This is happening all over the NoVaDC area.
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You have to wonder what sort of toxic filth was left behind in the ground for the new rich owners to deal with in their brand new $2 million dollar house (excuse me, “home”).
Wild guess is the property is worth about $1m, improvements on property are worth about -$80k. So I think $988k is over paying by around $50k-60k. Try giving them an offer in the mid 900’s and they’d probably take it.
Just because there is some crap on a piece of prime real-estate doesn’t mean we have a housing crisis. It means there is a worn out old building that the previous owner couldn’t afford to tear down.
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Well, yeah, but what about the possums’ bankers, the lemurs? They are the ones we really need to be talking about…
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That’s nothing, I lived close by Carmel, CA in the 1980s-90s. The city was sick of people building McMansions all over the place so they passed a building moritorium and declared you could only “rebuild” a place with the same # of bathrooms as what was in the previous residence. So you could live in a literal shack and if it happened to have 3 bathrooms, it was worth $1,500,000.00 easily. Each bathroom was worth approximately $500,000.00 You’ve never seen people work the system as hard to squeeze in another bathroom renovation before a sale. I was working at a lumber yard / home depot type store at the time and we would deliver wood and a toilet to a residence where they were converting 2’ x 4’ closets into bathrooms. One bare bulb, right next to a “real” bathroom, no one would ever use it, but it technically functioned. Wham! +$500 K and sell it!
Scarcity breeds demand. Total madness.
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And it’s going to further gentrify an already depressed neighborhood. Win win?
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The millennial answer (at least according to the techie folks on Blind) is, “Leetcode, every day”. There is plenty of folks up that way pulling down 200k/yr easy.
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No one was bidding on the house. They were bidding on the lot, which sounds like it went for a pretty good price at that location. Possibly they will completely demolish the house and start over, or possibly they will leave a very few components of the house so they don’t need to apply for a new construction permit.
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Which you would think makes it easier to afford housing, but it just further inflates prices making it continually inaccessible.
Even for a lot, Bothell just isn’t that awesome or desirable which makes this all the more surprising.
I mean Bothell is not a dump like some of the other surrounding areas, but it’s also not really convenient to get to Seattle, Kirkland, Bellevue, or Redmond which are the really hot areas because of their proximity to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the other tech companies.
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I used to drive that way to Redmond/Bellevue just to not pay the bridge toll.
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“A whole lot of potential awaits,” the listing promised.
Realtors who actually stick around for the eventuality… thy name is “Rare”.
Didn’t some people from there die getting the Death Star plans?
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“Many Bothellans died to bring us this information.”
If you’re at all familiar with Star Wars Legends, in many cases getting compared to a Bothan is fighting words.
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Things can change. I thought I would never be able own a home, back when interest rates were 15% and the news was a nightly litany of job losses and inflation.
People who think real estate can never go down are wrong wrong wrong.
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Imagine if we commoditized and priced other human necessities on speculation like housing.
“well, we think there might be a drought this summer, so bezos is building dams and reservoirs upstream of the PUD up in the mountains and charging the PUD $100 a gallon”
“well, clean air is a limited resource, obviously we gotta charge everyone a lot to keep it good and breathable. Don’t go selfishly huffing the big blue”
“I guess if it’s too expensive to live within 20 miles of where you work, you should just move someplace cheap where there’s no jobs either”
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It never ceases to amaze me that with all the great remote working technologies that exist today and tech companies’ lip service toward wanting to combat climate change that so many are have a work culture averse to remote workers that live and work where they want.
There’s just no reason the vast majority of people that work for tech companies in engineering roles should need to congregate in the same physical area. Imagine how much infrastructure, housing, and other strain could be removed from areas like the Silicon Valley, Seattle, and other tech areas if people didn’t feel as if they had to live there.
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Gentrification (renovation and updating) is good if everyone has opportunities to move up to middle class. The reality is we failed at putting social systems in place. And we have an unregulated real estate market that converts homes within react of a middle class budget into rental properties. A new landlord social class is growing leaps and bounds under this market. The end game is for all of us to be squeezed for rent so that a handful of people can live in leisure from their capital.
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