Last year, Darrin Lipscomb and his family moved from Richmond, VA, one of the nation's most affordable communities, to San Jose, CA, one of the nation's least affordable cities.

Now director of engineering for a high-tech Silicon Valley company, which purchased his Richmond company, Lipscomb believes he made the right choice.

"From a strictly financial standpoint, the move didn't make sense. I had to consider the enormous opportunity in the way of personal income and the ability to work with others to create technology used around the world," Lipscomb said.

"We plan on staying here to ride this technology wave for a while," he added.

He's not alone.

Home buyers moving to California from out of state reached the highest level in a decade, according to the Third Quarter 1999 California Housing Finance Survey, released last week by the California Association of REALTORS®.

Cashing in on job, career and income opportunities virtually unattainable elsewhere, those who move to California join a growing number of existing residents, likewise perplexed by the state's high cost of living, but not so much that they want to move away.

"Since the beginning of 1999, California's housing market has exhibited a marked shift to a repeat buyer's market," said CAR president Richard F. Gaylord.

Offering a snapshot of California's burgeoning housing market, CAR's quarterly survey also revealed 63.5 percent of the state's home buyers were repeat buyers, just shy of the record 67.6 percent in 1987.

"In spite of the high cost of living in San Diego, we just decided last October to start some serious saving and to buy our first house this year," says Kimberly Williams-Kee whose family moved to California when she was a toddler.

Now married with two kids and deep roots, she's staying.

"We wouldn't give up the lifestyle, family, weather, etc. for anything," she says.

The CAR survey of 5,000 California REALTORS, with more than 500 responses about transactions occurring in July, August and September last year, paints a vivid picture of the state's expensive, but still growing housing market and the factors that contribute to its desirability.

Among CAR's third quarter findings:

More buyers relocate to California. Out-of-state or out-of-the-country buyers comprised 11.1 percent of all buyers, the highest on record since 1989.

"My husband and I have lived in California for 18 years now. The weather is great, people are friendly. There's no end to what you can do here, opera, plays, ballet, fashion. Anywhere we want to be, the beach, skiing, gambling, hiking, camping, you name it, we're just a few short hours away," said Christine Mohammed, a loan agent with Elliot Ames in Los Gatos, CA.

"The brain power is here. As much as companies have moved to other states, they can't duplicate or replace the brain power that's found in Silicon Valley," she added.

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Published: January 20, 2000

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.