariffs on some U.S. agricultural products, Americans lose confidence in their financial futures, and why Tesla’s stock price has slumped.

If you've been following along, today did not come as a surprise. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizal. It is Monday today. This one is the 10th of March. Good as always to have you along everybody. The temptation of course on a day like today is to point out that the stock market is not the economy and it's not. That said though in contrast to those days where the market swings pretty

wildly and the general vibe is yeah yeah, I don't know, markets just do that sometimes. Today, we know exactly what's going on. The chaotic trade policy coming from the White House and the refrain from everybody, from the president on down, being, yeah, there's going to be some discomfort. The rubber has finally started to meet the economic road. Major indices rolled over, nervous traders went hard into bonds,

which sent yields farther down, and now we are just waiting for the dust to settle. And as we wait, consider this. The latest survey of consumer expectations from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that more than a quarter of households are expecting their financial situations to deteriorate considerably in the coming year. A growing number expect to be spending more and they believe it's going to be increasingly hard to get credit. And fewer say they're likely to quit their jobs voluntarily this year in part because they expect unemployment to rise. Marketplace's Samantha Fields gets us going.

In economics, the consumer is not always right. Ben Harris at Brookings says, take the last couple of years. By almost any measure, the consumer is not always right. Ben Harris at Brookings says take the last couple of years. By almost any measure, the economy has been strong. Unemployment has been historically low. The stock market's growing. Economic growth has been continuing. We would have expected that people's outlook all in all would be relatively positive. Instead, consumers have been feeling pretty negative. He says there's been a real mismatch between sentiment and reality.

Middle part of 2022, for example, people were just as down on the economy as they were during the great financial crisis, even though the economy in 2022 is doing so much better. Consumers then were also saying one thing, that they were worried about the economy, and doing another, continuing to spend like they weren't worried. Just because folks say they're unhappy about the state of the economy, that doesn't mean much. Justin Wolfers at the University of Michigan says it's important to distinguish between how people feel about the economy broadly and how they feel about what's happening

in their own lives. Because what folks are expert in is not the aggregates, GDP and the unemployment rate, but their own household economies. And in the last couple of years, when people said they were worried about the economy, They were worried about the headlines of the national economy, but not their own household economies. But this latest survey from the New York Fed shows people are increasingly concerned about their own financial futures.

Vicki Bogan at Duke University says that is worth watching, because if people are increasingly concerned about their own financial futures. Vicki Bogan at Duke University says that is worth watching because if people are worried about their own bills and job prospects... They're less likely to spend. They're more likely to save money. When they're reducing their spending and saving more, what is it going to do? It's going to reduce the demand for goods and services. When consumers reduce their demand for goods and services, business sales are going to decline. Which is why when consumer expectations fall,

there's always the possibility an economic slowdown could be coming. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. On Wall Street today, stocks bad, bonds good. We'll have the details when we do the numbers. As surely as the sun rises in the East, tariffs bring retaliatory tariffs. Mexico's talking about it. Canada's doing it. China, too, specifically with extra levies on U.S. agricultural exports.

Chinese buyers are going to pay 15% more for U.S. chicken, wheat, and corn, 10% on soybeans, pork, and fruit. Marketplace's Kimberly Adams explains just how the trade war this time is going to play out for American farmers. For agricultural products already on their way from the U.S. to China, nothing changes. Joe Shealy is with the U.S. Meat Export Federation. Our understanding is that the product that's already en route, that the additional duty would not be in effect for that product, that it would clear under the duties that were already in place.

But Shealy says there is an immediate impact on the psychology of the market. Anytime you inject additional costs or additional uncertainty, certainly suppliers have to look at how much China will remain part of their sales, their export portfolio. If you're a U.S. producer of, say, corn or chickens, and a buyer in China has already agreed to buy a certain amount from you at a certain price, what happens now depends on exactly what kind of deal you made. J.O.N. teaches business in international economy at the Harvard Business School. A lot of these contracts have clauses that are about unexpected trade policy changes. That will determine whether the buyer or the seller is paying the unexpected tariff or

how they're sharing that. Is it 50-50 or 70-30? Longer term, tariffs are likely to mean fewer exports, says Wen, and for some products, that will mean more supply on the domestic market. U.S. buyers of these goods are going to face relatively cheaper goods. But the problem is that U.S. demand is nowhere near large enough to compensate for the decline in Chinese demand. Layer these tariffs on top of all the others already affecting the ag industry, Wen says,

