Pushing Dirt

Straying to the residential world today…it’s so much more fun over there. Try punching “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” into Zillow.com’s property value estimator.

You’ll find the market value of this 16 bedroom 35 bath home totaling 55,000 square feet on 18 acres.

Apparently the housing market has taken a bit of a hit on the nation’s first house. Zillow figures the White House’s value fell from $389 million in the peak of the market to a measly $295 million today. Zillow figures on a $1.4 million mortgage payment.

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I saw a blogger suggest raffling off your home. Four thousand $100 tickets, for instance, would take care of a $400,000 house. Let a charity work as your partner, and they keep the overage (say you sell five thousand tickets in all).

Might be an interesting play on the commercial side, say for a smaller single tenant net leased investment (say a little $700,000 Dollar General with some assumable non recourse financing?). That could be marketed across the country, unlike a house.

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Isn’t commercial real estate a miserable subject about which to blog? Could my commercial real estate blog be any dryer?

In a rather humorless industry, I’ll take what I can get.

at the end of a long meeting yesterday with a very kind and soft spoken prospective buyer eager to buy one of my listings and cull information out of me, he pulls a 4 inch crumpled number 10 envelope and shows it to me: a big wad of cash. “Get me the deal and this is yours: ten thousand dollars.” Promptly stuffs it back in his pocket. Never seen anything like that happen before. I wonder how many agents have taken money like that. I’m sure it happens all of the time in other pars of the world….

Glengarry Glen Ross has to be the best real estate movie ever. If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to pick it up and watch it. All star cast but worth it for the Alec Baldwin monologue. Widely considered the highlight of the film, it was the only part of the movie David Mamet didn’t write.