This house in Carmel Valley was listed since May, 2011, and by the end of the year the price was down to $999,000 – but no takers. They went off-market for renovations in February and March, 2012, and came back on priced at $1,150,000. After 25 days, it went pending!
looks so much better. Any guess what they spent doing the improvements?
I kind of like the “before”–except for the black carpet. I’m a sucker for checkerboard. Of course, a million dollars for “vintage” 80s does seem unreasonable.
Less than $50k sounds about right. You can get travertine for real cheap these days, $2-3/sqft, the labor approx $5/sqft. Assuming $8/sqft, with approx 1200 sqft, that’s $10k. Carpeting should not be that much, assuming $5/sqft for rest of the house , that’s $12k. Let’s just assume kitchen granite plus appliance is another $10k. And paint for the house is another $5k.
Total of $37k. I’ll assume they went with their agent’s recommended reno team, so I’ll add another $10k for grand total of less than $50k.
Not bad in regard to investment.
I think the smoke smell would kill it for me more than anything. I take it that they got rid of that smell completely?
I think it’s more the timing than the upgrades, things have improved some since 2011. I don’t want to believe that people will pay $100k extra so they don’t have to go through opening a phone book and offering some contractor $50k to make their house presentable.
I think part of it is many buyers don’t have an extra 50k for the renovations after scraping together a down payment. If the seller does it, it lets the buyer roll it into the mortgage, making it much more friendly.
If you do buy with the idea of doing some work, you separate yourself from all these people and get a better final product for less money.
The sellers lost out on another 50k for not bringing the Frog Jockey back.
I can see leaving the MBR tile. If you like what you see so far, by the time you get upstairs, you are thinking, oh, nothing to redo here except this bath and I can do it how I like, so big deal, what’s an extra $10,000-$15,000 whatever which I can do whenever. I’ll take it!
It’s kind of like what the cake mix manufacturers discovered 50 years ago when the premade cake mixes weren’t selling and market researchers discovered that housewives felt a little guilty dumping the mix out of the box and adding water to bake a cake when a “real” cake from a “real” Mom was made was scratch.
So what was the solution? Let them add an egg to the mix! Then they felt like they were actually baking and maybe a little less guilty for buying that mix box instead of working from scratch.
Leaving just the master bath tile is kind of like that egg. The buyer can think, OK, I want a house that’s basically done since I don’t have time to work from scratch, but I would like to personalize it just a little bit. Oh, look! I can add my own touch with tile in the master bath. Perfect!
@ profhoff
Haha, that’s a good point. Something small and easy that the buyer will claim as their own. 🙂