and the takeaway is that farmers will just make less money. In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams for Marketplace. Selling a home can be complicated. Contingencies, comps, escrow, closing costs, there's a whole vocabulary that buyers and sellers have to navigate to finally reach a deal. And that is in the best of times. What's it like, do you suppose, to sell a house that doesn't exist anymore? Thousands of homeowners here in Los Angeles, affected by the Palisades and the Eaton fires,

are deciding whether to rebuild or just sell and start new someplace else. A couple of weeks ago, the very first listed residential property destroyed by the Palisades fire was sold, as Marketplace's Matt Levin reports. There's not much left of 17126 Avenida de la Herradura in the Pacific Palisades Highlands neighborhood. So you can see the EPA came through.

That's what this complete check mark is. Real to Richard Schulman is showing me the remnants of the 2,500 square foot ranch style house that used to be here. A charred file cabinet a few feet from where the front door probably was. Some cans of paint around what was likely the front yard. But at the end of the street, there's still an ocean view.

So this is the first publicly listed and closed property in the Palisades. This closed for 1.2 million. Shulman listed the property on January 15th, barely a week after the fire started. It closed in late February. If you're wondering how in the world a lot with 9900 square feet of rubble fetches over a million dollars, it's the

Palisades. This is one of the most beautiful places to live in the world. You're in a totally secluded part of LA but you're still in the in the city. Before the fires, the home would have sold for something like two and a half million. Schulman listed the property for 9999,000, but it's not like there were other burned-down comps he could find on Zillow. This hasn't been done before here, so we're trying to guess along the way and try to get the best answer. He settled on a price he thought would drum up interest.

Schulman wasn't sure how much demand there would actually be after the fires. Terry Bromberg, the seller, also had her doubts. I couldn't imagine anybody wanting to buy a completely destroyed, burned up property. Bromberg is 69. She lived at the Aridura property for the past 20 years, the last few with her daughter, Rosie Galanis and son-in-law, Kenneth.

While Bromberg was at work when the fires came, Rosie and Kenneth had to wait hours to make their escape. Abandoned cars were blocking the only exit route. At first, Bromberg wanted to rebuild. Rosie talked her out of it. Rosie Galanis When she brought that up, I just broke down and I was like, like, we go back and rebuild for what? Like, for this to happen again? That 999,000 listing price meant Bromberg would likely be selling the home for less than the 1.5 million she and her late husband paid for it 20 years ago.

Even with insurance, Bromberg would be taking a financial hit. Our decision was mostly an emotional one. We don't want to live back there again. We want to relocate. When Realtor Richard Schulman posted 17126 Eredura on the MLS with pictures of the house before the fires, he knew the pool of buyers would be mostly wealthy developers and investors offering all cash. We had over 60 inquiries.

We had a stack of offers. I think we had six offers over the list price. Because access to the Palisades was restricted, all those offers came without buyers seeing the actual property. Joe Salamani is the realtor who represented the winning bidder, who didn't want to talk.

We did a lot of Google, you know, with Google Street View, and we did a lot of other stuff. Investors like the one Soleimani represents are betting that in five to seven years, demand to live in the Palisades will be stronger than before the fires. They think new fire-hardened homes and infrastructure will convince potential buyers it's less risky now. Because this risk was there before, you know, and if you even go back to other places that

in the past they had fire or what have you, after a while people start going back. So tell me what used to be here. This was a really beautiful townhome complex called the Woodies. Realtor Richard Schulman is showing one of his three other Palisades listings, a townhome that was part of a larger complex completely destroyed by the fires. It looks like someone dropped a bomb on it. The asking price? 750 grand. It's just a dream. You know, it's a dream of what this will be in the future. You know, what you're buying is this view of this hillside here and the trees here and how this is going to look when it's done.

Shulman says he's already got plenty of interested buyers. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. Stock of the day today among the many, many that wound up deep in the red is ticker symbol TSLA. Shares off 15% on the day, 36% the past month for Tesla. Obviously what investors are willing to pay for a share of any given company is an amalgam of hard business decisions and how any given investor feels about that company, and in this case about its CEO and said CEO's side hustle. With the observation that Tesla shares have now lost all their gains since the presidential election, just to pick a random point in time, marketplace's Kelly Wells has more.

This isn't an EV market problem. It's an Elon Musk problem, says climate economist Gernot Wagner at Columbia Business School. What's happening here, you can probably explain through the politics and the optics. Wagner says Tesla stock exploded after the November election because of Elon Musk's proximity to newly elected President Trump. That proximity has not turned into Tesla sales, at least not yet, and maybe never. So EV drivers are buying other cars. And equity strategist Seth Goldstein at Morningstar Research says that's not just because of politics.

