41 Ford Before
Born in 1936 as a 1,315 square foot two-bedroom with one bath and purchased for $1,389,500 in November 2007, 41 Ford has been rebuilt as a 4,260 square foot four bedroom with four and one-half baths and parking for two (completed in 2009).
41 Ford Today
Back on the market in 2010 and asking $3,750,000, a sale at which would boost the neighborhood’s average sale price (and possibly even shift the median), irrespective of any actual market appreciation (or not).
∙ Listing: 41 Ford (4/4.5) 4,260 sqft – $3,750,000 [41fordstreet.com] [MLS]

61 thoughts on “41 Ford: Born A Two Bedroom, Rebuilt As A Four And Back”
  1. That is a VERY big price for that street. I love Ford…an incredibly convenient place to live with great access to the Castro and Mission. But $880/square for a large house on a flatlands street (with no view, subsequently, and a certain amount of urban “reality”). Well, I really don’t think it’s possible, but maybe I’ll be surprised.

  2. Another “fake” classic styled house that came out looking pretty good. Those two planted bushes aside the garage door improve the low point of the facade.
    Note some odd photo distortion : the pots look different though surely are exactly the same. Methinks that the photographer could not shoot straight on for some reason and attempted to work it out on the computer instead. And did the developer underground the aerial feeder wires (including the neighbor’s) or was that yet another trick ?

  3. Beautifully done, but perhaps overbuilt for the neighborhood. That’s a $4m+ house in Pac Heights. In the Castro it’s definitely under $3m.

  4. It looks like they did a decent job with this place, and it seems like more thought went into it than some of the properties we see here. The price is quite high as curmudgeon said given some of the characteristics. At $750/sqft, this would be more like $3.2M.
    What kind of profit do people think they would get at asking? They bought for $1.3895M in November 2007 on a $1.1M list.

  5. It does look good. I particularly like the wide board floors and the wood ceilings. And, two, count em, two flat screens over fireplaces. No pot filler though!

  6. I’d guestimate a build of this caliber on an easy site could be had for 300/sq ft. with the right sources. so build cost of just under 1.3m cost of 1.4m, seeing a profit of 1.05m not including any carrying/loan costs…..

  7. looks great, agree that it might be oversized for the neighborhood. it would be fun if this site had a mechanism to log our guesses for sale price and then show the results….that said, I say $3.25, and that it won’t sell for several months after several price drops.

  8. looks great, agree that it might be oversized for the neighborhood. it would be fun if this site had a mechanism to log our guesses for sale price and then show the results….that said, I say $3.25, and that it won’t sell for several months after several price drops.

  9. Even if build costs were $250/sq ft this will be minimal profit IMO, and they carried the thing 3 years….

  10. I wasn’t sure if it could go for asking, but thanks to the music on the site, I think it goes over asking. This house could get 900-1k psf in PH with no view me thinks.

  11. ^ funny
    Editor: the idea about a poll to log guesses of transaction price is an intersting one. First, it’d be fun. Second, it might actually be informative (“wisdom of crowds” and all that). Third, it’d help shine a spotlight to better identify the informed people on this site, versus, well let’s just politely say the less-informed.

  12. ^you can just post your guesses right here. People do it all the time.
    Here’s how it usually works:
    The owner, listing agent and other realtors trying to talk up the market “guess” high, everyone else guesses fairly accurately, and eddy hits it almost exactly right.
    As for the profit,
    Buy: 1.4
    Add: 1.4
    Hold:0.2
    Sell:0.1
    If it sells for 3.5, they get 350K-$400K for their trouble. Not too bad.

  13. 🙂 Thanks. Just to be clear, my guess on this place w/ or w/o music was a joke. The music doesn’t really make me think its worth more. I’ve certainly had my fair share of blown calls. Must have been the music clouding my judgement.

