$360k for that dinky little shack!
It's in Pasadena, but still.... 
You all's house prices
- Thread starter vraiblonde
- Start date
$360k for that dinky little shack!
It's in Pasadena, but still.... 
Wife and I - while considering places to retire - are seeing this all over. We can’t sell our behemoth of a home for much more than a little hovel in the middle of nowhere. I just don’t get it. The only thing I can think of is - demand. They’re just not lining up to buy a big house.
"They" are buying 5 bedroom 3 1/2 bath houses on SGI that are less than 20 years old for 800 grand...and destroying them, to build 1.6 million houses in their place.
NorthBeachPerso
Honorary SMIB
It will sell, probably in a couple days over list, likely with no inspection contingency. The buyer will be someone from DC or Montgomery County who comes with cash in their pockets who will be laughing inside at the steal they got. The reason for the latter is because the price is so much lower than what they're used to seeing where they are now.
Clem72
Well-Known Member
TPD
the poor dad
Definitely not me - it’s almost as bad as living in Ridge. Almost.
PeoplesElbow
Well-Known Member
You may laugh, but when I first moved here I couldn't believe people paid more to live on the water. Where I came from that's where the poor people lived because it smelled bad in the summer and was likely to get flooded out in the fall. Water street in every town was not a place you wanted to hang out.
I can't think of any time or place in my lifetime where "waterfront property" didn't have a premium associated with it. Lake front, river front, ocean front..
A century ago..maybe not.
NorthBeachPerso
Honorary SMIB
The waterfront was where the poor people, the watermen and the ne'er do wells lived. Places like Shadyside and the other Anne Arundel peninsulas, most of them, were mostly like that until forty or so years ago. The upper class didn't want to associate with them. You really saw that over on the Shore.
The Beaches were a bit different because they were founded as "resorts", although both, especially Chesapeake Beach, had quite a few people who worked the water.
I'd forgotten about how much of a dive/slum Deale harbor was 50+ years ago. Or the Baltimore inner harbor areas. Places like that certainly did exist. I remember when a waterfront or second-row house in Nof Beesh could be had for peanuts too. But we hung out, as rowdy teenagers, in Holland Point....waterfront cottages built on tiny lots, starting back in the 1920s. Even back then, waterfront places were desirable and marketed accordingly.
They say "in a shack down by the river" for a reason. It was that way in the midwest, too - the bougie people didn't live on the river, only the poor people.
PeoplesElbow
Well-Known Member
My hometown water street is still where the poors live. It is beside a 30ft wide, 5 ft deep river. The lake is better, but nobody wants to put expensive houses there because all the randos parking there to fish or use the public park.
Friend of mine from a town 20 miles away told me they called the people that lived by the water "river rats".
I've never been inclined to live on a river or large creek. Seen too many of them flood and take everything with them.
My grandparents retired to St. Michaels MD in 1967..bought a waterfront house on Water St. Sold that a little over a year later for almost 60K and bought a canal-front place in Pompano Beach FL. I sold the Pompano Beach place for 240K in 1991. The house in St. Michaels is worth roughly 1 million today. The house in Florida..about the same. Nobody can ever accuse me of being a savvy real estate investor.
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TPD
the poor dad
I've always said owning waterfront property ain't all it's cracked up to be. A lot of farms I've leased over the years have been on the water - bay, river, creeks. I've seen too many issues with these properties - erosion and loss of acres that the landowner still pays taxes on, government regulations on what you can or can't do with the property, flooding, trespassers wanting water access to fish, swim, etc. The cost of erosion control is outrageous if you do it according to regs.
PeoplesElbow
Well-Known Member
I just remembered the government actually bought out a small unincorporated village near my grandfather's house. The place flooded out so often they got tired of rebuilding it for them so they gave them one last pile of money and tore down the bridge to it, that last flood had washed everything away so I guessed they figured nobody could resist since all they had left was a soggy hole.
NorthBeachPerso
Honorary SMIB
Yeah, FEMA will do that if somewhere gets flooded out X times in X years (I forget the parameters now). Basically they come in, condemn the area with a couple provisos: the first is that if an owner insists on a rebuild it'll get done but they no longer qualify for flood insurance. The second is that the local jurisdiction has to put the properties bought out into a permanent conservation easement with no structures (or only utility structures like a storage shed for maintenance).
PeoplesElbow
Well-Known Member
This is all thats left to the place, now its a geocaching and exploration hot spot.