??? Palo Alto or Pacific Heights? Don’t know lot size at Pacific Height, just guessing. They did not have a yard.
Yeah… I was talking about Pacific Heights…
D1 just informed me that she maybe ready to buy her first apartment in NYC. This is ahead of moving in with her BF and getting engaged next year. I feel old all of sudden because I remember the first time we bought our first apartment. I advised D1 to get the apartment on her own because they are not married yet. I told her to look for a building with liberal rental policy in case if she should get transferred or buy a bigger apartment later on. They are looking at few apartments this weekend. I wonder what they will see.
I am quite sure there are no rules regarding real estate signs in Palo Alto…I honestly think there is nothing on the market, or if there is much of It’s “off market” and sells without ever reaching the MLS.
@oldfort, what part of town do you think they will zero in on?
Nothing to do with NYC. But the “super new condo” in Downtown SF on the 41st-42 floor(Penthouse) in SF is asking only $49 Million dollars, that 10,000 sf home has everything you can think of and un-obstructed views of the city and the Bay Area, but no back yard.
Oldfort, that is exciting. Good luck to your daughter.
She would prefer downtown, Gramercy to lower east side, Chelsea and West Village, but is also considering Brooklyn. I would like her to stay in Manhattan. We are having a bit of tug a war on that at the moment. I did agree to take a trip out to Brooklyn just to take a look.
speaking of lower east side, the landlord showed me an one bedroom apartment on C street next to the police department and told me it is safe. rent was $135/mo, could not afford it, ended up in Hoboken with a 4 rooms, 4th floor walk-up for $90/mo with great more space for my junk. Those were the days. 
I watched a Will and Grace re-run last night. Grace is married to Leo and has moved to his apartment in Brooklyn. The big joke the whole episode is that she lives so far away, none of the gang will come visit her there. Karen keeps talking about not being in the mood to fly all the way over to Brooklyn, Jack and Will keep promising to come over, then giggle as they stand her up, saying “no way we’re going to Brooklyn.”
Is it really all that far from Manhattan?
It is not. For D1 it would actually be one subway stop away, but it is just perception and when subways do not run well. D1’s head boss for her desk said to her, “Why are you considering Brooklyn?” D1, without missing a beat, said, “Pay me more.”
Brooklyn has become quite the hip/trendy hotspot since the days of Will & Grace. Ditto for some places just over the GW Bridge on the other side of the Hudson (yes, New Jersey!)
^^ With my story posted above. I am hinting that Hoboken should not be overlooked either. But that 6th st. 4 story brownstone that my landlord brought for $25,000 may worth 1 million per flat. Who knows…
If I think about my house’s value, I get depressed. A house in our neighborhood just recently went under contract for over 150K BELOW what we paid back in 2006. I thought the market was coming back a little, and I think this was an estate sale, but still. It went under contact almost immediately, so I’m hoping that’s a good sign that it was priced too low. There is another house that’s priced significantly higher, but it has been on the market for a couple of months.
1214mom, don’t let one sale get you down… Especially an estate sale.
@1214mom, maybe there was something in particular wrong with that house. Maybe it’s not that prices are down so much, but there’s something unattractive about that house that makes it impossible to sell?
Prices in my area have gone crazy in the last few years, but our neighbors were unable to sell their house, and pulled it off the market. I thought it was fairly priced, but I never saw a single person view it, even on open house days! They said that they thought they house was too vertical, and the driveway is extremely steep, which turned people off. But it is a gorgeous house, at least from the outside.
Sometimes there are just those one or two things that people can’t get past.
Thanks. Fortunately we don’t plan to sell for at least a couple of years, and we avoided paying for private schools, so we aren’t too worried. Mostly I just try not to think about it.
1214mom
don’t worry about it, the nation’s economy is still recovering, in some area, recovery is faster than the other. Overall, it has not totally recovered, that reflects the housing market. That is why the Fed Reserve has not increase its interest rate yet.
The positive is, if you don’t want to sell for awhile, maybe it’s good if the county thinks your house isn’t worth as much. Nice to pay lower taxes!
Some housing markets just have not come back. That price you paid also may not be what the market value is now, which can be depressing.
Having seen a huge amount of houses, both over and under valued in the last year, some of it is specific to property. I saw ridiculously easy fixes that were not done but would have made houses more appealing - one home had a completely different extremely bright color scheme in every room. Kelly green, burnt orange, fire engine red…so on. Could not even look at bones of house because the colors were so disturbing. The kitchen looked like the Brady Bunch house. Some homeowners do absolutely no work to modernize decor - which is fine, but not everyone eants to live in a house that could come straight out of the 70’s.
The home we bought was a fixer and a complete redo by the flipper. I have no idea how much they out into it, but it was a bunch. I am not sure if seeing the same house 6 months earlier if I could have had the vision of what they did before selling. It is exactly what we wanted and move in ready, with a little land.
A house does not have to be staged, but it should look like it was cared for. Maybe even something simple, like a coat of good quality paint. Or a good carpet cleaning or floors buffed. Some estate houses looked in such disrepair we tended to avoid them. One of them was a weird layout with potential with a balcony view which was phenonmenal, except as we walked across the concrete deck, I lost my footing on the concrete because it was icy. If I slide out on the second story deck during open house, that is not a good sign. I think - what else is wrong with this house?