They always say in real estate that what sells is "Location, Location, Location", but in reality sometimes the location can be too good. Case in point is
a house I travel by nearly every day which is located in a prime Ladue location, directly on Clayton Road near the Immacolata church and the Galleria Mall (and on the #58 Metro bus route!). Every time when I am stopped at the red light northbound on McCutcheon I am forced to stare at it and wonder who would ever buy it. At only $375,000 in Ladue schools and close to everything it would be a steal if it were not directly on Clayton and across from an incoming street with a street light located right in front of it! On all the online photos they make sure they do not show the unsightly street light in front, but it is definitely right there:
When the house sold in the fall of 2009, I was waiting to see the wrecking crew knock the whole thing down to see how they would rebuild a new McMansion somewhere on that property, but that did not happen. They simply fixed up the existing home so it looks pretty nice inside now. I thought they would remove it and build further back in the lot. If you look at the lot layout from
gis.stlouisco.com, the lot is triangular shaped and you could wedge a nice two story house back in the far corner with a garage up front.
I was guessing they would do a teardown and build a circular drive up front to separate the home more from Clayton Road like:
I wish them luck in selling the house though, since from the pictures it looks like they did quite a bit of renovation on the inside. That is just not a very great location for a house, especially with that stop light.
I actually visited an open house in the neighborhood since it was of
another house that is a bit of an anomaly. I was disappointed the first time they had an open house since I had to miss it that Sunday, but they had a second one just a couple weeks ago. That house is a fairly recent rebuild, and simply gorgeous inside. It is indeed enormous, much larger than it appears from the street. But being priced over four times as high as
another house for sale just two lots over, it seems vastly overpriced and out of place in our neighborhood. It would actually make a good home for someone who wants to live with older parents since it is basically a large ranch with two main floor master bedroom suites and two more bedrooms and a full bath on an upper level over the giant four car garage. But priced at $1.575 million puts it out of most people's budgets. I wonder where they came up with that price too. Why not $1.475M so people looking under $1.5M would find it, or frankly how about $975K since I can not imagine most people looking over the $1M mark will be that interested. For considerably less (under $1.2M) , you can buy this
nice two story home just a couple hundred yards east of us:
The
county assessor appraised the 2 story house at $1.038M and the ranch on our street for $883.8K for 2011. I do not know why he thinks he can actually get anything close to $1.575M for that house. Incidentally, for this posting I used
realtor.com listings since some of the ones on
cbgundaker.com no longer have any pictures. I actually still prefer using the
hermannlondon.com site, but to search there you need to register and give them an e-mail address. I have all these houses saved as "Favorites" on my HermannLondon account!
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