Ruth Mills

I just posted an article on my san diego real estate blog on my website. Looks like home sales in San Diego are on the rise, jumping more than ten percent compared to the same month in 2008. However, the median price dropped fourteen percent, in the same comparison. The article is at this location.

After making two rounds of cutbacks in May and last week, the San Diego Union-Tribune in reporting an expected profit of $5 million. Platinum Equity acquired the paper from the Copley family in May, and immediately slashed 192 jobs, laying off 112 more last week. The company says it’s finished making cuts.

The paper’s profit has dropped significantly in the last few years from $68 million in 2006 down to $38 million in 2007, then down to only a million dollars last year. Before Platinum took over, the paper was on a pace to lose $7 million. The newspaper’s revenue has tumbled almost 55% since 2006.

La Jolla real estate ---- Del Mar Real Estate

PICO Suffers Second Quarter Loss Pico Holdings (Nasdaq: PICO), a company based in La Jolla, reported a second quarter loss, in spite of an expanding portfolio. The company is in the business of acquiring, operating, or financing companies with low value to raise the companies’ net worth. Currently, the company has in its control insurance, water, and real estate companies, and they also have some interests in small businesses.

Pico’s reported second quarter losses came to nearly $2.5 million, about 12 cents a share for stockholders, compared with last year’s second quarter gain of just over $28 million, about $1.50 a share for stockholders.

The Coronado Bridge, that leads us, living in San Diego, effortlessly to Coronado, turns forty years old today. The Coronado Bridge was opened in 1969 and has been paid in full by San Diego residents and tourists.

The $1.00 toll was collected until 2002, even though it was paid off by 1986. The reason for the extended toll was due to those who had purchased their piece of Coronado real estate and their fear that by discontinuing the toll, traffic to the island would substantially increase. Turns out they were right. Traffic has increased by approximately twenty percent since 2002.

The cost of the bridge was nearly fifty million dollars in state construction bonds and is able to withstand around thirty thousand cars on a daily basis. However, nowadays there are around eighty thousand cars traveling across the bridge daily.

Happy Birthday Coronado Bridge.