monstrosity of a house. good little conspicuous consumers spent way too much money in the first place, now there are no suckers left who will overpay for a huge ugly home.

the people i feel sorry for are the ones who are getting hosed on a normal, middle class single family home that wasn't overpriced to begin with, but now is selling for 2/3 or half what was paid for it.

What is it, like 6 feet between houses?

I hate suburbia. Looks like a horrible place to live in.

houses are pretty close to together.

no thanks.

No sympathy here.

The lot is, at a min. 1/2 acre. has a pool, and is in the most desireable part of my town.
Price: $147,500...Est. payment: $718/mo ( no property taxes if you are 65 or older)
Bedrooms: 4 ...Bathrooms: 2
Size: 2,697 sqft....Price/sqft: $55/sqft......Year built: 1972
[IMG][/IMG]

It's ugly tho, but a bargain. A broke family could combine their savings and pay cash for it, put the inlaws in there, the grown kids who can't get jobs., etc. .... the next reality tv show.

A house that size could easily accommodate 2 or 3 families.

and for the people who say they are jammed together, here in the desert, large yards are not all that great for many people.

It costs a LOT of money to maintain a "decent" yard out here, and many people have no time or stomach for yardwork..

I'm on a one acre lot here in Central Texas and the yard is a royal pain. It's bad enough having to do the mowing and trimming even in normal times, but the watering with the sprinkler system costs way too many $$$. With the drought the last few years I just couldn't afford the $200-300 per month water bill for watering 3 times a week, so my whole lawn is toasted and dead, as are most of the neighbor's. Just can't afford it.

I also probably couldn't afford to heat and cool a 4000+ sq ft house. No way I would buy a house like that even if I could afford the price.

I used to live in Monterey, CA and had a 1200 sq ft house on .17 acre. That was about right for me.

and it probably has CCRs or zoning regs preventing its use as anything but a single family residence.

Far flung LA bedroom community with no visible means of support.

With energy costs going up, the Inland Empire is imploding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moreno_Valley,_California

The price doesn't seem out of line for the neighborhood.

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/15907-Camino-Real-Moreno-Valley-CA-92555/17896420_zpid/

The current price still seems too high.

Two homes on half an acre front and back never dropped below $360,000 in appraisal or sale value.
It's location. location, location still in So Cal.

It's back up to $445,000. now...was once, in fantasy land, worth $600,000.



The Tikkis

We pay $1545 for a house built in 1979 (1568 sq ft)

1660ft 1973 construction..a bit over 2000.

Or, it's part of a bundle for investors to consider, and that's the "bundle" price.
But I'm thinking there's probably a major plumbing/electrical or foundation issue that's driving even a short-sale price that low; if you're going to need to drop $150K just to bring it up to code and somewhat livable, even if the house was originally $600K in, say, 2001 when housing prices were relatively low, you're not going to want to pay more than $300K for that much of a fixer-upper.
It is possible that this is an estate sale on simply the amount owed or oustanding taxes sale, but those types of sales are harder and harder to find.
Even if the original owner did some major renovations - turning it into a rental duplex or a brothel - it is in a gated community, with a back yard large enough to support a pool and a spa, backing a golf course, so they should be able to get at least $450K on a short-sale for a 10 bedroom, 4 1/2 bath house.
Of couse, it's Moreno Valley, CA - which is a row of tract houses in the middle of nowhere, plopped in the middle of what should be scrub desert, and wasting freshwater as if they were located off the Great Lakes.

Haele

out here..

Too many houses and not enough people with reliable jobs to buy them

They actually bulldozed a bunch of "partially" built houses not far from that development when the balloon popped..

Basic rule of real estate.

It can get hot in Moreno Valley in the summertime.

Saw some of the multi-generational homes in Chino Hills. Anyway the area at least has some shopping close, which wasn't the case years ago and they first started throwing up the homes at the far edges.

Good luck giving that monstrosity away.....

