Solano Real Estate Scene: Jim Porter
Article By: Jim Porter – August 1, 2025
For the fifth straight time, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell kept rates unchanged this week.
Pressure from real estate associations and lobbyists across America didn’t sway Powell. To say that the number-one real estate salesperson in the White House is slightly perturbed would be an understatement. If the Fed cut the rates by a quarter of a percent, mortgage rates might have gone up or down by a quarter.
This would have had a slightly positive psychological boost for the market but almost no impact on the affordability problem in California. Inventory is up in Northern California and most house prices are down from this time last year.
To me, it looks like the top of the market was between St. Patrick’s Day and Easter 2022 and since then market values might be 5% to 6% lower in Solano and Yolo County.
Home values rose by something like 35% from Easter 2019 to Easter 2022, and so a 5% or 6% downturn is certainly no crash, but a sign that rates or prices need to come down for home sales to get back to what they were pre-pandemic. From Easter 1987 to Easter 1990, house prices in Solano and Yolo counties rose by 45%.
I moved to Vacaville around Thanksgiving 1988 with four little kids and two cats and rented for two years till we bought a 2,076-square-foot 3-year-old, two-story house in the Meadowlands for $210,000 with $10,000 total out of my pocket in September 1990.
In 1997 we listed the house for sale for $180,000 to move up to a slightly larger home on a cul-de-sac. After a month of no offers, we took the house off the market, and I remember saying, “geez, I guess we missed out on the American Dream!” I was joking of course, but that is what happened in Solano County between 1990 and 1997. It was not a crash, but it was basically home prices dropping 2% per year for seven years in a row.
Now, keep in mind, I did pay top dollar for my house in September 1990, along with a seller incentive credit of $6,000 for closing costs, but I am sure y’all get the point; values can go down for periods of time.
I sold our family home to my daughter four years ago for three times my original price. An owner-occupied home is not an investment because unless you have kids and a spouse that pays rent, your home is a monthly expense and not an income producing asset. It didn’t matter what the value was in 1997 because by then, my house payment was only 20% of my monthly income because I refinanced in 1993 during a yearlong REFI-MANIA.
By 1997, the mortgage payment, which was scary as heck in 1990 at 10% interest, was nothing in comparison to feeding and entertaining four kids, a spouse, a dog and three cats, not to mention car, life, health and fire insurance.
If you buy a house today for $765,000 and 25 years from now you sell it for $1.5 million, the only way it can payoff as an investment is if you buy an even nicer bigger one-story house in Texas or Florida for $750,000 and live out your days in humid hot weather.
Jim Porter, NMLS No. 276412, is the branch manager of Solano Mortgage, NMLS No. 1515497, a division of American Pacific Mortgage Corporation, NMLS No. 1850, licensed in California by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the CRMLA / Equal Housing Opportunity. Jim can be reached at 707-449-4777.
