Tag: Homes for Sale

Homes for Sale
06/22/10 6:36pm

Pearland Home of the Bloggess Is Guaranteed Zombie-Free. Sort Of

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Interiors, Pearland, Southern Trails
26 Comments

Jenny Lawson, known to her thousands of devoted blog and Twitter followers as the Bloggess, tells Swamplot her home in Southern Trails is “pretty and airy and there are NO ZOMBIES around. Unless you’re into zombies.”

And if we are? “Then I can get you zombies. Probably.” This is in Pearland, right?

Oh, but the place looks so . . . normal? Maybe that’s because the Kitchen shamwow comforter insulation pictured above — installed late last month to absorb any suds that might emerge from a laundry-detergent-fortified dishwasher — is missing from the listing photos. The listing does include, however, this family Castle-Study Area:

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Homes for Sale
06/14/10 8:14pm

Dunstan Lounge Plays House

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Southampton Extension
17 Comments

How many private tables can you fit in the top-floor VIP room? If it weren’t for those pesky Southampton Place Extension deed restrictions, this new mod stucco home on Dunstan near Morningside would be a prime candidate to become a Rice Village nightclub. Just 4 doors down from the Bolsover lot! Rope line can go through the garage if it rains.

But could you charge enough for bottle service to make a dent in the almost-$2.5-million asking price?

Have a tour before the light show begins:

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Carlton Woods
06/03/10 3:57pm

A Look Inside The Woodlands Mansion Chamillionaire Gave Back to the Bank

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Foreclosures, Homes for Sale, The Woodlands
13 Comments

Here’s what you wanted to see: nice fuzzy photos of the 7,583-sq.-ft. mansion in a gated neighborhood in The Woodlands recently repossessed from rap star Chamillionaire. Talking to TMZ reporter and comedian Adam Glyn yesterday in front of the W Hotel near New York’s Times Square, the Houston native says he gave the house in Carlton Woods back to the bank because he “just didn’t feel like it was a good business investment to keep paying that much mortgage for a house that I’m never at.”

This house actually was my most expensive mortgage. And I decided to let that house go because the house ended up being worth nothing. When the market went down, the house went down too and it was just worth nothing. . . . I paid close to 2 million dollars for the house and I decided to just let it go, give it back to the bank. It wasn’t a situation where they came and took it from me. I felt like I didn’t want to pay that much money a month for a house that I’m never at. I was never at the house, I was always on the road touring . . .

The rap star, who bought the home under the name Hakeem Seriki Millionaire Mindframe Trust (Hakeem Seriki is his real name), actually paid $2.125 million for the property in 2006. TMZ reports the home was foreclosed on after the owner failed to make several payments. The 5-bedroom, 5 1/2-bath house on an acre-plus corner lot may have been “worth nothing” to him, but the bank will likely be able to squeeze a fair bit of money out of it:

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Baybridge
06/02/10 1:07pm

New to You: Sugar Land Waterfront Ranch Loft

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Home Design, Homes for Sale, Interiors, Renovations, Sugar Land
17 Comments

Just another one of those Sugar Land loft-plan Ranch renovations with some of the usual crazy ceiling action. This one’s right on Oyster Creek, with a dock in back:

Granite tile floors? Check. Floating island kitchen? Check. Valance-mounted bouquets? Check:

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Homes for Sale
05/28/10 4:17pm

Audley International Style: FrogPad’s Machine For Living

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Renovations, Upper Kirby
14 Comments

Perched amid the Upper Kirby office-building ghetto just west of Eastside and south of West Alabama, the building at 3231 Audley dates from 1961, during developer Gerald Hines’s reign over Richmond Ave. Now that it’s had some midlife body work, the property is for sale again.

The Weather Research Center, a research and education nonprofit located next door at 3221 Audley, bought the building in the mid-nineties, but never occupied the space. (The organization moved to the Museum District in 2006 and opened its doors as The Weather Museum.)

Linda Marroquin, CEO of tech company FrogPad, snatched the shell of the office building on stilts in December 2006 and transformed it. She’d lived in another converted building across the street for 9 years, and says she had her eyes on the property the whole time. Besides running FrogPad, a business that sells one-handed keyboards, Marroquin is a serial renovator. She worked with local designer and contractor Michael X. Flynn to convert the building to a residence; it’s her fourth renovation in Houston. Over the next 2 years Marroquin and Flynn gutted the space and built out another 2,500 sq. ft. on top. The result is the high-tech executive’s interpretation of the Villa Savoye — as it might have landed on a 5,000-sq.-ft. Houston lot just a couple blocks from the Jack In The Box on Richmond.

