from Nicole Serrin:
historic 1912 bungalow in the Roosevelt historic district: 3 bed, 1.75 bath, 1702 sq ft; carefully restored. $775,000 [48 W. Willetta St.]
1930 Tudor Revival home in the Medlock Place historic district: 2 bed, 2 bath, 1795 sq ft, with a separate 532 sq ft studio or guest house. Lot is big – just under half an acre. $747,000
1935 Tudor Revival with some Mission features in the F.Q. Story historic district: 2 bed, 1 bath, 1152 sq ft; lots of neat detail. $330,000
Richard Dodd’s May 19 article in the Orange County Register on Brea, California’s Union Oil Co. neighborhood is a good one:
The 1882 discovery of oil in shallow wells in Brea Canyon had a major influence in the history and economy of Orange County. Several small oil companies sprang up shortly afterward and in 1890, some of them merged to form Union Oil Co. of California.
Many local communities faced a housing shortage for new workmen during the oil and land boom in the 1920s. Union Oil built 61 homes for their employees in the southwestern part of Brea. This area became known as the "Union Oil neighborhood."
The bungalow period was in full swing at the time. As a result, most of the homes are California, Craftsman and Pueblo bungalows and other variations interspersed with a few
provincial revivals.
The unpainted (or brown-painted) brown shingle is one of my favorite types of house. Usually taller than a one-story ground-hugging bungalow, built in either a Craftsman style or Western Stick variant (which often incorporates more rustic and cabin-like features, like rougher beam endings and less-symmetrical eaves), and are less often Craftsman-fied Queen Annes, with glossy trim and a bid of beadwork around the windows, these houses always seemed warm and friendly to me – partly because I grew up in Berkeley, CA, which is full of such homes, and partly because my father lives in a very warm & comfortable house built in this style. Some are raw wood or brown-painted wood shingle, others use wood siding or brown-painted wood siding; all share a sort of undecorated honesty of design. (There are also quite a few very modern brown shingles, built in the angular "Northern California" style that owes far more to Sea Ranch than Maybeck; these are mostly in the Eucalyptus woods of the upper Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco Hills, and while I am sure many of them are fine homes, they’re not especially interesting to me, or – I imagine – to you.)
Here are a number of attractive brown shingles for sale. As you can see, the style is most popular on the West Coast, specifically in the Bay Area; I doubt wood shingle would last nearly as long when exposed regularly to snow, wind and ice.
Brett Weinstein and Hal Feiger sell real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their firm, Realty Advocates, advertises "full real estate services at reduced fees," and they really do approach their jobs as a trade and craft and not just a get-quick scheme – Hal is very active in the development of non-profit affordable housing in the area, and even found the synagogue I grew up with (Rabbi Burt officiated my Bar Mitzvah!), Kehilla, a permanent home in the East Bay. Brett, on the other hand, has worked as a carpenter and general contractor, and knows a lot more about quality construction than most of the agents I interact with. Basically, I’d buy a house from these guys.
Recently, they added a blog to their site; one recent article caught my eye. Read the complete article at their site:
You know the practice: suggesting, or going along with a seller’s
idea, that the best way to obtain the highest price in the sale of a
house is to deliberately ask a price that is well below what you expect
it to sell for. A more odious variation: agreeing to list a property at
a price the seller has told you he would not accept. You figure this is
pretty safe: everything gets bid up these days. The SF Chronicle
recently dubbed this the “under-pricing epidemic.”Sometimes this practice is blatant, as when the
agent puts in the confidential remarks section of the MLS: “seller
reserves the right to reject any and all offers.” Other times, it is
hidden, as when offer day comes and you, the buyer’s agent, deliver the
only offer. You are then countered at a price ten of thousands, and
sometimes, hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the asking price.
In essence, the buyer is being told to bid against himself.
A few homes that struck me as I was browsing new (to me) search engine Oodle, which lets you look at classifieds at almost every major newspaper in the US (and plenty of not-so-major papers):
Houstonist‘s every-Saturday Shelterporn section focused on a really pretty bungalow in last weekend’s edition:
Longtime shelterporn readers will know that we’re most partial to two
kinds of houses: clean, contemporary designs and traditional bungalows.