  14. Well I haven’t been there, but i agree with others – Nearly $4mm to live in the ‘stro? Turnkey beautiful homes in better neighborhood Cole valley go for roughly 800 a foot, topping out in the low $2M’s, and some of them have upper floor bridge and headlands views. Hmmm.
    Hopefully It’s a contractor who was able to build at a decent price, but this looks more like a high $300’s retail price job , plus demolition, permits, Architect fees.
    I’ll give a rough guess..
    Buy – 1400
    Arch fees, permit fees and demo – 175
    build -1400
    commission – 150
    interest – 150
    taxes – 50k
    That’s 3.325 already = Breakeven?!

  15. Editor:
    All property sales shift the median. There is nothing special about this. A bigger sales price will not result in a bigger shift in the median. The median is just the number in the middle, or the average of the two numbers in the middle if there is an even amount of numbers in the set. Adding a sale price, whether it is low or high, changes where the middle is at by one number in the set. No more, no less.
    Example: (1, 2, 5, 5, 6)
    Here the median is 5. That’s the number in the middle. Now let’s add a crazy high number like 3.7M.
    Example: (1, 2, 5, 5, 6, 3.7M)
    Even though we added a big number the median is unchanged. It’s still 5. Since the set now contains an even amount of numbers we average the two numbers in the middle (5 and 5) and we discover the final result is unchanged. Now let’s add another crazy high number like 8M.
    Example: (1, 2, 5, 5, 6, 3.7M, 8M)
    The median is now 6. Did the median shift? Yes. Did it shift a lot? No. In fact it would have shifted just as much if you had added a much smaller number, like 7.
    This is the problem with using medians when the sample sets are so small (which is often the case in San Francisco).
    I think all RE medians should be required to also display the sample set size and the range. If you saw something like this:
    Median $6.00 (size:7, range: $1.00 – $8M)
    then you would have a pretty good idea that the median was a useless metric in this case. On the other hand if you saw something like this:
    Median $875k (size: 67, range: $735k – $905k)
    then you would have a pretty useful metric. You would know that a home selling for $825k could be a great bargain. Or a home selling for $900k might be fairly average despite being near the top if the range. That’s the kind of information a median is supposed to convey in theory. Wishful thinking, I know.
    [Editor’s Note: Not quite. We’ll circle back in an hour or two with a more detailed explanation.]

  16. Commenters above: “looks great”?!? Are you f’en kidding? This is completely phony Williamstown-esque anti-architecture.
    When is this friggin ‘fake historic’ era going to end in SF?! The year is 2010, not 1910.

  17. ^^Agreed^^. What all of these “fake historic” remodels say about San Francisco is worth a thought. For a city that tries to claim the crown of “Tech Capitol” ,(which I think really belongs more to the South Bay or Seattle), why can’t S.F. at least embrace forward thinking architecture? This is like wanting to drive a replica 100 year old car or talking on a replica 100 year old phone.

  18. I agree with Morgan
    this is lame
    I wonder if it is motivated by the market or the neighborhood acceptance?

  19. This is a nice looking place, but I agree the price seems high for the neighborhood. They did a good job staging, I think the art is particularly nice.
    I recognize the Chagall in the bathroom, but who did the unframed forest scene in the bedroom? The very green one. I want something like this, who can tell me who the artist is?

  20. Aw cool your jets, modern fetishists. Not everyone (or every neighborhood) wants the latest trend. Assuming it is done well, fake historic will always have a place in older cities. Not just SF but pretty much everywhere. It has been employed all over northern Europe and Japan to help stitch back together the wounds from WWII and was usually looks authentic, at least to laymen like myself.
    Modern has a place also if done well. We’ve seen both good and bad examples here.
    I’d prefer good design and good build quality regardless of the era being presented.
    … and I’m looking forward towards when someone constructs their facade completely from Lego blocks.

  21. Morgan, I think nothing is wrong with the “fake historic” look. People are drawn by it. It’s nice to have a bit of historic in the San Jose Bay Area because not everyone wants contemporary and modern and ultra modern. Diversity is a good thing. I think ultra modern will be ultra dated in the near future. Look at 70s housing. Compare to 1880s housing. More styles from the 1880s work today than those from the 1970s.
    The Presidio in San Francisco offers the old army housing as rentals, so they have the historic look. I’ve been told they have around 1,150 units. I’ve also been told they have zero vacancies. There’s clearly a market for people who want the old look. On a side note, the Park Merced Apartments are facing bankruptcy for those more modern apartments they have.
    I do agree San Francisco needs to embrace more forward thinking in architecture. There are too many projects turned away because they aren’t similar in style with the rest of neighborhood. If that thought process were unchallenged, then one would need to demolish an entire block in order to have new designs.

