All right, so this video is a quick rundown of the five questions that I get asked the most by my clients that are relocating and making a move here to Temecula, California. Let's go ahead and get into it.
Hey guys. Hey again, my name is Justin Short. I'm a realtor and team leader for the Short Real Estate Team here in Temecula, California, in Murrieta, California. This video is all about the five questions that I get asked the most by my clients that are relocating and making a move here to Temecula, California. We're going to go ahead and get into it in just a minute. The first thing, if you are liking videos like this, please do me a favor. Please hit like, please hit subscribe. Our goal is to keep putting out videos like this each and every week for you guys. We have all types of videos talking about best neighborhoods, worst neighborhoods, best schools, worst schools, what part of town you want to live in, what part of town you don't, pros and cons, et cetera. We mostly focus on the cities of Temecula, Murrieta, and Menifee, California.
Hopefully you can go ahead and do that. Then, if you guys have any real estate questions, I'd love to hear from you. You're going to see all my contact information at the end. You can feel free, you can call, you can text, you can email, of course I'd love to hear from you guys. I have people that reach out to me all the time. Happy to answer any questions you may have, or of course we'd love to help you out with your home search. Let's go ahead and get into it.
I guess the reason for this video is most of you guys that are watching these videos and you're checking them out, usually it's people that are relocating from out of the area. Usually people moving from Northern California to Southern California or making a move from out of state here to the Temecula area. Hopefully it's a good resource for you guys. Hopefully it gives you good perspective on what it's like to actually live here and give you some good information that maybe is hard to find on some other websites. Hopefully it's good info for that. But, these are the five questions that come up the most and I figured it'd be good information for you guys to know the questions and know the answers.
Question number one, so by far the question that I get asked the most is, what is the worst part about living here in Temecula? Usually it's like, "Well, hey, so be honest with me. What's the worst part?" For me, so my background, so I live currently live here in the city of Temecula. I have lived here for over 20 years. I lived here for a long time. I went to high school out here and I really grew up here and I plan to live here long. I love the area. I think it's a great place to live. I have two young kids, we love the school district. We plan to be here and raise our kids. I don't have any plans to ever make a move away. Maybe one year when I retire or something like that, but way far down the line.
We love living here in Temecula. So because I think there's a lot of pros. Right? It's a great school district, it's a growing area, it's really changed a lot in the last 20 years. There's so many cool things to do now that didn't used to be here. By far, the worst part about living here is really it's just the weather in the middle of summer, it's hot. Some of the other videos we went through some different stats, et cetera, but the average temperature for the months of August and September is 91 degrees. But, we have those heat waves. We have heat waves that'll easily take us to a 100, 103, 104, all the way up to probably 105 degrees in the middle of summer. Again, for the month it averages out about 90, but over 100 degrees, it's hot, it's miserable, you walk outside and boom, that heat is really going to hit you and it's just not pleasant.
That is without a doubt the worst part about living here. The plus to that is everyone has air conditioning, so you have central air, you can stay inside, you can stay nice and cool, so it's not really a big deal. What is nice too is at night the temperature really cools down. Because we are relatively close to the coast, so by around four o'clock or so we get a nice breeze that starts to come in. It actually comes from over the coast, over the mountains, and it really cools down the area. By about 6:00, 6:30, it's actually really nice outside. Even when we might be in the middle of the heat wave and it's like 105 outside, it just sucks.
By the time that breeze comes by about six o'clock, it's probably like 72, 73 outside and it's super, super nice. Right now it's summertime, it's going to stay sunny until about eight o'clock at night. You can go to the restaurant, you can go sit outside the porch and it's really beautiful outside, you really can't beat it. The other thing to know about the heat is besides cooling down, it's a very dry heat. There's really no humidity typically. It's different than maybe some other parts of the country living in the south or something like that.
That's question number one. Question number two people always ask is what part of town should I avoid? Or, basically, what's the worst neighborhood? Where do I not want to live? Really what I tell my clients is when you're going to be moving here to Temecula is I would say you're probably going to almost the entire city. Probably about 90% of the city you are going to like, you are going to think it's a nice place to live. There's a couple reasons for that. The short answer is there's really not any bad areas. There's maybe a couple apartment buildings here and there that you might want to stay away from because maybe it's older, there's just a lot of people living there and maybe not the greatest. But other than that, most of the city is really, really nice. Some of that is because it's a newer community.
