[HN Gopher] Tiny in size, a Cupertino home is selling for big bu...
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Tiny in size, a Cupertino home is selling for big bucks: $1.7M
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 25 points
Date : 2024-04-26 21:20 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| countvonbalzac wrote:
| This is what happens when you outlaw building new homes, and
| especially when you outlaw building apartments.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| the land would be expensive still in high demand areas. the
| purchase price has everything to do with the land and nothing
| to do with the house itself
| tshaddox wrote:
| I bet the land would be less expensive if more of the
| surrounding land contained higher-density housing.
| beaeglebeachh wrote:
| 300 sq ft of land and a used RV to park on it might be
| affordable. People might not like some the implications but
| it's probably cheaper and more sanitary than the alternative
| of those people in tents.
| turtlebits wrote:
| You can absolutely build a new hone. The conundrum is that the
| land value is so high that you have to build as big as possible
| with finishes to match the neighborhood, even if you don't need
| the square footage.
|
| I'm waiting for my area to allow multifamily and or detached
| ADU before I build.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Cupertino is being sued for violating state law for not
| rezoning for housing. In fact, Cupertino spent funds
| allocated for affordable housing on lawyers to fight against
| affordable housing.
|
| Thank Scott Weiner for the builder's remedy.
|
| https://sanjosespotlight.com/cupertino-spent-affordable-
| hous...
| yonran wrote:
| > Thank Scott Weiner for the builder's remedy.
|
| Scott Wiener did not create the builder's remedy; it was
| created in 1990 and rediscovered by Chris Elmendorf
| https://twitter.com/CSElmendorf/status/1474286606982934528
| https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38x5760j. But Wiener did
| make the builder's remedy apply to more jurisdictions by
| increasing the RHNA quota (SB 828).
| beaeglebeachh wrote:
| I live in a place with no building codes (and barely any
| zoning regs) and raw plots i looked at asshole boomers
| encumbered their title with irrevocable CC&Rs preventing
| small starter homes before they croked. Most the properties I
| looked at were poisoned this way making it totally impossible
| for young starting families to stake down, it was quite
| infuriating.
|
| You'd be surprised even in rural undeveloped areas how hard
| it can be to build, it's all gotten much worse in the past 50
| years. In the city they damn you with onerous permit and
| utility connection requirements, in the country they slit the
| throat with ever more onerous septic and well environmental
| restrictions which of course were voted in by people who
| grandfathered their own property in.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The party deciding how big to build probably isn't going to
| build to stay there (if so, they are just optimizing for the
| highest profit, not facing a conundrum).
| s0rce wrote:
| Land worth a lot, home may in fact have negative value if it is
| torn down as that costs new owner money. Nothing new here.
| beaeglebeachh wrote:
| Connection to utilities, unique grandfathered permit that is
| essentially unrepeatable due to asinine new regulations, roads,
| landscaping etc all represent huge value too. I built a 600 sq
| ft house myself and half the cost were the aforementioned.
| TrisMcC wrote:
| > What's also drawing people's attention is the size of the lot
| the home sits on: nearly 7,900 square feet.
|
| Is that a big lot for that neighborhood? 0.18 acres?
|
| Makes my 0.33 acre lot seem overly spacious.
| supportengineer wrote:
| A standard size lot around here is 6000 ft.2
| holycrapwhodat wrote:
| Yup!
|
| Much of Santa Clara Valley has "R1-8" zoning, which means
| "detached single family homes, 8 per acre."
|
| 43,560 / 8 = 5,445 sqft lots.
|
| 7,900 sqft is larger than average for many comparable
| neighborhoods.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure why the downvotes. A tiny fraction of an acre is
| utterly ordinary or really fairly small in many suburbs and
| certainly exurbs in many/most areas of the country. Certainly
| where I live outside of Boston which is generally not
| considered a LCoL area.
|
| Multiple acres are very normal in my town which is probably at
| least as close to Boston as Cupertino is to SF.
|
| I understand various attractions of the Bay Area including all
| the area that is decidedly the 'burbs but make no mistake that
| even tiny amounts of land is decidedly insane relative to the
| areas outside of most other cities including those reasonably
| considered as tech hubs.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Boston isn't comparable to SF -- the median income is nearly
| 50% higher in SF. And Cupertino is one of the richest cities
| in the US.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's really difficult to compare city statistics. Boston
| includes some really pretty poor areas like Roxbury and
| Dorchester that don't have a real counterpart except for
| very small areas of SF.
|
| I agree that Boston is very different both because of
| industry diversity and fewer geographical constraints other
| than the ocean. But the fact remains that although there
| are some very expensive communities, many though not all on
| the ocean, an hour drive gets you to some pretty reasonable
| pricing--say $500K on multiple acres.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _It received eight offers, all above the asking price, and the
| winning bidder is expected to close escrow in May._
|
| If they set up the writing desk in the entrance way, and keep the
| front door open, the bidder should have enough elbow room to be
| able to comfortably sign the papers.
| beambot wrote:
| The headline should read: "7900 sqft lot sells for $1.7M"...
|
| This was true for our house mid-peninsula: The appraised value of
| the land was 95% of the purchase price; the appraised value of
| the structure was less than the cost to bulldoze.
|
| Given the proximity to Los Altos, this house will be purchased by
| a developer & razed, and they'll build a new 4000-sqft 2-story
| which will be listed for $5M+.
| goodcjw2 wrote:
| But that headline will not be interesting at all to be news
| worthy...