Frankly, though, it’s the bungalow that really makes us think "home" —
and so it’s only natural that we fell in love with this Heights beauty at first sight.
At $599K, it’s no bargain, whatever that means, but I can’t speak to relative prices, not having much knowledge of Houston’s current real estate climate. However, based on the last selling price and the square footage price of other homes in the neighborhood, Zillow estimates the home’s value at $187,915, which certainly seems a bit more realistic.
Adam Wells, president of Clerestory Homes, says that the upgrades and renovations were extensive:
This project was definitely a labor of love for our company. It is
an original 1920s bungalow that was extensively remodeled and
renovated. We added ~1,900 sq.ft. to the original ~900 sq.ft.
footprint.
You can see previous sales data here; looks like a flipper or the developer bought it for $160,656 last year – so a more than 300% increase in price. It’s just too bad that people are priced out of neighborhoods they’ve lived in for years, and entire areas are ghettoized, by profiteering and personal greed. That said, the house itself is beautiful, inside and out, and apparently the buyer is very happy with her purchase.
From Martha Horton’s recent article in the Star-Gazette‘s Twin Tiers Homes section:
John
Stevens, a Horseheads native, studied architecture at Cornell
University, and his wife Rosemary, originally from Owego, is a Cornell
graduate, but the two did not cross paths on campus. They met later,
when Rosemary was employed with Corning Inc. and John, an independent
electrician, was doing work there.John
had purchased a Craftsman-style house in the Village of Horseheads in
1993 from the Shappee estate. The original owner, who built the house
in 1920, was James Shappee, a prominent citizen and foundry owner. His
caricature by famed cartoonist Zim hangs in the Zim Center in
Horseheads. James’ wife Febe was a Horseheads school principal.When
Rosemary, an interior designer, first saw the house, she recognized its
"good bones," and thought it was well worth preserving and updating. So
the couple went to work on it, doing most of the labor themselves. "We
worked on the house every day after work," Rosemary recalls, "and every
weekend." They are still working on it.John
did extensive rewiring and updated the heating system. Rosemary, who
now operates her own interior design firm under the name of "Designs by
Rody," masterminded the aesthetics. "I wanted to keep the house in
character and bring it forward as it would have evolved through the
years," she explains. "Houses talk to you," Rosemary adds.
The 3+ bedroom, 4 full bath, almost 4000 square foot house is listed by Kristen Dininny, a real estate agent with Signature Properties. There’s a map here.
Of course, where I live, a house like this would sell for well over $450,000, even with the market falling a bit in the past year. It’s almost tempting to move to New York and try to make a living doing freelance work or by beefing up this site and trying to make some money from the advertising … the $200,000 cash I’d walk away with from the sale of my own smaller home would cover expenses for several years.
Redfin is a real estate listing service with an integrated blog, which gathers neighborhood information, maps, photos and other information on a particular for-sale property all into a nice neat package. They bill themselves as "the industry’s first online real estate brokerage," and brings the whole web 2.0 package to MLS listings. And unlike customer-hostile realtors and newspapers who hide MLS listings behind layers of logins, security measures and other barriers to a halfway decent customer experience, Redfin puts the listings themselves right there in front of you, to browse and bookmark and share as you see fit.
A recent listing in their San Francisco Bay Area section shows a small, attractive, and – as usual – ridiculously overpriced bungalow in one of my favorite Berkeley neighborhoods. Unlike other real estate tools, though, Redfin is much more upfront and honest about pricing, forgoing hype for honesty; they point out that $602 per square foot is just short of criminal, and present alternatives like this more expensive overall but only $396 per square foot home with a beautiful view just up the hill.
Laurie Manny, a Long Beach realtor specializing in older homes and historic neighborhoods, has a nice rundown of those neighborhoods / historic districts on her Long Beach Real Estate blog. The directory includes neighborhood boundaries, a survey of historic home styles in the area, general neighborhood description, maps and plenty of photographs. There’s also a sort of reverse-directory by house style – for example, if you are looking for a tudor revival home, it’ll be in Belmont or California Heights or Bluff Park, but if you want a Streamline Moderne home, it’d be in Bluff or Drake Parks or Wilmore City.
It’s nice to see a realtor with a genuine interest in community history!
