Zillow sticker shock
Posted on February 12, 2006
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I must have been way behind in my reading, because I completely missed the talk around Zillow. Thanks to Erik for blogging it to my attention.
Zillow is a real estate site that lets you see the value of any home (that’s in their system) in a lot of interesting ways. It doesn’t have more that tax appraisal values for our current town, so it wouldn’t have been a lot of help when we were house hunting.
But it does have a lot of information about our old home town of Stamford, Connecticut. When I entered in our old address, I nearly fell off my chair:
$1,268,884!!! We sold it for $1,028,00 last June.
I doubt we would have gotten an extra penny for it. Most of the houses immediately surrounding our old home are valued $700–900K. You have to go about 1/2 mile away to the 1 acre zoned lots to get over a million, and our home was only on 1/2 acre. Many realtors who came to our home in the open houses said that it was a great house, but we couldn’t reasonably expect to get $1 million on our street. Ha! Got an acceptable offer in 5 days.
I can also tell that the satellite shot was taken before 2002. It shows the old pre-construction roofline. Zillow has our old house pinpointed slightly south of reality.
The triangle is where Zillow thinks the house is. The circle is the real thing. It’s the first bird’s eye view I’ve seen of the house at all. Google Maps and other satellite sites don’t have detail that close.
Also Zillow says the house was last updated in 1970, so it doesn’t take our massive renovation into consideration at all. Look at this graph:
The far left $$ is when we bought the house for $315,000 in 1996. The far right $$ is when we sold it. If the graph realized the sudden change from a 2,100 sq. ft. ranch to a 4,200 sq. ft. colonial in 2003, there should be a sharp corner somewhere around the 03 line, no? Instead, the graph shows the home value improving steadily over time as the market changed. If we didn’t do the renovation, we would have gotten around $600,000 for the house, tops. If we could have sold it at all considering the shape the roof was in. You can’t see it in the shot above, but trust me, it was bad.
Whatever happened to your old house pictures, Judi?
Posted on February 6, 2006
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Glad you asked.
As you may or may not know, this very blog started as a sanity check for me in December 2002 as my house in Stamford, Connecticut was undergoing major construction.
I took pictures and documented the entire process from start to finish. It was a huge project. Certainly bigger than I expected when we started.
I first realized the power of the blog when my little Blogger blog was picked up by an Australian site:
Mom building home is more like it. This American blogger (hence the “o” in “Mom”) is documenting every step of the renovations on her home in words and pictures.
It was a ranch but she always pictured it as “colonial” style, and by gosh, she’s going to make it colonial, no matter how many tradesmen it involves. She even thinks it’s worth blogging the spot where the staircase will be, and discussing whether or not to carpet the study. The blog is primarily aimed at keeping relatives informed, after all.
I remember being both tickled and scared when I found this page in my referrers. It honestly never dawned on me that anyone I didn’t know would read what I wrote! Shortly after I got that linky love, I moved my blog in house to Movable Type and named it “A View From Home” so the link changed.
It’s now over 3 years later and that Stamford house is now someone else’s headache. As a result, I never put in the effort to bring the house-related section of the site up to date with the new look & feel of the site. But it’s still all here if you want to look. It’s all there, bad links and all. Always on my “to do” list to go through and rework it into the current templates.
The whole long and bloody saga that took us from this:
to this:
So if you came here from theage.com.au, this will help you get to where you meant to be and will explain why it looks the way it does. Any link that doesn’t work will take you back to the search page. Anything I blogged about the house can be read in the house category. Enjoy.
Rita Asfour
Posted on September 7, 2003
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As I posted previously, Eric and I purchased a limited edition Rita Asfour print while we were in California. It arrived the other day and I hung it in our living room and I’m thrilled with how it looks. Now I just have to get window treatments and pillows for the couch.
Here’s a close up of the print. The artist painted on the print so it’s difficult to see where the print ends off and the paint begins. It’s very different than the original print, in fact.
Finally!
Posted on August 13, 2003
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Yesterday was a big day. We finally got our certificate of occupancy. That means the house is *done*. As I type the driveway is being fixed.
house renovation summary
Posted on July 2, 2003
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Now that the house is 99% done, I don’t plan on putting up new house update pages. Instead, I wrote a little narrative of the whole process and added the pages to my site along with some pictures. Kind of wraps up the whole experience.
