Hat tip to JS for sending this in, from nbcsandiego.com:
The slow housing market has inspired one San Diego restaurant owner to market her Mission Hills property the best way she knows how – with free food.
Terryl Gavre’s Mission Hills estate has been on the market for 5 weeks and in an effort to sell it quick, she’s tossing in a delicious deal.
Buy the estate and get free breakfast at her restaurant, Café 222 not once or even twice but for the next 15 years.
“I thought, you know, ‘I need to think outside the box. How do I get more people to come look at my house?’ The housing market is slow in general so why not offer something they can’t get when they buy any other house,” Gavre said.
“People will come in and say ‘Oh, I love that restaurant; omigod, that kitchen looks just like the one at Café 222’.”
Gavre’s restaurant, located in downtown San Diego has been profiled by Food Network and is known for hand-made specialties like pumpkin waffles and her peanut butter-and-banana-stuffed French toast.
One happy buyer will walk away with two homes on the lot separated by a courtyard and a free breakfast once a week. The price tag on the property may be $1.4 million but the incentive will save you approximately $8,000 in free food. Now, what foodie can pass up that offer?
Workin girl home sellers take note!
Estate? ESTATE??
Jim, are you a foodie?
Ha! If you bring her a buyer, be sure to put in the offer that she give YOU a free breakfast for a year…
Jim, you say it’s been on the market for 5 weeks. But looks like it originally listed Aug 19, 2010 and has been on and off the market since.
That wasn’t me, I copied the article from the investigating team at nbc.
Reporters don’t think of looking deeper, they want to hit and run.
I had one from the local TV news call me the other day to comment on the free-visa-for-foreigners-who-buy-a-house program.
She already had her angle – that it would be a big deal. I told her that I didn’t think at this point we could say what the impact would be, if any.
She didn’t like my answer – she was determined to blow it up into a sexy headliner.
She asked my a couple more pointed questions, I didn’t bite, and she hung up abruptly.
Ah. Okay. I wondered how that could get by you. Yeah. Investigative journalism has gone out the window. Maybe the headline should’ve read, “Restaurant owner desperate to sell offers breakfast.” Underneath, the subheadline reads, “Been chasing down the market for over a year.”
….and thinks $8,000 worth of pancakes is all that is needed to win over a buyer.
“Reporters don’t think of looking deeper, they want to hit and run.”
Jim,
Probably the most lucid dissertation on American reportage ever. That phrase should be bronzed – or at the very least required under every masthead…sorta-like a cigaret pack warning!
http://www.sdlookup.com/MLS-110040257-3539_3541_Dove_Ct_San_Diego_CA_92103
Thanks Peter, and I’ll add.
There is a lack of street sense everywhere you go. Education is stressed throughout the generations, and now it’s how high above a 4.0 GPA can you get to advance to the next level.
But once in play, these book-smart kids have little real-world experience to help them think deeper. Sure they might have spent a sememster in Spain, but sorry, look what that did for those Jersey Shore kids – just honed their drinking skills.
Especially the journalists – how many in-depth stories have you seen on the housing debacle, which could be the biggest story of the decade?
CNBC is probably the closest to giving it constant coverage, but it’s just Diana’s lightweight and usually wrong opinions followed by data that kind of supports them.
They gave me three one-liners in 30 seconds, which I appreciate, but they need to go much deeper to be able to divulge the real truths of what is happening today.
“I had one from the local TV news call me the other day to comment on the free-visa-for-foreigners-who-buy-a-house program.”
The funny thing is, you can already do that (buy a house and live here six months at a time) under existing law, at least that’s what somebody I read was claiming, so there’s no point in creating the new law.
I have a way better incentive idea for her to offer. And it doesn’t have to last 15 years . .
Forget the breakfast, what about that pink Power Wheel SUV in the listing photos 😉
I wonder if she is ATM’d her house and is now ‘desperate’ to sell.
Sensationalist news pieces like this are just incredible.
Well, the sad part about it is that someone will “bite”. They don’t see the money value of the breakfasts…they see “breakfast”, “free”, “15 years”, and all of a sudden, that is worth $200k in their mind.
When we were negotiating, a counter offer was a small reduction in price + remodeling plans. Those plans were worth something to the seller, because it was what they wanted to do with the house.
However, to us, we didn’t necessarily want to do the same thing, so the value of those plans dropped quickly to $0.