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Attractions
05/24/10 6:33pm

Goodbye, Aurora Picture Show: Houston’s Best Known Movie House, Up for Sale

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Homes for Sale, Religious Facilities, Renovations, Sunset Heights
3 Comments

Home theater specialist Andrea Grover is leaving Houston — and selling the Sunset Heights church-turned-movie-theater-turned-residence where she founded a well-known local arts organization 13 years ago. For the 10 years that it operated on Aurora St. just east of Main, Aurora Picture Show featured a ridiculous range of obscure and not-quite-as-obscure film and video screenings in its sanctuary space, along with 13 weddings and a couple of memorial services. Then 2 years ago, Grover explains, the microcinema went south — to Montrose:

Aurora relocated its office and library to a bungalow in “Doville” (the neighborhood affectionately named after Dominique de Menil). Their programming has been nomadic and site-specific in order to attract new audiences and activate different sites in Houston. This strategy has worked extremely well for the organization, which has seen increased attendance and membership as a result of catering to Houston’s love for new experiences and one-of-a-kind events. I retired at the end of 2008, and Aurora is doing so well that I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner!

The house includes a movie chapel with pew seating for 96, audio-video equipment, and a “disused baptistry,” along with a small freestanding outhouse for theatergoers that was “designed by a well-known architect (Michael Bell), though you would never guess it,” writes Grover.

The home comes with a trailer, too:

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Buying and Selling
05/24/10 4:16pm

Comment of the Day: Local Experts

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Comments, Homes for Sale, Houston Heights, Quicklink
No Comments

COMMENT OF THE DAY: LOCAL EXPERTS “Wow, these comments are amazing…quite obviously you aren’t the target audience for a renovated Heights bungalow. Not to sound like Jeff Foxworthy but if you don’t like subway tiles, craftsman style, small (to Houston) homes or high prices per square foot you aren’t a good person to guess on the price of a house in the Heights. Similarly I wouldn’t make a guess on a Katy home because I wouldn’t ever have the desire to live there. . . .” [Wannabe, commenting on Swamplot Price Adjuster: The Heights of 2-2ness]

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Homes for Sale
05/24/10 2:25pm

Swamplot Price Adjuster: Riverside Terrace Nice, or Just Nicey Nice?

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Interiors, Price Adjuster, Riverside Terrace
27 Comments

The Swamplot Price Adjuster runs on your nominations! Found a property you think is poorly priced? Send an email to Swamplot, and be sure to include a link to the listing or photos. Tell us about the property, and explain why you think it deserves a price adjustment. Then tell us what you think a better price would be. Unless requested otherwise, all submissions to the Swamplot Price Adjuster will be kept anonymous.

Location: 2412 Wichita St., Riverside Terrace
Details: 3-4 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths; 3,400 sq. ft. on a 10,200-sq.-ft. lot
Price: $729,000
History: On the market for almost 8 months. Price cut $21K at the beginning of May

A reader who lives in the “crazy quilt of a neighborhood” of this Riverside Terrace listing thinks this recently remodeled home dating from 1946 is worth considerably less than it’s going for:

Priced, as you can see, at just under 3/4 of a million (!) in a neighborhood where homes sell for around 200K on average. What? I mean it looks nicey nice and all, but not THAT nice.

Or is it? “It looks great in person,” admits our correspondent, after a quick drive-by. Did you catch those front doors, “replicas of those at the Chinese Embassy”? Or . . . what’s behind them?

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Foreclosures
05/24/10 11:20am

No Auction Action for the Harold St. Family Home Turned Party Pad

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Homes for Sale, Montrose, Price Reductions, Streetscapes, Trees
8 Comments

How’d that foreclosure auction go for the humongous early-eighties brick house on Harold St. in Montrose used in recent years as a party pad and chainsaw test site?

Let’s just say that the auction listing is gone, the property is back on MLS — and the price has been cut another $45K. But unlike the sudden, swift, and unexplained felling of the mature street trees surrounding this property, the chopping of the list price has resulted from a series of 6 hacks, from $644,900 last October to $469,900 just last week.

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Homes for Sale
05/19/10 10:02am

Swamplot Price Adjuster: The Heights of 2-2ness

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Houston Heights, Price Adjuster
49 Comments

The Swamplot Price Adjuster runs on your nominations! Found a property you think is poorly priced? Send an email to Swamplot, and be sure to include a link to the listing or photos. Tell us about the property, and explain why you think it deserves a price adjustment. Then tell us what you think a better price would be. Unless requested otherwise, all submissions to the Swamplot Price Adjuster will be kept anonymous.

Location: 1447 Oxford St., Houston Heights
Details: 2 bedrooms, 2 baths; 1,498 sq. ft. on a 6,600-sq.-ft. lot
Price: $421,500
History: On the market since the beginning of last December. Price cut $5K in mid-April.

