Deceptive Listing Photos

The_Tim

I've mentioned the house across the street from me before. It was a foreclosure that was bought by a flipper (then gutted and mini-flipped to a different flipper). Today it finally hit the market.

This is the primary listing photo:


Here's another photo of the front of the home from the listing:


It's a nice little place with a quality remodel top to bottom. Only thing is, the listing agent left out an important bit of this home's context...



This is what it looks like from the street, taken from roughly the same angle as the first photo above. The home sits ~20 feet up from the street, with a steep slope in front.

Here's an angle that matches the second photo above:



I think prospective buyers of this home are going to be in for a letdown when they come see the house and find out that their front yard is a steep slope with a cracked concrete switchback staircase.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the home sells and to watch how many people drive away as soon as they pull up.

nathan118

Saw your reddit post of this. On one hand I can't blame them. If they post the bottom photos, people might not even come out. Top photos, people come out, get pissed...but might trek up just to see it.

But that is a really odd looking property.

The_Tim

The home itself was remodeled quite nicely. Much better than most flips. However, the flipper definitely cut corners on the landscaping. If you look at Google Street View you can see that the hillside used to be covered in ivy and blackberry vines. The properties to the north and south have the same hill and are still covered with the same vines. The flipper and his crew came and cut them all out, but didn't dig them up. You can already see the vines coming back up through the massive amount of beauty bark he poured over the hill.

I predict unless the new owners take drastic measures, the hillside will be re-taken by the vines a year from now, killing all those new plants the flipper plopped in along the line of that wall partway up.

Regardless, I suspect this home will be pending within the next few days. The open house this weekend was busy. It's absurd to me that this home looks like it will go for ~33% more than I paid for my much larger home on a mostly flat lot (and without any blackberries) just four years ago.

m.p.

What about NO interior photos?!? That's is apparently a thing now. I should probably just accept that I'm going to be a renter...
http://www.estately.com/listings/info/411-boylston-ave-e--14

Movety

Very nice house. I think it's quite a good catch for budget real estate purchase. Well done.