  22. I also think it’s nicely done and I have no problem with the “fake historic” look. It’s just a style of architecture and looks great, no matter if it’s new or old construction. Nothing fake about it. I wish there was more color contrast between the kitchen cabinets and floor. Other than that, the place is aesthetically pleasing and I think will attract many people. I’m unsure about that price, but time will tell.

  23. This is like wanting to drive a replica 100 year old car or talking on a replica 100 year old phone.
    the iphone does sorta look like the monolith from 2000: A Space Odyseey.
    … and I’m looking forward towards when someone constructs their facade completely from Lego blocks.
    what about Cubix? that’s close right? (ducks)
    as for this place: overall I like it. There are a few things that aren’t my style (some countertop choices, etc), but seems nice overall. The only thing I really dislike are the fireplaces. boy did they drop the ball with those. They look very cheap without much thought or effort into putting them together.
    rest of the places is nice. not sure if it’s $4M nice, but it’s nice.

  24. @passerby
    The area is called the San Francisco Bay Area, not the San Jose Bay Area. The city of San Francisco is named for the bay, not the other way around. Way back, the city was named Yerba Buena and the bay was called San Francisco Bay. In the mid 1800s, two cities wanted to change their name to San Francisco. I don’t know how the contest was decided, but Yerba Buena became San Francisco and the other city became Benicia.

  25. I appreciate that the San Jose Bay Area comment is trying to be clever but consider maybe gong with Silicon Valley Bay or something.
    San Jose is hardly an urban titan. It is one of the only (Detroit might be the other) large cities in the US (and maybe the world) that has a lower day time population than evening.
    It is a big bedroom community with a very small empty downtown.

  26. I don’t think that’s completely correct, D, with respect to Benicia. Benicia isn’t even on San Pablo Bay, much less San Francisco Bay.
    Benicia was named after Francisca Benicia Carillo de Vallejo, the wife of Comandante General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. Originally, General Vallejo wanted the city to be called Francisca when he sold it to Robert Semple and Thomas Larkin. According to the link below, Alcalde Barlett thought naming a city Francisca would overshadow Yerba Buena, so he quickly changed the name of Yerba Buena to San Francisco, after the Benicia land was deed over, but before Benicia was technically founded.
    http://www.yerbabuenagardens.com/history.html

  27. In general, I have no problem with faux historical buildings. I almost wish we had more of them, including more styles, Colonial, 30s, heck, even Gothic!. I don’t expect absolute fidelity (unless you’re going for an actual reproduction) but I wish they’d get the basics right. The upper floor is too squat.
    But the inside!!! Wow! I like. Classic.
    (withholding judgment on what looks like a beadboard ceiling until I can see it in person.)

  28. “fake historic will always have a place in older cities.”
    Shouldn’t it be referencing something about the history of the area it is built?
    I might be wrong but this seems to be referencing an old western style that is older than just about anything else in the area because of when it was developed
    I can understand this for restoration and for infill of a very homogeneous area but the housing stock in this area is very diverse and not at all from the late 19th century which is what this says to me.
    Its just arbitrary. What is the point of this and what is it motivated by?

  29. If you’ve got to do faux historic at least have the intelligence to study and understand the style you are emulating. This ridiculous building is totally out of proportion – the entire facade, the floors to each other, and the windows to the wall. Tacking on moldings and gee-gaws does not an historic design make. It just makes a mess.
    And BTW, the electrical service is still there, and has been photoshopped out. Are there no ethical standards in the real estate industry?

