A Dying Breed: Paying Over $1M for a Mt. Carmel Home
It seems like just yesterday – ok, maybe 2 or 3 years ago – when a
new listing in Mt. Carmel that came on the market with a price tag higher than
$1M didn’t raise an eyebrow. Heck, there were even some bordering close to $2M
that I thought “well, if someone’s willing to pay that much, then that must be
what it’s worth.”
Of course, these are wildly, WILDLY different times now in
real estate. That shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, right? Well, as experts in what we do, many of us Realtors
can quickly and generally assess a home’s list price relative to its
neighborhood and say, “yes that’s priced well”, or “what the hell is the color
of the sky on THEIR planet?”, or “what are they smoking in their pipe?” You get the idea.
I’m talking now, of something that seems to be getting more extinct
than journalistic integrity in real estate reporting (oops! Did I just say that
out LOUD?), and that is, paying over $1M for a home in the Mt. Carmel area.
Let’s do a quick look at the numbers: out of the 16 homes
that have sold in Mt. Carmel in the last 6 months, only one of them sold for
over the elusive $1M price tag (that would be 263 Iris, for $1.238M, which,
incidentally, was one heck of a gorgeous home).
And out of the 17 homes currently active for sale, 8 of them
are priced at over $1M. A few of those
have been on the market for 361 days, 259 days, 116 days, and 98 days.
Now this absolutely is not saying that any of these homes
currently on the market is not worth its asking price. As I always say, the value of your home is
whatever a buyer is willing to pay you (and for you to accept). If you're a seller, then this blog post and this one are MUST READS.
And what I also say is that if your home is on a busy
street, and you want to sell it in under 1 year, do NOT price it as if it were
set further in on a neighboring, non-busy street. It’s a pretty rare breed of buyer that wants
to buy a $1M+ home on a busy street, especially if they have children. An even rarer bird is the buyer who will pay
over $2M to live on a busy street – I just seem to think, if it were me and I
were spending over $2M on a home, I’d be more inclined to look in, oh, Emerald
Hills, Woodside, Portola Valley, Los Altos, San Carlos hills…but that’s just
me, what the heck do I know about what buyers want (rhetorical sarcasm…don’t
answer that!).
Time will always tell what these homes eventually will sell
for. Timing is everything – if you were
fortunate enough to sell a home 3 years ago for a price that no one would touch
in today's market, you may be more lucky than anything else. I can’t reiterate this enough when it comes
to buying or selling property: timing is everything.
Realtor, Marathon Man, "Man of a Thousand Voices".