I didn't find any portion of the OP that pined for sympathy .... THIS large house is not the house SoCalDem friends bought ....

What I find fascinating: I live in a wonderful 3 bedroom basement apartment in Portland OR. This unit is part of a large craftsman/gingerbread style house built ~100 years ago .... IF we combined the floor area from all 3 partitions, it would be approximately 5000 sq ft.

This house was built as a single family dwelling in a large neighborhood that has hundreds of such dwellings ..... If we added up all the bedrooms for all 3 units, it would total 9 bedrooms ... Apparently it is not unprecedented to build very large houses in the past ....

While we consider it to be wasteful to have such a large house now, large inter-generational families might find such a home to be perfect for their needs ....

Myself ... I am looking toward a tiny house for retirement .... Maybe a fresh prefab cabin planted near the Oregon coast .... 300-400 SQ ....

sucks majorly, so we are just paying this one off and they'll take us out in body bags

With 30+ years' worth of :stuff", the prospect of moving gets less appealing every day

We walked away from an upside down house in Riverside in the early 90's ..... (Remember how the Reagan/Bush I terms ended with an economic bust ???) ..... It broke our hearts, but, after a serious layoff from work, we couldn't afford to stay and we couldn't sell at a loss .....

SCD ? ... We once had lots of accumulated 'stuff' that we carried everywhere we went, but a house fire in Brea took care of that for us .... Now I carry a much slimmer household .... I have only a few boxes that I don't have to open - Everything else is stuff we need ...

And I certainly do NOT miss the Riverside area ..... Ungodly heat and smog and traffic .... Pretty during Winter though ...

Perhaps consider SoCalDemtoNW ?

Two of us live in a 650 sq ft 1 BR apartment in a larger private home. It seems very spacious to us. Of course the fact that the LR has a whole wall of picture window with a million dollar view helps it feel spacious. We have two cats and a border collie. It still feels spacious. And we have owned large homes in the past, including a 6 BR Victorian for 6 of us.

The only downside is that I maintain a big storage space to keep the stuff I don't have room for, and it's not cheap.

You must be in SE Portland. Practically perfect Portland!

My mother retired to Lincoln City, and loved it. She had a very small place. That was pre-casino, tho.

I am actually in NW in Nob Hill ..... I got an unbelievable deal on this place: I am paying less than $1K for a 3 br apartment in NW

It's perfect for my son and I, and a small music studio ... We love it here .... We love SE too .... I guess it's no secret that Portland is an amazing place to live ....

Lincoln City is on my radar .... Although the amazing Oregon coast sounds very attractive, parts are pretty remote, so settling near Lincoln City or one of the other major coastal towns that have access to health care and basic consumables would be ideal ...

I find myself dreaming of it now .... It is a very pleasant reverie ...

I have been known to enter casinos now and then .... with a very limited purse ....

apart and create several sane homes a person could actually afford.

assisted living.

Please don't ever come to my house (a very, very old house with issues that are always cropping up that aren't always attended to immediately) on a working farm in the middle of a drought.

That house looks clean, freshly painted and with some minor problems that don't look insurmountable at all.



(some DUers clearly have no idea how people with limited resources actually live)

afford that, and if somebody GAVE it to her she'd mortgage it, go on a spending spree, and go bankrupt and lose it anyway.

Maybe the Duggars can buy it for their eldest's future family.

just a fucking box.

with 20 of their extended family members, and they play ranchero music loudly all day long, and work on fixing 5 broken vehicles in the yard. Neighbors would love that.

That's evil.

Who needs a house that big? I would say a huge extended family would be the ideal tenants! If they all pitched in on the mortgage they could get by cheaply.

Seriously, ridiculously large houses (McMansions), at the same time that nuclear families are shrinking and people have fewer children, is insanity. Super-huge houses kind of irritate me.

looks wedged into the lot. Prices sure have fallen, haven't they. I don't like the architecture at all. It looks like it was built to impress with number of bedrooms, I guess, but at least IMO it has no architecture merit.