Open House Picks

“That “sunroom” on the Kensington house is an abomination.” (Bolder)

Yes, from the outside. Inside it seems fine though I can never fully understand why anyone would want to block light getting into the living room. Can anyone guess when it was added? It’s obviously not recent. Feels like 1930s or 40s to me, but that’s a very uninformed guess. I don’t get it. If they had at least matched the brick color, maybe.

Open house on 3rd St. was interesting. House has been updated/renovated, but rental quality updates and still would need a lot of work. Relatively small floors, 20×30. Obvious signs of old termite damage, new floor joists in the rear of the house. So the question really is, is it worth 1.5 milion to get what is either going to be a long term rental property, or a gut job to turn it into something that you would occupy. If you do gut it, do you take two floors and have a relatively small owners duplex with two rentals, or do you take three floors, turn it into a two family and have three floors with one rental. I’ll be interested to see what it ultimately goes for.

I found this opinion piece from last Sunday’s NYTimes especially interesting. It’s about how the foreclosures mess could delay the recovery of the housing market and indeed the entire US economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31smith.html?scp=5&sq=foreclosures&st=nyt

Here’s a quote:

Other serious abuses are coming to light. Consider a company called Lender Processing Services, which acts as a middleman for mortgage servicers and says it oversees more than half the foreclosures in the United States. To assist foreclosure law firms in its network, a subsidiary of the company offered a menu of services it provided for a fee.
The list showed prices for “creating” — that is, conjuring from thin air — various documents that the trust owning the loan should already have on hand. The firm even offered to create a “collateral file,” which contained all the documents needed to establish ownership of a particular real estate loan. Equipped with a collateral file, you could likely persuade a court that you were entitled to foreclose on a house even if you had never owned the loan.

I guess it has been said, but 79 Fenimore is only just starting to enter the range of reality. 87 Fenimore started out at $1.1M. Those are listing prices–you’ll notice that 87 hasn’t sold yet either.

I don’t know what is fair or reasonable, but I know that I can’t afford $900K for either place.

The problem with #79 isn’t just the boxes, it’s that the bathrooms are all just sketchy as hell. Every appliance is dripping and you just know there’s going to be some hellish rot behind the sheet rock.

It is not a short sale. It is a legal four family. No existing staircase connecting garden to parlor for lower duplex.