The old homes here in Temecula were built in 1988, so they're not really very old. We don't have old crummy homes that were built in the fifties and the sixties and there's different construction standards and different just, I guess different codes and whatnot and there's just crummier houses. We don't have to deal with any of that. We don't have to deal with plumbing issues. Very rare to have a roof concern or anything like that. It's just different than some of the bigger cities like San Diego, LA, Orange County where you're going to have a lot of those concerns. Then also, it's the suburbs. Temecula is constantly one of the safest cities in the entire United States. It's a safe area, there's a really big police presence, there's a really big military presence. It's a nice area.
Most people, I would think you would say it's pretty squeaky clean. There's not a bunch of trash everywhere. It's very well taken care of. Just because of that, it's a nice area, it's a nice city. Most people are going to most parts of town. I always tell my clients to really consider anything within the city, and then you may prefer a certain side of town versus the other, maybe for commute reasons, et cetera. Overall, it's a nice city and there's not really too many areas to avoid.
Question number three is what are the best neighborhoods? More generally, I would say that the most desirable part of town for most people is going to be to live in South Temecula. If you look at a map, you have the 15 freeway that really runs north and south. You have the freeway off-ramp, that's Temecula Parkway. That's going to run east and west. Then anything south of Temecula Parkway is going to be considered South Temecula. That tends to be most desirable for people and really for a couple reasons. Number one is a lot of people that live here in Temecula, they make a commute and the most common commute is down to San Diego. If you live in the southern part of the city, that puts you a lot closer to your end destination to where you're going to make a commute to.
For example, if you're commuting to San Diego, the difference from living in South Temecula versus maybe the North side of Temecula could be about 20 minutes each way. That's about 40 minutes a day in difference in driving. That's a huge difference in quality of life. That's one of the reasons that South Temecula is so desirable for people. If you're making the commute, it's going to be a lot better, a lot shorter. Then the second reason is they have the best school in the area. It's the best high school. It's Great Oak High School, it's a super, super highly rated school. It's one of the top 1000 schools in the entire country. Super desirable. A lot of people will move here just for the kids who go to the high school. Because of those two reasons, those are really why South Temecula is most desirable and they have some of the nicer neighborhoods too.
The top handful of neighborhoods for people are typically going to be Morgan Hill, you're going to have Wolf Creek, you're going to have Redhawk, you're going to have Crown Hill, you're going to have Paseo del Sol, you're going to have Summer's Bend, and you're going to have Harveston. Those tend to be the most desirable for people. Again, like I just mentioned, I think you should consider probably 90% of the area if you find a house that kind of meets your size requirements and you think looks nice and that fits you, most areas are going to be pretty nice.
Question number four is all about taxes. The main question is what are special assessments? What are Mello-Roos and how does the tax assessments work? Basically easiest way to summarize this is special assessments are basically extra taxes that are part of your tax bill in certain areas. The hard part is it varies. One neighborhood may not have any special assessments, and then some may have very high special assessments. It usually it's dictated by year built. Anything that's older than I would say 2002 is just about never going to have special assessments or very, very few special assessments per year. After 2002, you started seeing more and more, it became common. You saw higher charges for special assessments until even the brand new homes have pretty significantly high special assessments right now.
What are special assessments? Special assessments are extra taxes on your tax bill. Basically what happens is most of the neighborhoods that are out here are a mass tract home builder came in, bought a big plot of land, they bought 50 acres or whatnot, and they subdivided up into different tract homes and they built a thousand houses. That's the most common thing that happens here. When a builder comes in and they do that, they are not only just building houses, they're building a whole community and they are building infrastructure. What used to happen, say pre-2002, is the builder would have some of those infrastructure costs that they would have to put in and the builder would pay that as part of their cost to build.
