The 2010 Revenge of Teardown Mania!

I receive regular e-mails on homes that have relisted at new prices, just because I am a big real estate nerd. One that caught my eye is on the corner of the block where we used to live in Brentwood, a 2005 teardown that is now for sale again. Anyone who drives up and down High School Drive knows what I'm talking about, it's this giant blob on the corner of High School and Lawn that listed near a million dollars back at the peak, selling for over $900K in 2005. Now it is back on the market and they recently dropped the price from $849K to $795K. Now I love the Brentwood area and the stately brick homes in that neighborhood, but that house in particular was a bit extreme in cramming a 4,000 sq foot house with a pool and a 3 car garage onto a not so large lot. The driveway for the house comes off High School Drive and is barely a car length long. In my aerial photo here from Google Maps you can see in in the upper right hand corner. If you notice the two large teardowns in the lower left corner, that is where our old house lived before it was torn down and replaced by the two behemoth block homes. Incidentally, in past Googling for Kingbridge homes, I found a Brentwood city document where it asked citizens to pick their "least liked" photo representing single family homes in the area, and those two houses on our old lot won (see page 32 of the PDF)! Our new neighhborhood only has one really obnoxious teardown, but there was the one further north on McKnight that was for sale forever, starting at about $1.7 million and finally selling for $1.1 million. There are a ton more in Brentwood between Brentwood and McKnight north of Manchester. Some of the other in-fill construction doesn't look so bad like this one for sale on Parkside or this one on Madge. At least the spread of "teardown mania" seems to have slowed with the poor economy. At least that is one good thing about being in such a nasty recession.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trying out the L'Ecole Culinaire Presentation Room restaurant

Image
We had been seeing the ads for the restaurant at L'Ecole Culinaire and since we live so close by we thought we would try it out. We had always enjoyed dining out at cooking or hotel schools like the CHIC in Chicago and the Statler at Cornell where we went to college. Since we still love to go out and eat here in St. Louis , we ventured over to their restaurant on the first day they were open for lunch. The first thing we noticed is that they do not have much parking! They really need to let patrons know where they are supposed to park. The restaurant itself is small but very well attended. There was one fellow who kept straightening all the centerpieces and place settings on the tables, and we always saw one or two student workers milling about. The lunch menu was small and the choices did not appear overly "gourmet". The special of the day was a bison burger stuffed with cheese, and other choices picked by my group included a club sandwich, a "margherita" pi...
Read more

BMI & BMR Calculator (Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate)

Image
My wife has been researching type 2 diabetes and recently checked a book out of the library which included a body mass index (BMI) chart much like the one pictured here. Whereas it is fairly easy to follow, I, of course, think it must be converted to an online calculator! However, when I checked the Internet, there were already a billion of them so I had to make one that was different. So my lovely BMI BMR calculator accepts either inches or centimeters for your height and pounds or kilograms for your weight and calculates not only your BMI, but also your BMR (basal metabolic rate) which determines how many calories you should consume! So I made a spiffy "all in one" healthy body indicator calculator which not only determines how underweight or overweight you are, but also tells you how many calories you should consume to maintain or improve your ideal weight. 
Read more

Not all Frosted Window Films are the same!

Image
We live in an older home with a lot of issues and one of them concerns our back door to our patio from our sunroom. The door has double paned glass on it, but unfortunately the seal has broken so you can see moisture collect inside of it. We decided the easiest way to "remedy" the problem was to cover the window with some "frosted" film so we did not have to see the moisture condensing between the panes. But the question was, what film? There are a bunch of them available so we had to select something to try on the door. The first place we tried was our nearby Lowe's store which had a bunch of Gila brand film. We selected what seemed like the typical adhesive based door sized  film that cost about $25 after tax. We thought it could not be that hard to put up and look nice on our door. So one day my wife ran out and purchased it at Lowe's and we commenced to install it on our door window. We made our own soapy water solution and followed the directions...
Read more