Covenant REO

Written by Jim the Realtor

December 15, 2010

Perfect for a tennis player who always wanted to renovate a south-facing 1970’s Convenant fixer in a tommy-bahama-meets-Apocalypse-Now setting:

20 Comments

  1. Dwip

    Must have been a nice place back in the day.

  2. Jeeman

    Ouch on the comps…. $310/sqft? Looks like it’s at about 1999 pricing there.

    One thing that a new buyer in the Covenant will never know until they move in…there is no broadband! Buy a multi-million property and you suffer with 56k modem access. We were lucky, because, unbeknown to us, our property has a clear view of Black Mountain, so we were able to use a “radio internet dish” to get broadband. We may be only one of 10-15 homes that has this access. This REO does not. So the new owners are stuck in the 1990s technology wise.

    Anyways, you think $800k to get that fixed up? That’s quite a bit of dinero. I was thinking $400k, and sell for $2M. That would be quite a tidy profit for someone who wants to live there for a couple years.

  3. tj & the bear

    Jim, I’m also curious as to how your $800K guesstimate breaks down.

  4. emmi

    Ooohhh the exhibitionist’s shower. I’m sold.

  5. Jim the Realtor

    I was implying that you could spend $800,000 and stay under my mental cut-off of $2,000,000 for older Convenant re-mods with warts.

    Spending more than $2,000,000? I want to be away from Linea Del Cielo, and have a more typical backyard.

    I think you could spend $250,000 on this house and have a great start. What it really needs is sweat equity. It might be a flipper candidate.

  6. Clearfund

    Thinking JTR’s renovation number is not only ok, but likely the odds are it is light vs heavy.

    jeeman, Many better options for $2mm than what that home would be after a quick $400k shave/haircut…don’t forget you will also have carry, permits, prof fees and $150k of realtor and closing costs to account for as well.

  7. tj & the bear

    Okay, got your thinking now, Jim.

    Clearfund, excellent point to keep hammering home about better options at the “all in” money.

  8. IRE

    Wow, no broadband? Not even on cable?

  9. andrewa

    If it was where I live i would be interested……….tart it up and rent it out. Its in a good location, if you can afford that house you can afford satelite broadband (if it works in the middle of the kalahari desert it will work there..american technology for long range problems, or buy a POYNTING antenna..sa technology for short range problems

  10. François Caron

    Satellite broadband is out. Speed is too slow, bandwidth is hyper-expensive, and the latency is murder, ruling out VOIP and on-line gaming.

    If I were a flipper, I’d walk away from this one. The repair costs would be too high along with the risk.

  11. Geotpf

    Yeah, satellite is actually worse than 56k for some things (on-line gaming for instance) because your ping is insane (1000+) due to having to bounce the signal off a satellite in deep space and back. For things like downloading files and streaming video it’s fine.

  12. clearfund

    Jeeman – I never heard of the broadband problem in RSF. That is classic.

  13. Chuck Ponzi

    What about wireless?

    I get 6MBps downloads on my Evo with 4g… faster than many cable and dsl real-life speeds.

    With Sprint/Clearwire 4G, Verizon LTE, Tmobile HSPA+, and AT&T LTE all coming online in San Diego, I see price wars for wireless deep broadband (may not be for gaming, but otherwise quite competent)

    I love that house, and think that with 250-300K, it could be a real flip candidate. No Joke. It has great bones (at least in the video). I’d have several people come out and crawl around the place to make sure; but landscaping money will take care of a lot of that and create more usable space. A good landscape architect could come up with a plan that provides privacy and usability.

    Anyone who has had work done recently knows that prices are off from the peak (to do construction, renovation, etc) 30-40%; in some cases more. Flips have gotten riskier, but the rewards are greater.

    chuck

  14. Jeeman

    Chuck, Sprint 4G isn’t available in San Diego. But go to a small town in Texas, and most likely, it’s available. Verizon LTE just got rolled out, and they have a 5GB cap. Unacceptable for me.

    There is no cable in the Covenant. You have to go satellite for cable. Satellite internet has horrible lag times, and the bandwidth is about 128kbps up, 1Mbps down. Not very good.

  15. Jeeman

    clearfund, I have seen some really nice homes in the Covenant for $2M+. Also, recently, I got a personal letter from a renter in the Covenant saying that they were interested in our house. I haven’t called him back, but it would take alot of dinero to get us to move out at this point, especially when we have to pay taxes on it all. Maybe when we have been in there two years, and we can take advantage of the nice tax free gain, we’ll reconsider.

  16. MarkB

    I would love a tennis court and a yard I can hike in. I like that house too. Strangely, on the inside, it looks like a ski lodge from the 70′ (and that floor looks like a few hundred ski boots walked over it too. I’ll bet it’s gonna be bought and lived in though (for less than the asking price). In my opinion, there’s just too much for a typical flipper to mess with there.

  17. College Joe

    Jim,

    How often do people offer to buy another person’s home? (Jeeman)

  18. Mark

    I tried entering this address at http://www.att.com/dsl, and they say it “qualifies for high-speed internet.”

  19. Jeeman

    Mark, it said that for my addy as well, but one call to AT&T and they said no!

  20. François Caron

    And don’t be surprised if affluent neighbourhoods get no proper Internet service for decades. The population density in those areas is simply too low to justify the investment, unlike an apartment complex where you can wire up a few hundred customers in the same amount of space as a typical mansion’s eight car garage.

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