We're seeing increased competition. Other automakers are now offering comparable long range vehicles at a similar price point. On top of all that, the Trump administration has brought with it some bad news for a huge piece of Tesla's business. Gil Tal is the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis. Tesla have one less very serious revenue source, which is selling credits. Tal says Tesla, one of the cleanest automakers, sells carbon credits to its more

pollutive colleagues so they can meet state regulations and those imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA regulation is now in question. By canceling the EPA regulation and so on, they're just directly canceling this market. That would be bad news when credits make up more than a third of Tesla's business. Moreover, Tesla sales are cratering in Europe and there have been protests against the company here and abroad because of Elon Musk's political involvements. Jessica Caldwell with Edmunds says this summer is going to be a major test for Tesla's future.

People that buy stock in Tesla, it's almost like a dream as to what is going to happen. Is Tesla going to dominate the robotaxi field? Because we know who does that is going to be an extremely profitable company. Whether Tesla dominates the field will depend on whether it makes good on its promise to have autonomous vehicles on the road starting in June. I'm Kayley Wells for Marketplace. Coming up. But it's been a very tough ordeal to discuss, you know, price changes. Yeah, those tariff conversations can be awkward.

First though, let's do the numbers. Yeah, nobody's surprised, right, that it's the Wah-Wahs today. Dow Industrial is off 890 points, 210%, 41,911. The NASDAQ subtracted 727 points, 4% even. 17,468. The S&P 500 down 155, 2.7%, 56.14 there. The proximate causes, you know, right? Okay. S&P is about to do another one of its quarterly rebalancings. It announced it's replacing four companies in the index and that is

usually good news for the newcomer shares, but today? Forget about it. Losses for newbies DoorDash, which gave up a tenth percent. TKO Holdings Group, actually it's TKO Group Holdings, that's the parent of WWE and UFC, get it, TKO. Took a 1.1% hit, retailer Williams Sonoma, which fell 1.7%, the one new addition that did gain energy, of course, natural gas producer Expand Energy, which inflated three and two tenths percent bonds rose yield on the tenure Tino down

4.22 percent you're listening to marketplace If you want to be savvy about the economy, the Marketplace newsletter is just what you need. Every Friday, you'll get explainers and analysis that make sense of everything from the moving markets to grocery prices. No jargon, no hype, just smart takes delivered to your inbox. Sign up today at Marketplace.org slash subscribe. This is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Rizdahl.

A reminder by way of setting up this next piece that what Elon Musk and his operatives call government savings, often even usually aren't. Governments aren't businesses and can't be run the same way. Case in point, healthcare care and government funding. Hospitals and clinics in rural parts of the country rely heavily on federal funding to keep the doors open and services available. And the cuts that have been made so far are having ripple effects far from Washington.

Oregon Public Broadcasting's Lillian Karabick has more. Last fall, Bobby Nicolaitis was on the once-a-week bus that travels through the Oregon outback. This bus, we are like family. It's a great group of people. Nicolaitis was making the 130-mile trip to get a blood draw at a clinic. On average, rural patients travel twice as far to health care. Bus driver Debbie Warren said it's part of rural living. Doctor's appointments are a long ways away, but there's peace and quiet. This bus service is federally funded, and it's just one of many health services that

could disappear with federal cuts. Rural community health clinics are also feeling threatened. Take Fossil, Oregon, a community in the high desert that's so remote the Census Bureau doesn't even categorize it as rural, but rather frontier. One person per acre. That's Teresa Hunt, the CEO of Asher Health, the only provider in this area, serving 1,200 patients a year and... Without the federal money for being a federally qualified health center, there's just, there's no way that we'll be here.

Well, it would be devastating for the people that live here. And if the clinic loses funding and closes, patients will have to drive more than three hours over winding mountain passes to get care. Many other rural clinics face similar challenges. We're designed to take care of the underserved. We're the primary care safety net for a community. care of the underserved were the primary care safety net for our community. That's Casey Bolton, CEO of Aviva Health, a community health clinic in rural Douglas County, Oregon. It serves about 18,000 patients a year with the help of federal funding. Last month, Bolton started to worry he might not have access to federal grants that are

already promised to the clinic. So he tried to withdraw the remaining balance. Apparently he wasn't the only one. I think it was kind of like a run on the bank. Like everyone's trying to draw off the system and overloaded the system. The federal portal from the Health Resources and Services Administration crashed. We're all thinking the same thing. Let's get ahead of this.

