A house went up for sale in our little cul-de-sac last Thursday evening for just north of $900k. True to form, five offers before the first open house and they closed the bids Sunday afternoon.
Our houses are nothing special - 2x4 construction, no basement or attic, 1980s aluminum windows and pressboard cabinets, what we suspect is the original carpeting, average size 4-br two-story houses. Bubble, anyone?
ETA: The realtor says 9 days worth of inventory around us, a Seattle suburb.
Yup. Builders will scoop homes on larger lots and bulldoze down a perfectly remodeled $2M home (think marble, granite, new high end appliances). If they can build 2-3 modern boxes in that spot and sell each for $3-5M, they are in the money.
But this one is not going to be subdivided. It is someone building a private estate.
I haven’t seen many tear-downs in the Wallingford/Greenlake area but the NW University/W Ravenna neighborhood sure is changing. Seems every month, I see a house(s) torn down and a new apartment building going up. We live on the border of a planned new upzone, so I expect we’ll be living a couple blocks from new 5 story apartment buildings in the next 5 years too.
Here’s a question. Moved from WI to flat Florida a few years ago (love visiting son/Seattle summers). With all of the steep hills how does one determine lot sizes? If one plots out latitude/longitude coordinates on a hilly plot how much (partial) acreage is there? Have always wondered. Such as if someone leveled our last home’s lot in Wisconsin by bulldozing a ridge to fill in a ravine in the backyard woods. Is an acre- but never figured out if that was flat or up and down measurements.
An acre is the two-dimensional projection. You’ll need more grass seed for an acre in Seattle than an acre in Kansas.
ETA: I should add, this is not usually followed. It’s more common to measure a lot as if it were with the surveying chain or one of those rolling wheels, inflating the actual square footage.
Because most lots are postage stamp size nowadays, there is little difference between a hilly lot and a flat one… people do fill ravines and “relocate” wetlands to make their lots subdividable.
A couple of guys walked up our driveway today and asked if we are selling our house. Builders looking for land. I told them that even if we were selling, there is not much they can build on our swamp.