Home prices near Microsoft falling too
Looks like home prices are rapidly falling near Microsoft too. I found this listing today http://www.windermere.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Listing.ListingDetail&ListingID=19908913. From KC records, this house was bought in 2005 for 1 million, and is now on the market for 835K - We should be close to 2002 prices soon.
Comments
Read the comment from the listing again. This is an REO:
"Lots of room everywhere with this lender-owned repo opportunity near Grass Lawn Park. Nice designer touches throughout! Sold as-is, without warranties or representations of any kind."
The lender is taking a loss. The last sale was probably a mortgage fraud. I've seen at least 2 other new-built houses from this builder, ROYAL CREST HOMES INC, that have gone into short sale.
Looks like someone who built cheap apartments decide to try and build a house and didn't quite get it.
Only if the ltv was more than 83.5% on the mortgage that the bank was holding (assuming it sells at the asking price).
But jack, be fair. It was an 750 sq ft house on a 3 acre lot. Not really a fair comparison. :twisted:
The original owner had been (half-heartedly) trying to sell it for over a year at $1.1M, FSBO, using a Fred-Meyer-obtained FOR SALE sign placed inside the slider facing the street. They didn't even try a RE agent as far as I know (probably didn't want to pay the commission or couldn't afford to).
If you ask me, this house is still way overpriced at $835K. You get a great view of the stormwater retention basin next door from the master BR upstairs--with any luck, you might see a duck or two in there! And you get to view the mirror-image of the same house a mere 50 feet or so across from your front door (well, if you can see over the neighbor's Hummer :roll: ).
there is a lot of new construction in that neighborhood including those three story houses that are selling for over 600k (ridiculous). Also, the neighborhood has some really crappy homes (at the 148th/old redmond rd intersection) which are a real eyesore - i can't imagine anyone paying more than 50k for those.
That cul-de-sac was developed on the cheap back in 1977 and is entirely private. Even though we pay the same tax rates and fees for services as all of our surrounding neighbors, the city will not maintain our street surface, sidewalks, storm sewers, or sanitary sewer. We have our own private sewer mains and pump station which we have to maintain. It sucks BIG TIME! And each house pays a city sewer bill. Also, none of the houses have any kind of foundation drainage into the storm sewer system as is required now. The downspout drainpipes on my house route right into the crawl space (no, I am not kidding) where they then empty into a well on the outside of the foundation that is pumped out to a storm drain grate in my back yard. When the power goes out during a rainstorm, I will get 3' of water underneath the house in short order. Let's just say that the 23.5 hours of power outage during the December 2006 storm were not very fun, trying to keep sewer from backing up, then running generator to pump out crawl space, rinse, lather, repeat . . .
It was all I could afford ten years ago (3X my gross salary at the time), and even with all of my pay increases (or not) since then, I couldn't even afford it today (now valued at 6X my gross salary). Great location though.
All I can say is if you are looking at a house on a private street, carefully weigh the pros and cons (hint: there are no 'pros') as you will get zero tax relief from the municipalities for all of the services that you are paying for but not receiving.
/rant off
From reading another local RE blog, I know that some agents actually lift a finger or two in order to get a house sold, and I would strongly recommend that the listing agent for this place learn how to utilize his digits to activate the cell phone keypad to call a yard maintenance company (or actually wrap those same digits around the handle of a lawn mower if he doesn't want to spend the $300 to get the yard cleaned up).
Some staging inside would be nice as well. A 3500sf house looks insanely large and empty inside without some furniture here and there.
It amazes me to see RE agents not do a bit of elbow grease to make a sale, especially how it has slowed down here. Can't they offer to adjust the commission based on a bit of spending to get the property cleaned up?
Mind you, the sellers might be making it hard for them to do that. But we will see soon enough. Methinks that the current market conditions will thin the RE agent herd a little bit, and people after quick money with no work will leave.
Apparently the original owner of the house in question re-fi'd maybe a year after purchasing and extracted every last penny of equity and then (lived in it free for several months and) walked. The RE sign is still up but the neighbor told me he thinks that it is sold (no "sold" or "pending" noted on the sign however, but no surprise there, as the realtor didn't even pony up the $ to clean up the yard--it's funny , as the neighbor complained about it to the RE agent and was told to go ahead and get a bid--exactly $300 as I guessed in a previous post).
Now here's the shock (if true)--the neighbor told me that the remaining two other homes at the end of the cul-de-sac will both be foreclosed upon also!!! :shock: So he is the only 'real' homeowner out of the four houses--the other three were apparently just scamming the system for some quick cash while living in a new house for a year or two. Damn that's scary!
So three of the four of these new homes built in 2006-07 are going to be foreclosed upon--wow, just wow. I can't say that I'm that surprised, but gosh darnit, this is on the Eastside a mile away from Microsoft--say it can't happen! Let's say that each of the two other home-debters also re-fi'd using bogus inflated appraisals and ran with the cash, and we could be talking about losses to the banks and mortgage companies of close to one million dollars--IN JUST ONE CUL-DE-SAC in an area that at least one RE agent on other blogs claim is just bulletproof, RE market-wise.
Now multiply this cul-de-sac by hundreds if not thousands across this country, with many if not most other areas in the country not being economically as healthy as our area currently is. That should give you an idea of the magnitude of this storm that we are seeing the leading edges of now.