Location, location, location

Whoa—this is not something you see very often here in the Valley they call Silicon:

By which I’m referring to the “price reduced” addendum to the For Sale sign. Because residential property prices are pretty much unidirectional, and headed into the stratosphere.

So I knew when I saw the dreaded "price reduced" addition a week after the original sign was put up that this place must have serious, deeply serious problems. Because it went from $987,000 to $799,000.

Here’s the original flyer:

(The only thing that changed in the replacement was the price.)

This hovel was built in 1949, and from the looks of the front yard, nothing has been done to update it since then. I’m telling you, they haven’t even watered the weeds.

And here are a few selected photos from their listing on Redfin. The kitchen:

The bathroom:

The other bathroom:

Well, the clue was “Ideal Home for Remodeling”. That’s the marketing hype. A friend of mine tells me the internal real estate term for these sorts of properties is “scrapers”, because you’re just going to scrape it off the lot and start over.

The new, $200,000-lower price must have done it, because a few days later, here was the sign:

See, the thing is—this property is about half a mile from the new Apple spaceship headquarters. You could sell a 1970s rabbit hutch with nothing but fecal droppings in the shag carpeting for décor in that neighborhood for $595,000.

(I can't find any data on the last purchase price; if it's changed hands since 1949 it was so long ago that the MLS system isn't picking up on it. But there's another house on my walking route, which is right across the street from the Apple complex. It last sold in 1998 for $370,000. It's listed now for $1,088,000.)

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the house disappears and construction starts on the McMansion.