When the California Dream Gets Inherited
For decades, the idea of the California Dream was pretty simple: work hard, build a career, buy a house, and ride the appreciation wave. For a long time, that formula worked. But the latest numbers suggest something has changed. According to data from Cotality, highlighted recently in The Wall Street Journal, roughly 17.5% of home transfers in California last year were inherited. That means nearly one out of every five homes changing hands didn’t sell on the open market — they passed from one generation to the next. To put that in perspective, the national average sits around 8.8%. California is literally double the rest of the country. As someone who develops and invests in real estate, that number says a lot about where the market is — and where it might be headed. The Shift From Ownership to Inheritance If you go back about 30 years, the picture looked very different. In the mid-1990s, only 8.7% of property transfers in California were inherited. The overwhelmi...