How long could Swamplot readers go without some good old-fashioned price-sniping in the Heights? The latest submission for the Price Adjuster focuses on this little 1920 home on the corner of 15th St.:

There’s just so much a 2/2 can go for in the Heights. Also, it has no garage. The kitchen has been updated but it’s not a nice kitchen. Nice backyard for sure with trellis and a bit of storage, but at the end of the day, it’s still a 2/2.

Well, then . . . what price would sell this place?

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Home Design
05/13/10 12:16pm

Behind the Westminster Wall, Still Modern After All These Years

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Homes for Sale, Huntleigh, Memorial
31 Comments

Back on the market for what looks to be the first time in a couple of years: This 1959 garage-free number on Westminster Dr. in Memorial, just a couple doors down from Chimney Rock. The house was designed by Houston architects Wilson, Morris, Crain, and Anderson — just a few years before the company drew up plans for the Astrodome.

What? No giant west-facing windows in front? And what’s behind door number 1, anyway?

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Ferndale
05/12/10 1:59pm

Hangin’ with the Large and Lonely Homes of Bammel Lane Park

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Homes for Sale, New Construction: Residential, Price Reductions, Upper Kirby
14 Comments

A couple of readers have expressed — how best to put this? — concern for the financial well-being of the developers behind the Bammel Park Homes featured on Swamplot early last year. Writes one recent visitor to the complex:

The development was originally intended to have 12 homes. There are only three complete and it doesn’t look as if any more will be built. . . . The front gate is rusted, the driveways haven’t been paved, the fountain is clogged, there isn’t any landscaping and loose wires are hanging here and there.

Didn’t Black Diamond Development claim the park-like setting would in fact be “enchanted”? Meanwhile, the asking prices for the hefty properties at 3204, 3244, and 3248 Bammel Ln. have been cut in three hacks each from $2.239 million to $1.798 million. Just look at all the bricks that includes:

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Homes for Sale
05/11/10 4:55pm

A Good Sale in Royden Oaks Takes Time

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Interiors, Price Reductions, Royden Oaks
3 Comments

Selling this home a block north of Westheimer in Royden Oaks has been a long slog — and it’s not over yet! Longtime Swamplot readers will recognize the hulking 4,303 sq. ft. stucco mansion, sitting patiently like a lion with garage-apartment paws, from its Neighborhood Guessing Game appearance last June. (Well, at least the reader who won a steak dinner off of it will.) By that time, the property had been on the market for 4 months, and wasn’t budging from its 1,495,000 asking price.

But it’s done some budging since. By January of this year, the 3-bedroom, 4-1/2 bath 1987 property was up with a new listing — for $1,449,000. And just last weekend, there was a bigger price cut:

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Homes for Sale
05/10/10 2:02pm

Coming Down from the Heights: How the Swamplot Price Adjuster Works

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Houston Heights, Price Adjuster, Price Reductions
No Comments

Whatever happened to that little Swamplot Price Adjuster feature — you know, the one where readers report on a property for sale that appears to need some pricing correction, and suggest a better price for it? It’s still waiting for your smart submissions! In the meantime, here’s some evidence that it actually works:

Last November, when a reader nominated the 1920 house perched on an 8,200-sq.-ft. lot at the corner of 10th St. and Cortlandt in the Heights, a bunch of you wrote in to suggest that the list price was a bit steep. The nominator gave a target:

Asking $600,000 for this is a joke and I think it should be at the most $350,000.

By December, the price had been lowered to $450K. And then, by late March, the house was gone from MLS. What’s happened to it since?

You guessed it: A brand new listing appeared at the end of April, with a new set of photos and — what? Is it listed at $350,000 now?

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Bayou Woods
05/06/10 1:33pm

Mobster Sale: Quiet Little Witness-Protecting Memorial Mansion Sheds a Cool Million

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Crime, Home Decor, Price Reductions
15 Comments

The daintily decorated Bayou Woods mansion owned by a Vincent Cabella — put up for sale last year for $4 million but reduced to $3.45 million by the time Swamplot featured it in March — has been discounted again. Now come up with just $2.45 million and the cozy little 5-6 bedroom, 5 1/2-bath retreat is yours!

How could you refuse an offer like this?

Of course, this isn’t just your run-of-the-mill elephant-statues-by-the-front-yard-fountain Memorial Dr. show-off-piece. According to the New York Daily News, it’s actually the hideaway mobster Vincent Palermo — aka Vinny Ocean — retired to after he testified against some of his former underlings in New Jersey’s DeCavalcante crime family and joined the federal witness protection program. (Cabella, crime reporter Greg B. Smith explained, was the former Mafia boss’s new Houston name.)

But he’s led an active retirement:

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