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Not news worthy, but definitely interesting. One camp says
| that the purpose of property rights is to incentivize value-
| additive economic activity by connecting investment to
| reward. A different camp says that the purpose of (asset)
| property rights is to pay rich people for being rich, thereby
| establishing and reinforcing a class hierarchy where the
| people on the bottom pay to exist and the people on top get
| paid to exist.
|
| Improvement value has a shape that mostly fits the former
| narrative while land value has a shape that mostly fits the
| latter narrative. Whenever you observe a sale that
| establishes a relative proportion between land value and
| improvement value, you are observing the market's revealed
| opinion on the relative validity of these conflicting
| political narratives.
|
| That isn't just interesting, it's fascinating.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| do you skip various forms of property insurance (other than
| liability and contents) ? Or does the mortgage company (if you
| have one) require it anyway and you're basically paying for
| nothing?
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| Depends on the kind of loan. A conventional loan requires a
| home to be habitable and for the buyer to live in it for a
| specified amount of time, plus insurance.
|
| A developer may have their own financing arrangement.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I can't speak with certainty on the topic, but my guess would
| be that you're starting -- assuming you're an individual
| buying this lot to build a house to live in -- with a
| building loan which will turn into a mortgage when the house
| is finished.
|
| A building loan is how the bank limits its liability on a
| property that cannot yet act as collateral to a mortgage --
| you go to the bank with a plan for how you're going to build
| a house, and they only give you the funds to complete it as
| different milestones are met. You get so much money for the
| foundation, so much for the framing, etc etc etc.
|
| If you successfully build a house in the time period given,
| the loan converts to a mortgage, secured by the new house, if
| you don't ... I'm not sure actually. Probably they start
| expecting payments on the loan at the much less favorable
| unsecured loan rate, then take over the property when you
| fail to make payments, to auction off and minimize their
| losses.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Gotta love it because _definitionally_ all of the lot owners'
| new wealth was not created by them, but by the community
| _around_ them and _despite_ their withholding that land from
| anything useful.
| david_shi wrote:
| georgism intensifies...
| beaeglebeachh wrote:
| Nah it was created by them when they voted to make housing an
| NFT limited by very high barrier regulatory environment. They
| bought in before the minting cost was wildly raised at their
| own direction.
|
| In many cases in CA the non-property owning community drags
| the property value down because all those pesky people you
| made homeless through idiotic policy are shitting on your
| sidewalk, and rich potential buyers don't enjoy that.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If you've lived in the community for awhile and helped
| develop it, some of the community's value really could have
| been created by you. You paid property taxes, you frequented
| businesses, you participated civically. Conceivably, if a
| bunch of rich do gooders moved to Gary Indiana
| and...gentrified it...they created wealth (for better or
| worse, obviously).
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| > You paid property taxes
|
| Sure, back them out of the appreciation.
|
| > you participated civically
|
| ...by voting to block development that might have reduced
| your appreciation. Lol.
| nickff wrote:
| I thought the parent made some good points that I hadn't
| considered before. Why are you "Lol"-ing (I assume
| derisively)? Did they disrespect you in a way which
| justifies rudeness?
| jedberg wrote:
| > and they'll build a new 4000-sqft 2-story which will be
| listed for $5M+.
|
| Cupertino regulations won't let them build quite that big
| unless it's two stories and basement, but yeah, you're right
| about what will most likely happen.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Started as a hunting cabin built by the family.
|
| Own it long enough and the city may come to where you are, with
| bizarre results.
| jedberg wrote:
| They are buying the lot. That lot size in Cupertino will allow
| you to build a house that is 3,555 sq ft, which is bigger than
| most homes around it (they average about 1800 sq ft). If you
| build it with a basement, which a lot of new construction is
| doing around here, you can get up to 5,700 sq ft, since Cupertino
| doesn't count basement space against you for FAR regulations.
|
| That's a pretty big lot around here, and the developer who buys
| it and builds the max house on it will sell that house for close
| to $5M.
| geff82 wrote:
| The price of a well maintained chateau in France with about 10-30
| acres of land.
| angarg12 wrote:
| This is pretty much the main reason why I will move from US to
| Europe in the next couple of years. I'm not keen on dumping my
| life savings into a down payment and then have a balloon
| mortgage to buy a shack in my area when I could use a similar
| amount of money to basically buy myself a palace back there.
| finolex1 wrote:
| You don't have to go all the way to France. It's the same
| anywhere outside big cities in the US.
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