In 2003 the 360 square foot earthquake cottage at 48 Cortland was purchased for $400,000 by way of a $320,000 first and $80,000 second. Three years later the cottage appears to have been refinanced with a $412,500 first and $47,000 second.
This past August, 48 Cortland sold for $348,000 (13 percent below 2003) having been listed for as much as $499,000 in 2009. Since remodeled, reapplianced, and repainted, the Bernal cottage returned to the market listed for $669,000 three weeks ago.
Today, they’re asking $619,000.
∙ Listing: 48 Cortland (2/1) – $619,000 [MLS]
Which is which?
“adorable” per Realtor description in the MLS. Not “cozy”? or “quaint”? At least you don’t need much of a furniture budget…
And so this shack wasn’t torn down and rebuilt because…why?
What a disaster and what a ridiculous price. Cortland is a very busy and noisy street. Not the prettiest either.
And those new windows on the front elevation. It appears they have significantly reduced the openings, thus reducing the amount of natural light into the house. Why would anyone but an amateur do that. Plus that butt-ugly front door with the arched top glass window.
And the new washer/dryer stuck up on that concrete ledge? Really?
Cute backyard though.
I kinda like like elevated washer and dryer (I have stackers myself, so I’m used to the eye-level dryer). On the other hand, having the doors open into each other rather than away from each other is a fail.
Um, this is the 1908 equivalent of a FEMA trailer. They know this was only supposed to be temporary housing, right?
Smart how they got the garage to work — before the reno you could only park a very short sports car in there and would have to crawl out on your hands an knees. Looks like they did it without having to mess with the main floor level….
For noearch — do you have a life? Or, are you just sitting in your Mom’s basement all day sponging off her welfare check and making snide comments on EVERY SocketSite post because you have nothing else to do?
This site has, unfortunately, gone way downhill, and so I (like others I’ve noticed recently) will be signing off permanently.
[Editor’s Note: This is only comment from “sf sf sf” we’ve ever received, apparently it will be the last. And as those who have been plugged-in might know, “noearch” actually owns a home and architecture practice in Noe Valley.]
Did they forget to finish painting the front fence? That looks ridiculous. Otherwise, though, it doesn’t seem that bad to me.
@ Lori – no, the ‘unpainted’ part is a separate neighbors fence
And so this shack wasn’t torn down and rebuilt because…why?
Oh, so you’re the dude tearing down all the small houses in the city. Thanks, [Removed by Editor]!
God protect us from Home Depot. $348K seems like about the right price for this place. Agree that the little back yard is cute, but I’m scared to think what would happen when you open that below-grade back door in rain like we’ve been having this past week.
Yea, I think the real price should be about $279k..this is another example of how SF real estate is out of whack with reality. And clearing showing the outrageous greed of a seller.
This site is great because it allows us to call it like it is..and challenge pricing, quality, and even the “business style” of many realtors. This info can only help buyers become more savvy and ask the right questions.
For those permanently leaving the site, don’t let the proverbial door kick you in the ass on your way out.
why do people get upset when someone makes a negative comment on here….I can only imagine it is those people who are wishing away the downturn in real estate and are on edge anytime someone says something negative about the market, probably because they own a house way under water.
and PS, this place deserves plenty of negative comments. $300k sounds about right.
This is a ridiculous price.
The monthly cost of ownership is ~ $2,931.
One has to make over $155,000, at a minimum, to qualify to purchase this place.
For a tiny little place in Bernal this is absolutely insane.
Some flipper is risking capital there.
I am not sure the flipper’s rationale is correct though. His bold move assumes that the reason this earthquake cottage didn’t sell that it was not readily livable. He did resolve a few of the original flaws. Kudos for that. It’s still a house the side of a large garden shed.
Truth be told, I did consider it for an investment a little more than a year ago, but gave up because I didn’t see the ROI in rental or otherwise on a place so small, with no chance to expand – ever. Even the roughly $750+/sf it got last year seemed bubbly to me at the time. Now, double this price and we’re in unchartered territory…
Then again, all it takes is 1 buyer.
