Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dbcurtis 3204 days ago
OK, but you have to understand the dynamic in this neighborhood. I also live about 1 mile from the new Apple campus, in a slightly different, though very similar, Sunnyvale neighborhood.

You prep your house to sell by getting all inspections done ahead of time and staging it reasonably for showing. Agent-only open house tours are on Tuesday in my neighborhood. Buyers' agents make a short list of properties worth visiting with their clients. Open house on Saturday or Sunday, take offers the following Wednesday or Thursday. Expect 10+ offers from pre-qualified buyers. High bidder takes it, assuming they have a clean offer and financing.

If any house in this neighborhood sits on the market for more than two weeks, everyone wonders what is wrong with it.

As a seller, though, it is a one-way trap door. If I sold today, I'd never be moving back into the same neighborhood.

Someone below said to the effect that is is a push-in bought for the land. That happens, but not so much in this neighborhood. The houses were built in the 1960's and are well constructed. There are older homes in some areas that are smaller that are the push-in candidates.

BTW -- I chatted with a neighbor that was one of the original buyers on my street in 1961. The four bedroom floor plans sold for $21,000. $22,000 if you wanted insulation in the walls. Oooof

3 comments

It's still a huge change in real value vs today, but for accuracy, 22000 1961 dollars is 181000 2017 dollars.
A 13.6x growth. Pretty good. But not as good as the stock market which would have given you 22.1x over the same period.
You also have to take in to account all the rents you saved (dividends on stocks are peanuts relatively).
For what it's worth, all of this is currently true for most US cities. It's not a "just San Francisco" thing, or a "just the coasts" thing.
Wowwwwww. That is insane.

In suburban long island NY, plenty of homes sit on the market for months, in good school districts, near halfway decent jobs.

I can't believe it, but I guess I should, that Sunnyvale has so many high paying jobs and so little land that buyers are swarming like bees to a hive.

This is a market that literally 99.3% of the world is priced out of.