He was eventually able to withdraw the $3 million of grant funding, but that money will only get the clinic so far. Meanwhile, Bolton is even more worried about possible cuts to Medicaid. It's kind of like the ER for outpatient care. We won't turn folks away based on their ability to pay. Nationally, about 47% of children in rural areas use Medicaid. It's even more for Aviva Health. That's my big worry, actually.

The House passed a budget resolution that calls for $880 billion in health services cuts. These are facilities that literally have zero days cash on hand to operate. That's Carrie Cochran-McLean with the National Rural Health Association. She says rural health care providers are left scrambling trying to even get federal grant coordinators on the phone. Cochran-McLean says cuts to federally staffed clinics could shift pressure elsewhere. And in rural areas, community health clinics will have to pick up the slack.

Those costs have to go somewhere and frequently they end up being shifted to other parts of our health care system, which then in turn kind of raises costs across the board, which is kind of a never-ending spiral. And she says for patients in rural areas, these federal funding uncertainties threaten to spiral clinics out of existence altogether. In Oregon, I'm Lillian Carey-Bake for Marketplace. The White Hot Center of uncertainty in this economy right now is, of course, trade policy. On again, off again, on again, off again. Tariff pronouncements will do that to you. Also, and not something we've really talked about in this go-round of Trump tariffs,

exemptions, carve-outs for certain products, subject to the whim of the Commerce Department. Among those dealing with that uncertainty is Sam DeSye. He's vice president of RM Metals out of South Plainfield, New Jersey. We first talked to him back in 2018, when his company was deep in the heart of the steel and aluminum tariffs back then,

and filing for exemptions. We feared it was time to check back in. You know, I'm not in the prediction business. I feel like I'm making guesses all day. Not the way it should be. It should be the metal comes in, they give it to the consumer to use, and that's what it should be, right? Since this duty was announced about a month ago, aluminum pricing has gone up about 20%. Steel prices have gone up about 15%, just based on some remarks over the last four weeks.

You know, I don't know if they have changed the prices yet in the retail stores, but I can guarantee you they'll change them in the next couple of weeks. I have a product coming in right now and I sold it to a customer and now I'm going to see them on Thursday, but I'm going to figure out how to get them to increase the price. Right now I'm at a loss of about 15%. The customers, majority of them are willing to work with us because they understand it's not my fault.

But it's been a very tough ordeal to discuss price changes against whatever the contract is for. We've been busy because a lot of people are trying to build up their inventory levels of whatever steel they carry. So that's been a positive thing. We see that lasting to a point once their inventories are full, they're going to see what happens with these new duties coming about. I'll say one thing is true. Everybody expects prices to go up. The

manufacturing is going to increase, but if the raw material keeps coming at a higher price, it's just hard to sustain the same cost structure. And right now, our margins are very low. It's between 1% to 4%, and that's it. Just because of all the uncertainty out there, and last year we had all these shipping costs that went up. This year we have these tariffs that are changing. So yeah, our margins have been razor thin. Our company's been in business for almost 40 years now.

In the past, things were pretty much flat. Prices changed up and down. But in the last five years, I would say that the drastic changes that have happened have made business very difficult and very stressful. You never know what's going to happen the next day. But this is what I do. I'm in the steel industry and I have another 20 years, hopefully, in the business. So I just keep going at it.

Sam Decide going at it with RM Metals in South Plainfield, New Jersey. This final note on the way out today in which the subject is the price elasticity of demand. Credit to Axios for this one, which spotted research from the University of California Berkeley that shows it took a 228% increase in the price of eggs to reduce the number of eggs bought by just 4%. Darn, really, any good substitutes and even six or $8 a dozen is not a huge part of people's food budgets. Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Nicholas Guillaume, Maria Hollenhorst, Iru

Ekbanobi, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry and Sophia Terenzio. I'm Kai Rizdal, we will see you tomorrow everybody. This is APM. Consumer confidence had its sharpest monthly decline since 2021, which means we're all in our fields about money. And while uncertainty is the only constant these days, it's also a great reason to get serious about understanding personal finance. I'm Janelia Espinall, host of Financially Inclined,

a podcast from Marketplace that makes learning about money simple. Learn about practical skills like negotiating job offers, dealing with money and friendship and love, entrepreneurship, and student loans. Get serious about your money and build a life you've always dreamed of. Listen to Financially Inclined wherever you get your podcasts.