A preview tool would be so nice to have…
What year does Flip Van Winkle think this is, anyway?
Also, it looks like all they did for the garage was fit bigger doors. The first foot or two of the deck is stepped up, but after that it seems the same. you’re still going to need that 914 and spelunking gear.
“why do people get upset when someone makes a negative comment on here”. “probably because they own a house way under water.”
Whenever you see the comments getting more acrimonious (which started late last week), do what I do and go to redfin and see how many homes were sold in the last week. It’s pretty much a perfect correlation.
According to Redfin, only 35 homes were sold last week (it’s been running about 55-60 per week in the weeks before that). So it looks like it could be slowing down again (which usually happens before a big price drop), and I assume the realtors are getting irritated. If you want to run a comparison, you can check the sales last month, which would include the three weeks before the last week. Sales in the last month are 210. Subtract the 35 from last week, and you get 175 for a little over three weeks, or about 55-60 per week. So sales are at 60% of what they had been.
You can usually correlate the number of acrid comments with the sales rate. The drop was so dramatic that I had to check it twice to make sure I wasn’t just selecting houses (instead of houses, condos and townhouses) or otherwise making some other mistake. I doubt it’s normal to have sales falling in the spring, so it’s probably worse than it looks.
It’s only one week’s worth of data, I’m not proposing it as indicative of any trend, but it usually correlates pretty well.
I’d be irritated too, BTW.
@EH: no, I don’t work in real estate, so not tearing down anything. But this thing (and other shacks like it) are just a complete waste of space. Keep a handful for historical purposes, tear the rest down and replace them with something that’s actually useful and relevant in 2011. Preserving Victorians is one thing, but these shacks aren’t even aesthetically pleasing or practical to live in. Just my opinion, of course.
And noearch is consistently one of the resounding voices of clarity and reason on this blog, at least architecturally – I find his comments generally insightful. Again, just my opinion.
Legacy Dude is absolutely correct. I fully support preserving Victorians as well, those that are reasonably sound structurally and have architectural merit. This shack has neither.
The City (Planning Dept. and the Historic Commission) goes way overboard, I believe in placing “historic value” on almost ANY building over 50 years old. We need a more balanced approach.
This shack should be torn down, without protest, and in its’ place some decent, well design family housing, priced for the neighborhood.
Thanks Legacy for your support. For those who think my comments are snide, well..they are not. I simply speak very directly as an architect in the residential design business who, thru experience, knows good value, poor design, poor construction, etc. when I see it. My only goal here is to offer constructive criticism to help potential buyers and homeowners make responsible choices in real estate and remodeling.
And, as a side note: I don’t live in a basement. I own a great house in Noe with my partner, and I have a small residential design practice.
justme, if the prospective buyer is driving a Fiat X1/9, that would work as well.
This place is the kind of thing you send to your friends who live in other, affordably-priced areas and comment: Only in San Francisco! It took some real chutzpah to ask $669K for this out of the gate.
3/14 -3/20 saw 71 sales. That’s over double the amount you based your latest goofy rant on.
I would like noearch to post his designs for all of us to critique. Link noearch?
Well if a tear-down shack is asking $669 out of the gate, and now asking $619k, I shudder to think what new construction following a demolition and lot clearance would go for.
Certainly a working-class or even upper middle class family wouldn’t be able to afford it.
So when the next big one hits and with the modern San Francisco mentality, will our entire city be nothing but earthquake shacks 100 years from now?
Indeed. While I’m fully supportive of the idea that some modern buildings deserve protection, “historic” and “within living memory” are two rather different things. It would be nice if the distinction were more clear (and more realistic) as far as The City is concerned.
As well, not everything old inherently deserves preservation. While I’m sort of a fan of the earthquake shacks, and see no reason why this one couldn’t happily remain a nifty, if cramped bachelor pad, nearly $700k, or two grand a foot, is simply absurd.
Is there a way to implement drug testing on sellers?
Sorry, my bad I meant the northern part of SF had those sales.
All of SF (according to redfin, for SFRs, condos and townhouses) had 63 in the last week, 388 in the last month.