What happened starting about 2002, I don't know exactly the laws and how it happened, I just know this is what we have to pay as homeowners now is after 2002, is the builder found a way to where they no longer had to pay for that infrastructure and they could take that infrastructure charge and pass it off to the new homeowners. They do that in the form of special assessments that go on your property taxes. Those are going to be charges for things like utilities. The builders, when they're subdividing everything, they're going to bring out utilities, they're going to bring out power and water and sewer. They're a lot of times going to have to pay for curbs, they're going to have to pay for gutters, they're going to have to build a park, a lot of times they have to build a school or pay for a fire department and any of those types of things.
Builders, they found out they were able to take on those costs and pass them off to the homeowner and the homeowners would say, "Okay." And buy the house anyways. It became more and more common. So the newer homes tend to have those higher special assessments. Those are bonds that they do eventually get paid off, but usually they're anywhere from 20 to 30 years. That's something that's hard to bank on. Anytime we look at properties is we always want to pay attention to those special assessments. When we talk about tax rates with our clients is we're going to factor those in so that they know what they're actually going to be paying for taxes, which is going to affect what most people's mortgage is going to be and what their actual cost of living is going to be there.
A low tax home may have a 1.1% tax rate, and a high tax home may have a 2% tax rate. It doesn't sound maybe a big difference, it's like a 0.9% difference. Let's say if we're buying a million dollar home, 0.9% of a million dollars, that's going to be about $9,000 per year. It's significant. That's a ton of money. It's going to be probably about $450 a month or so in tax difference. That that's something you got to know if you're going to be buying a home. Imagine you get hit with an extra $450 per month, you're going to be pretty upset. Right? That's something that does happen quite a bit. We have agents that are maybe from out of the area, they don't know this area too well, they're not familiar with special assessments. A lot of times they come up from San Diego and home buyer is super surprised to find out that their mortgage is going to be $400 higher than what they thought.
That's a big deal. Something you got to pay attention to or your real estate agent should help point out to you. Something we always bring up to clients and make sure that they have a good understanding of. And then the fifth most common questions is just about offers. Again, a lot of times you guys are, you're making this move from out of state, there's a lot of moving parts, a lot of juggling things. The question is, well, I'm trying to time all this out. Once I found a home that I love and that I want to try and buy, how many offers am I going to have to write to actually have my offer accepted? That is a little bit hard of a question for me to answer in video form.
I got to timestamp this. Right now it's July, 2023. Right now, on average, our clients are writing between two to three offers before they have an offer accepted. It's relatively quick, but sometimes what does happen is that first dream home that we find, it doesn't quite work out. Maybe there's competition, maybe we can't get offer accepted, maybe sellers being unreasonable on price point. That first one isn't necessarily always going to work out, so you do have to kind of prep yourself for that. I would say right now, over 50% of the time, our first offer is able to get accepted and we are able to land that first dream home. It's just not going to be every time. Averaged out to about two and three right now for clients and it's going to change with the market. When we were in a super crazy sellers market, let's call it 12 months ago for our clients, a lot of times we're having to write six or seven different offers for them in order to have something that's accepted.
That was a more competitive market and so expectations had it changed a little bit and we had to navigate around that a little bit more. Right now, between two to three offers. Timeline wise, from the time we start working with you to the time your offer is accepted, sometimes that's going to happen in the first weekend. Sometimes we're going to go out that first time and you're going to find a beautiful home that you're going to be happy with that's really your dream home that meet all the criteria. If so, that's great. We can get that going so that that's less than a week. You can find a home and open escrow which is awesome. Sometimes if we have maybe a little bit pickier criteria or a little bit tighter criteria, a little bit more area specific, or we only want this one neighborhood or whatnot, it might take a little bit longer.
It might take 30, 60 days to find something. That's okay too, you just got to go in with the right expectations, which hopefully we can help set for you. Those are the five most common questions that I get. Hopefully it's good information for you guys. If you know have any other questions, you can feel free to reach out anytime. Again, you're going to see my information. You can feel free, you can call, you can text, you can email, and you can hopefully go ahead and hit like and subscribe if you want to see more content like this and hopefully talk to you guys soon. Thanks.
