The other day I showed some clients a house that had recently come on the market in the old Foothills section of the Catalina Foothills.
The house was listed at $2.6mil with one acre of land, and therein lies the problem. Three years ago, after having been on the market for eons, this house sold for $2.2mil, but it came with five acres of land.
The new owner then split off four acres and carved them into 4 one acre lots, which are now available to the buyer of the house- for an additional $1.4mil. So if you want what he paid $2.2mil for three years ago, the price is now $4.0mil. That's 82% appreciation after three years, in a market that's been in decline for two of those years.
I had all this info and sent it to my clients before we went to look at the house. And though the price didn't seem to make any sense, the house and land looked like it might fit the bill, so we went to see it anyway. We wondered if maybe they'd done a million$ refurbishment of the house, or something like that, to justify an 82% increase in price.
Well it was a wonderful house and very nice land, but no refurbishment, or any other value-added improvements had been done. The lots were just split, and no utilities or other improvements were added there either.
So we left, never to return. It's insulting, they must think buyers as well as their agents, are stupid.
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