Subtract 63 from 388 and you get 325 in the prior 3 weeks, or about 105 average per week. 63/105= the same 60% of the prior 3 weeks average sales. It’s the same for the whole city as it was for the portion I noted.
No matter which portion of the city you look at, the last week’s sales are running about 60% of the prior three week average, which is heading in the wrong direction from what you’d expect for the spring.
One week does not a trend make, but big dropoffs always portend big price drops on average. And when they happen, tempers among realtors get very, very short.
If Legacy Dude and noearch are right, then I think there’s too much RH-2.
Did the flippers just hit gold? Even if they close at around $550k, it is still over 60% return in under a year.
Is the real estate market really that inefficient to reward flippers with such fat profits? Let’s not forget it was also flippers that helped create the last bubble, and apparently they are back in force.
O well, all it takes is one fish! And the comp shoots up in the neighborhood, and wala! another boom…
They are back in force for sure. I heard 30 offers yesterday on that 1844 Laguna street fixer.
Hard to imagine how an SFR on a quiet street 1.5 blocks away from Japan town with significant expansion potential didn’t get a bid from every contractor in town at $850K.
Actually, it really is hard to imagine when you look at what Lower Pac Heights is doing. The price was a tease. Dozens went way over and the work required probably will cost about as much as the teaser price. The “winner” is betting on 2.7M for LPH returning. I wish them luck.
Flippers may have helped create the last bubble, but they were enabled and abetted by Wall Street’s craziness with securitizing absurdly toxic mortgage products, and that level of craziness, while not completely gone, has been markedly reduced since 2008.
Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, the contention thrown around here that “one in every six buyers in SF proper pays all cash to close a real estate transaction”, without crazy financing options like 100% financing, negative amortization loans and so on, we’re not going to get the kind of buy-side volume that’ll produce another bubble. That said, I think there will always be flippers in a city like San Francisco.
Re 1844 Laguna, There are a couple of blocks of LPH that are really very nice as long as you aren’t on a corner of one of the busy streets, and that block of Laguna is probably one of the nicest blocks in LPH, if not the nicest block. Japan town starts about a half a block away and really gets going about 1.5 relatively flat blocks away. The homes on that block are all beautiful, ornate and well maintained, with the exception of 1844 Laguna that was almost certainly dragging down the block.
You can check it out here:
http://www.mapjack.com/?BYAnWfr2bFoB
The home itself was expanded, but only partly and not the full height. Based on the other homes next to it, you can expand it back for a full three story addition with a light well.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1844+laguna+street+san+francisco&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=1844+Laguna+St,+San+Francisco,+California+94109&gl=us&ll=37.788241,-122.428383&spn=0.000908,0.002064&t=h&z=20
You could probably also jack up the house if you wanted and still allow the rooflines to step down the hill so that the lower level in the back was full height, or just build the rear addition up if you were willing to accept small stairways.
Something to the studs in that location would be pretty rare, and the street is very nice. I don’t know if you can hit 2.7, but I think any developer could do very well at a buy price much higher than asking. The location in the mid block is pretty good. Thus, the 30 offers (with a few clueless retail buyers thrown in for good measure).
“Um, this is the 1908 equivalent of a FEMA trailer. They know this was only supposed to be temporary housing, right?”
If you could only convince the hysterical preservationists of that… The best suggestion I’ve ever heard for how to deal with earthquake cottages is to keep 4 of them as museums and allow the rest to be torn down. There’s no good reason that every single earthquake shack still exists.
Those windows in front are truly awful. Whose brilliant idea was that? Good luck to sf sf sf.
The list price for 48 Cortland has just been reduced $20,000 (3 percent), now asking $599,000.
This little 2BR unit in a 3-flat in Bernal just sold for 329k, down 33% from its 2005 sale at 490k.
http://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/24-Coleridge-St-94110/home/1810334
If anyone pays more for this crummy Cortland shack, they are nuts.
^^
“Little” is right. How does one fit 2 br’s in a 538 sf condo?
The list price for 48 Cortland has been reduced another $19,000 (3 percent), now asking $580,000.
The listing for 48 Cortland has been withdrawn form the MLS without a reported sale.