Open house today in our neighborhood

by philg

There’s a house for sale in our neighborhood (we rent a 2BR for $2800/month). It went on the market about a week ago. The first showings are today, 10a-4p, and “All contracts must be submitted by 5:00pm on March 3rd.” This million dollar home (built in 2012; re-sold in 2017 for $1.3 million) sits on a princely quarter-acre lot and offers a vast interior space of 4,574′. It was “coming soon” at $2.95 million two weeks ago, but the asking price now is $3.225 million (escaping NY, MA, and CA vaccine coercion and mask orders is not cheap!). The house comes with the opportunity for a lifetime close friendship with the appliance repair brothers, sisters, and binary resisters (i.e., there is a Sub-Zero fridge).

Zillow estimates the value at $2.225 million. Redfin admits “we don’t have enough information to generate an accurate estimate at this time.”

Your entire collection of hard-to-buy vehicles, e.g., Honda Accords, has to fit in the two-car garage. There is no basement or attic, so the garage also needs to serve as storage.

Let’s compare actual inflation in the cost of this house compared to the government’s official inflation rate. $1.29 million in April 2017 was equivalent to $1.48 million in January 2022 (the most recent month available for the BLS calculator). If the house sells for $3.225 million, therefore, it will represent an additional 118 percent inflation over the officially published rate.

Update, May 13: The house closed at $3 million, according to Zillow/Redfin.

17 thoughts on “Open house today in our neighborhood”

  1. Florida should secede from the Union. Then invade Georgia and declare the southern half part of Florida. More space for the fleeing refugees.

  2. NO BASEMENT! My God, the little 1500 square foot 3BR/1BA 1-Car integral garage house in densely packed suburban NJ at least had a proper basement (well, when you weren’t being scared to death by the authorities about the possibility of nuclear radon gas contamination) and it’s only worth $435,000 or so now – with THREE fully usable and furnishable stories including the basement. Then on top of that, there is a large attic space.

    I guess that house is going to qualify for Global Warming/Sea Rise Resilience Money soon, too!

    The landscaping is beautiful, I must say, as is the palm tree. I love the upstairs balconies and subtle arches and columns. It’s very open and airy and the metal roof makes sense (not solar?) Are all the landscapers documented? We know they can’t be illegal. No person is illegal.

    Since housing is a Human Right, I guess it is the owner’s Human Right to ask whatever they think they can get for it.

    • I don’t know if that house is fully “1619 Project” proof though because of the black shutters on the first floor, which smack of Colonialism. So any future owner who wants to avoid being labeled as a stealth Colonialist Sympathizer should replace them, maybe with rainbow flag shutters. I’ve searched and amazingly I can’t seem to find any pre-made window shutters featuring the Rainbow Flag but given the technology available, they should be easy and profitable to manufacture, certainly in China but maybe even here in the USA.

    • Sorry I didn’t complete a phrase “…where I grew up in densely packed suburban NJ…”

    • Alex:

      In Southern Georgia and Florida, the water bed is very high, sometimes only 1 foot from the surface. That’s whey there are no basements.

    • @Ivan: That’s what I surmised. Also as a possible Bad Omen for any Progressive Future Owner: The American Flag hung proudly out front and what appear to be Crucifixes hung in the middle 2nd floor window and interior wall behind suggest that the current owner might be a Deplorable. But those can be replaced with a proper pagan ceremony to welcome Satan and/or the Goddesses.

  3. The lion kingdom is surprised how much the current interest rate rhetoric is repeating 2012. They kept putting off raising interest rates for 7 years by using 1 crisis after another to justify not lifting off. By the time they finally did a quarter point hike in 2019, housing prices had doubled, the government had inflated away most of its debt, yet people remaned confident in fiat money.

  4. Potentially over $50,000 a year in property taxes?

    (Current rate $19k/yr at a $900k valuation)

    Man, I think I’d prefer an income tax instead.

    • Mike: Florida is not an exceptionally low tax burden state. https://taxfoundation.org/publications/state-local-tax-burden-rankings/ says 8.8% of residents’ income was collected in state and local taxes in 2019. Compare to 10.5% in Maskachusetts (following Science is expensive) and 14.1% in New York (keeping Cuomo supplied with young women wasn’t cheap, apparently). If you want low taxes, go to Alaska (5.8%; not sure if they subtract the “permanent fund” payments) or Wyoming (7%).

      But for everything that has a price we can also look at the value delivered for that price. People who love “helping the vulnerable” (e.g., with free housing, health care, etc.) won’t mind paying the Massachusetts tax. People who enjoy services for middle-class and upper-middle-class families won’t mind paying the Florida property taxes, which fund gifted and talented education in the public schools (no state and usually no local funding for this in MA; required for every school system in FL), magnificent public parks and playgrounds with clean restrooms (the playground-associated restroom is an unheard-of concept in MA! Our property taxes doubled in MA over a period of time when the town demolished the only shaded playground (wooden castle-style play structure too old) and never rebuilt it), ever-expanding ever-improving road network, etc.

      Do you want your kids to learn about critical race theory, land acknowledgments (the school will admit that the land underneath was stolen, yet the town will never give back that land to a Native American and pay him/her/zir/them rent), and the beauty of 2SLGBTQQIA+ romance in the public schools? If so, you’ll love paying tax in MA. Do you want to find a “free” parking space, a clean bathroom, and a trained-and-equipped lifeguard at the beach? If so, you’ll love paying tax in FL.

  7. Money printing (ahem, Quantitative Easing) has consequences. So is electing a vegetable.

    • As always, look what the alleged idiot actually does and not what he says! Contemporary Democrats only care about what people say, to the detriment of the country and the world.

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