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$782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

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Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#181

Post by Atheros »

danans wrote: post #126
dbcurtis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but you have to understand the dynamic in this neighborhood. I also live about 1 mile from the new Apple campus, in a slightly different, though very similar, Sunnyvale neighborhood. You prep your house to sell by getting all inspections done ahead of time and staging it reasonably for showing. Agent-only open house tours are on Tuesday in my neighborhood. Buyers' agents make a short list of properties worth visi…

It's still a huge change in real value vs today, but for accuracy, 22000 1961 dollars is 181000 2017 dollars.

A 13.6x growth. Pretty good. But not as good as the stock market which would have given you 22.1x over the same period.

Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#182

Post by sytelus »

Atheros wrote: post #181
danans wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a huge change in real value vs today, but for accuracy, 22000 1961 dollars is 181000 2017 dollars.

A 13.6x growth. Pretty good. But not as good as the stock market which would have given you 22.1x over the same period.

You also have to take in to account all the rents you saved (dividends on stocks are peanuts relatively).

Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#183

Post by methodover »

hkmurakami wrote: post #58
brianwawok wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The description kind of hinted the lot would be big enough for 2 houses. Would the local lets law you flatten the house, build 1 house to live in on half the land, and say sell the other half of the land for a million bucks to a developer?

You go through a city planning commission to do the sudivison.

Startup idea: Let people pool money to buy larger lots and do exactly this.

Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#184

Post by methodover »

mediaman wrote: post #109
ryandamm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on a 13k square foot lot! But yeah, that has happened elsewhere in the Bay Area. (Zoning tends to prevent it, though, so there's an element of regulatory arbitrage.)

You could definitely fit that many units in a 13k square foot lot. Fitting a narrow format house on a 2k square foot lot (40x50') is plenty doable. Even more so if they have some adjoining party walls, as with townhomes. Though as you mention, zoning may prevent it. Some areas have 5,000 s.f. minimum lot sizes.

This should be illegal. There's no good reason why you shouldn't be able to split up your 13,000 sq ft lot into smaller lots and sell those separately if you want to. Setting some reasonable state right-to-split-lots bill might go a long way to helping solve the housing crisis.

Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#185

Post by loeg »

blackskad wrote: post #180
loeg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why is this better, exactly? Seems like it just takes longer to accomplish the same goal (finding FMV). Buyers are still not guaranteed their offer will be accepted unless they gratuitously overpay (by offering list price).

You're assuming all the sellers are always overpricing by a very large percentage and that nobody accepts a lower offer. What usually happens though, is that you determine an estimated FMV (eFMV) based on recently sold properties in the neighborhood that are similar in size. Experienced realtors are usually quite good at this. You can add a factor to the eFMV to get your list price. As a seller, in the worst case, yo…

I'm not assuming nobody accepts a lower offer. Just that sellers will overpice FMV by some margin (as you confirm) and eventually accept the highest bid under list (seems confirmed too).

Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#186

Post by cdkee »

aidenn0 wrote: post #135

As a tech worker with a large family (this house is too small for my family), I believe I am now officially priced out of every moving to SV. And that's with me being quite wealthy; I have about $1MM in equity in my house, and various other investments and retirement savings.

South San Jose (Evergreen) and the East Bay would be within your reach most likely.

Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#187

Post by aidenn0 »

cdkee wrote: post #186
aidenn0 wrote: post #135

As a tech worker with a large family (this house is too small for my family), I believe I am now officially priced out of every moving to SV. And that's with me being quite wealthy; I have about $1MM in equity in my house, and various other investments and retirement savings.

South San Jose (Evergreen) and the East Bay would be within your reach most likely.

What are commute times like to where the jobs are from those (Cupertino, Palo Alto it seems)?

Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#188

Post by luckydude »

"Large lot - 13000 square feet". So I'm not anywhere near as good of a commute location, takes me 25 minutes to get to Los Gatos, so getting to Apple is probably 40, but I've got 15 acres, a main house almost twice as big (it's too big in my opinion, just gathers junk, so not necessarily a plus), a barn that we have turned into 1/4th man cave, 1/4 exercise room, 1/4 chicken house, and 1/4 barn, and a 1 bedroom guest house, and a 1500 square foot shop, and a quonset hut you can park 3 or 4 semis in.

All for less than what that buyer paid, admittedly 10 years ago. So it's in no ways apples to apples. My guess is my place is worth about what they just paid. Yeah, my commute would not be great if I worked at Apple, but you guys remember Rands in Repose, right? The manager dude with the blog about managing? Worked at Apple? He's my neighbor. We've got lots of Google/Apple/whatever people up here, you get way way more house and property for your money and you are not living right on top of each other.

If you are house hunting and you want to consider the mountains, PM me, I'll hook you up with an excellent real estate agent. It's definitely not for everyone, if owning and running a generator, tractor, chainsaw seems nuts to you, yeah, not for you (though I didn't know anything about tractors before I moved up here, now I own two and an excavator and do jobs for $1000/day). Happy to answer questions on or off the forum about the mountains, I frigging love it up here.

I'm blown away that people will spend that much for a boring ranch house on a little lot. I could get it if it were downtown Mountain View, that's pretty pleasant, ditto Palo Alto, but Sunnyvale? That seems nuts.

Does anyone else feel like it is a bubble? Or is this the new normal?

Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#189

Post by edison85 »

jarjoura wrote: post #7

Yes South Bay is so overpriced right now it’s ridiculous. Keep in mind that 5 years ago that same house would have sold for 650k and even then people would have been complaining that’s it was way overpriced. One things certain, east bay across the 84 is still under a million at the moment. I suspect that will change soon.

That's just not true. They bought this house for $1M 13 years ago. 5 years ago it was worth 1.7M. It's all on public record. It's not overpriced, there is just so low capacity because no one is selling due to property tax prop 13.

Re: $782k over asking for a house in Sunnyvale

#190

Post by edison85 »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #15

It's a 13k lot a mile from Apples new campus. The person who bought it knows it's potential. Even if you make 10% of that initial investment you're still doing amazing.

It's not 1 mile away from Apple, it is 3.5 miles away but this means nothing. There are 7 perfect school district areas in the Palo Alto, MV, Los Altos, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, West San Jose area. These places are in the center of the valley, extremely safe and best commute too.

This neighborhood is probably the 5th or 6th best here. Los Altos same house would go for 3.5M, MV there is just 0 supply, Palo Alto would be around Los Altos, Cupertino 300k more expensive, only west San Jose/Cupertino border is comparable. Apple has been here forever. They have had their hq here forever and same with their 2nd and 3rd largest offices.

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