  30. Morgan, Jim and Zig are the only ones here who seem to get what an architectural crime this pile represents. And it has nothing to do with modern fetishism. What is recognized as good or great architecture can be progressive/innovative design, or it can be historic preservation/adaptive reuse. This project is neither.
    You can have perfectly responsible urban infill or ‘background’ buildings in the city that also acknowledge the time they were built — great examples from the past 15 years can be seen all over Europe (as opposed to the faux historic stuff in Europe mentioned above, from a couple decades earlier, which is of little architectural integrity or urbanistic merit).
    The standard ‘make it look old’ SF building here on the other hand is a formulaic box with ill-proportioned, fake ‘period’ details tacked on. It is a lie, and a bad one at that.

  31. Is this a clear style? Again, to me this looks like a late 19th century western style of some sort (I don’t know what it would be called). I would expect a few places in this style around Church, Chattanooga, Guerrero maybe.
    The very first buildings in the neighborhood, before Victorians.
    Am I way off here?

  32. I also think this fake pile of faux crap is a travesty to the neighborhood and what could have been.
    I appreciate excellent modernism, as well as excellent historically accurate architecture. This is not historically or stylistically accurate in any sense of the word. Window proportions are hideous and wrong. This looks like design, once again, by a builder not trained in design or some hack draftsman on his staff.
    Exterior window trim is a joke, ill proportioned and wrong scale. The cornice and brackets are sadly out of scale, spacing and shape; they appear to have come from a HomeDepot kit of parts.
    Interior is just as hideous; over use of heavy trim everywhere, a kitchen pretending to be a French Baroque piece of design, baths are just drippy and crude.
    Unfortunately, this house will attract many people, and it probably satisfies many neighbors and some of the old farts on the planning commission. It simply appeals to the masses, without an ounce of sensitivity or correctness. So much for our so called “progressive” city, sadly lacking in very much excellent architecture.

  33. This is an improvement for sure, and there is nothing wrong with architecture that’s appealing to the masses.
    I don’t think they’ll hit their number though; not close.

  34. You know what, this city is full of pastiche. I’m not going to get my knickers in a knot just because this house is neither perfectly historically faithful, nor perfectly modern. It will appeal to someone, and it’s not actively ugly.
    However, it’s not $3.75 mil beautiful. In my book, anyway.

  35. editor,
    There was an implied critique in your “not quite” posted in response to my explanation of why there is nothing unusual about this house having an effect on the median. I remain interested as to what you have to say on the subject, and am still hopeful for a more detailed response. A couple sentences would suffice, thanks.
    [Adam’s Note: That’s my fault (and responsibility), I’ll get a detailed explanation up by the end of the day.]

  36. FWIW, I agree w/ noearch. This place is neither eye pleasing or historically accurate in any sense. Well, I guess it is historically accurate in regards to bad / chop shop remodels circa 2010. 🙂

  37. Not to steal the editor’s effect but I thought I’d chip in.
    A median is not influenced by the sale price of one house if:
    – The median house is not the house in question
    – The house was on the same side of the median
    If you have 5 sales on a given month:
    House 1 – 500
    House 2 – 600
    House 3 – 650
    House 4 – 800
    House 5 – 900
    Median is 650
    Case 1 – If House 4 is redone and is sold at 1M (and assuming everything else is similar):
    House 1 – 500
    House 2 – 600
    House 3 – 650
    House 5 – 900
    House 4 – 1000
    Median is still 650K
    Case 2 – If House 2 is redone and sells itself at 1M
    House 1 – 500
    House 3 – 650
    House 4 – 800
    House 5 – 900
    House 2 – 1000
    There: median becomes 800K
    Case 3 – If House 3 is redone and sells for 750:
    House 1 – 500
    House 2 – 600
    House 3 – 750
    House 4 – 800
    House 5 – 900
    Median becomes 750
    I think the editor assumed we were in case 1

