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.

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