Marketed by Sotheby’s with a $47.5 million price tag back in 2012, subsequently reduced a number of times and listed for as little as $15.99 million in late 2017, “Woodhaven Manor” – which was built in 1988 and includes a 12,000-square-foot main home, a 1,200-square-foot carriage house and a 1,000-square-foot guest house on over 3 acres of land at 700 Kings Mountain Road down in Woodside – ended up selling “at auction” in Hong Kong with an effective sale price of around $9.4 million in the first quarter of 2019.

Cleaned up, re-carpeted, re-painted and re-decorated inside, Woodhaven Manor returned to the market priced at $12.8 million in September of 2019, positioned as a “Gated Luxury Resort for total entertaining!”

And having been reduced to $10,888,888 in October of last year, which was “WELL BELOW [its] APPRAISED VALUE,” according to its listing, the flip of the 3-acre Woodside estate has now closed escrow with a contract price of $9.613 million following a two and a half year hold, minor refresh and a property tax bill of $84,178 in 2020 alone.

15 thoughts on “Auctioned Estate Resells “Well Below Appraised Value””
  1. Unusually, I think I prefer the white interior over the rose….in the entrance hall; but they should have quit while they were ahead: it’s the usual tedium in the the other rooms.

    Auctioned in Hong Kong ??? hmmmmm….

  2. From the looks of it, they managed to re-carpet, re-paint and re-decorate themselves into a corner where the place doesn’t appeal to either new or old money. For total entertaining… or correcting one’s twin daughters and wife.

    1. Woodside, Portola Valley, and Los Altos Hills have been having a bull run compared to pre-pandemic levels. People have been snapping up nice estates in fire zones all year. The real victim may be the high-end of Palo Alto…no property in North Palo Alto priced at $5M or above went into contract this month. Buyers who would have been circling North Palo Alto homes pre-pandemic, on comparatively smaller lots, are fleeing for the hills where they see value in the land.

      This house suffered because it has been beaten to death and a joke within the community of buyers and agents, and the layout and dimensions of the home are not so simple to just jump in and remodel to today’s taste – the octagonal foyer and kitchen, for example, are tough sells regardless of materials.

      Woodside is not remotely easy to build in either…if somebody had the means to just tear it down and start over, they are doing so in “free market” Atherton where you get to do whatever you want to do as long as it is zoned, and permits come quickly and easily. Woodside’s notoriously difficult and subjective (think SF Planning Board levels of ambiguity and chaos) permit process is a big deterrent.

    2. Milkshake, read this and let us know if it supports or refutes your assumption about wildfire-induced hesitancy. From More Americans Are Moving Into Fire-Risky Areas:

      Demand for houses went into overdrive. By the end of 2020, McLaughlin had sold as much property in these wildfire-torched communities as any year in his career.

      “Only a few clients in the last year or so have told me they don’t want to live here because the fire risk is too great,”” he said from his own home on Malibou Lake, an affluent neighborhood where dozens of homes were destroyed in 2018 and which has seen surging sales in the past year. “Covid erased people’s wildfire fears.”…only 4.6% of U.S. households live in a census tract that’s been burnt by a wildfire since 2010. But their numbers have grown since the pandemic: Compared to the previous 12 months, the number of households that moved into areas with a recent history of wildfire climbed 21% between March 2020 to February 2021, according to a Bloomberg CityLab analysis of change-of-address data…

      It goes on to say that “by early 2021, moves to the Paradise area spiked 120% as many people returned”.

      1. 4.6% of U.S. households live in a census tract that’s been burnt by a wildfire since 2010

        Doesn’t this number strike you as remarkably – absurdly – high? There are ~120M U.S. households, so that would be ~5.5 million households; yet the number of homes lost is…what ?? …(only) several tens of thousands.

        Granted the claim is “live in census tract that’s been burnt”, so presumably if only a few houses (out of hundreds) were burnt, everyone in the tract could make that claim but if that’s the case then the metric is highly misleading; alternately, if the requirement is heavy damage – i.e. most of the homes – then I don’t see how the numbers can work.

  3. And this my friends is why tech titans should never be allowed to go near anything aesthetic. Let them have their toe-sock-shoes, their gleaming, vapid luxury cars, their all meat injectable macro-diets and bitcoin enabled sex robots. But please keep them away from art and architecture!

    1. Your bigotry is relentless.

      I know plenty of high level creative art directors with much better taste than you, I’m sure.

      Maybe you’re wrong. Consider it deeply.

      1. Thats his usual style, regurgitated cynicism at his short list of targets. I wonder what he would say if he knew this aesthetic was put together by an investor targeting a “Chinese-based buyer”.

Leave a Reply

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