  38. lol,
    Thanks for taking a crack at this. I appreciate it, I really do.
    But just to push back on this, in all of these examples you are assuming each *property* is assigned a number in the set, and that isn’t the case as I understand it. The reality is that each *sale* is assigned a number in the set.
    So if a property is sold twice in a month then both prices would be used to calculate the monthly median for that neighborhood. To the best of my knowledge they don’t “update” the numbers in the set as you have done.
    More to the point, given that the last sale of this property happened in 2007, more than three years ago, there is no way that the current sales price in 2010 would replace the previous sale price from 2007 in the sample set in the manner you describe even if that *was* how they did it.
    The current price is not “replacing” the previous price. It’s a *new* entry into a set that is created on a monthly basis based on the sales that occurred within that month.
    Again, I’ll point out that *every* sale effects the median, even if the median doesn’t appear to change, because every sale is a new entry into the sample set that changes where the middle is located.
    The only thing that can result in a dramatic shift in the median is if there is a broad range among the numbers near the middle of the median (which typically you would only expect to find in smaller sample sets). In that instance a small price, or a just barely large enough price, can have just as much impact as a large price. But to say that a price, merely because it is large, would “possibly” shift the median is silly. It will “definitely” shift the median no matter what price the median is. The only caveat is that the median might not appear to shift if there are numerous properties in the vicinity of the median that are all the same price. The median will have shifted, but the median price will not have in that case.

  39. missionite,
    Yes, you got it right. This is why I had the prerequisite “everything else is similar”.
    Your examples are interesting as well with the caveat that whenever you add a sample the median unit will shift by 1/2 unit. If you work with constant #s, things are a bit easier to compare.
    Medians are imperfect. Averages are also imperfect (One big sale can taint the sample). $/sf are a much better metric though they are also tainted by disparate quality (run down slum vs. top shelf new construction). I will never praise the editor enough for spending all that time researching these apples.
    Something about apples:
    1 – They are usually decently recent. The more time between sales, the more likely there will be a renovation or upgrade to taint that apple.
    2 – 2 sales close from each other are a sign of volatility for this unit. Either an investment gone good/bad, or a white elephant/trophy property people are unloading/winning rapidly, or a property that had major flaws/local positive dynamics. Usually people are not selling after 3 years: the commission itself + closing costs will make it rather prohibitive. 10-15 years is more like it, but this range brings us into 2 very different eras.

  40. I LOVE THIS HOUSE!
    My ideal location would be between Mission /Dolores Park and the Castro (im gay) which comes out to about 18th and Church. This is darn close.
    Ford street is quiet and private, yet your steps away from the most bustling neighborhoods in SF. You’ve got a suburbs-sized house yet still immersed in the an urban community atmosphere.
    4,200 sqft has to be one of the biggest houses in the area. There may be reasons why that is. But regardless, it’s rare and therefore significant.
    562 Sanchez (recently sold) was similar on paper, but 41 Ford is much easier on the eye, bigger, and a MUCH MUCH MUCH more useful floorplan.
    one thing strange is that the front windows have screens on them. i guess its not necessarily a bad thing, it just jumped out at me as peculiar.

  41. Is “NEW PRICE!” really that much better than “Reduced Price!”? Price has got to get a lot new-er before it moves.

  42. Not that anyone is actually going to read this… I’m a little late to the game… Yeah, if you’re a purist you probably wouldn’t like this house. But it is comfortable and very imminently livable if you like that traditional/sorta country/a touch of elegance (the crown moldings) look. Nothing wrong with that. Having said that I don’t care for it. Not because I’m a purist (and mostly I’m not) but because I’d prefer something more modern.
    Without having been in the house I think the floor plan is pretty decent and it looks like the kitchen has a skylight… which means top floor…. I note the “Features” section mentions a lower level bedroom with access to the garden. That is probably the worst part of an otherwise good floor plan…. no direct access to the garden from the kitchen. As you might imagine with my comment about liking something more modern…. ALL the cabinets should be replaced. But that’s my preference. Still they fit in with the overall house’s “style”.

  43. Oh, and as far as the music on the website…. That is JS Bach’s cello concerto (well one of them) played by Yo-Yo Ma. It is lovely music.

  44. surprising (to me) if it went for the current list. That would be significantly higher than the 3.25ish that most people seemed to be guessing here (that is those who hazarded a guess).
    We shall see, as of course we don’t know yet. But as we saw on the Hill Street property, and some others, there is surprising support for luxury housing in Mission adjacent neighborhoods..so much for conventional wisdom about the importance of views and being “above the bum line”. And meanwhile several properties up in Clarendon Heights still sit…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *