579 Wisteria Way may look like an ugly duckling, but we all know what happens to those ducklings in time: they become beautiful swans! That’s exactly what will happen with my new listing in Terra Linda. It’s just going to take time and cost a lot of money.
You may be asking, why don’t the sellers fix it up themselves? Maybe changing the carpet and putting in new flooring will make a difference? Typically, it does but in this case both the bathrooms and the kitchen all need to be gutted. There are plumbing issues. The lipstick on a pig strategy simply won’t work here, and the sellers really don’t want to do the work. This is an ‘as is’ sale if there ever was one.
Who would be interested in such as ugly ducking? I currently have sent out 29 disclosure packets. Price it right, at $799,000 and the demand materializes for any house, even the ugliest of ducklings. When I sold my parents house in Tiburon we tried the lipstick on a pig strategy. The 3500 sq ft home on a acre lot with dead on views of Mount Tamalpais was breathtaking. However, the house was vintage from the 1950’s, and only contractors were interested. The eventual buyer ended up tearing it down and leaving one only one wall to ease the permit process.
I’m not saying 579 Wisteria Way needs to be torn down. However, it does need a complete reimagination. I don’t think anything less than a gut job will do. In the end, this worst house in a nice neighborhood will become one of the best! While it’s currently a millstone on neighborhood values, in time once the transformation has been made it will bring the values up.
I sell a lot of fixers. I also sell a lot of beautiful homes and everything in between. Sometimes we put work into the homes, and other times like with Wisteria Way we sell them ‘as is’. In order to get ready for the sale we cleared out the house and had some decent yard work done to make the property presentable from the exterior. That’s the best we could do under the circumstances. I’ve set an offer date for this coming Tuesday, and if experience is any guide I believe my sellers will be looking at least one acceptable offer, if not several.