COMMENT OF THE DAY: UPPER MIDTOWN “Talking of rimshotting onto the popularity of neighboring areas did anyone else notice that the Alexan Height[s] apartments became the Midtown Heights after changing hands despite the fact that they are at I-10 and Oxford. Exactly how big is Midtown these days?” [Jimbo, commenting on Watch for Cottage Cheese Dropping from Heights]
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Tag: Real Estate Marketing
This 1,300-square-foot, 2-bedroom, 2-bath home planted in a lot-sized subdivision in Shady Acres called “Cottages in the Heights” just shed $5K from its asking price and is resting at $184,000 after a month on the market. But Heights home shopper John Whiteside still isn’t buying it:
These things always seem like the real estate equivalent of conjoined twins with birth defects. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but your children are stuck together, and their garage doors are bizarrely oversized, and their internal organs are jumbled around in unfortunate ways.â€
Ever wonder what’s really going on in some of the houses listed for sale on MLS? Sure you do. In real estate, everyone’s a voyeur.
The trick for agents, now that so many houses are just sitting there — is finding a way to appeal to that urge to look.
Swamplot’s been keeping this house in Riverview under surveillance. It’s just south of the Gulf Freeway and Telephone Rd., not too far from the Orange Show. It has 2 or 3 bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths, and dates from 1945.
What’s the story here?
C’mon, wouldn’t you like to . . . peek around the house a bit for yourself?
Oh, yeah. You know you want to . . .
House designer Jack Preston Wood has apparently had second thoughts about his plan to build two 4-story townhomes where this bungalow now sits in the Freeland Historic District. The city historic commission turned down both his new-construction and demolition plans last month, and neighbors have been writing him letters and protesting every weekend since.
Freeland Historic District is a collection of 35 bungalows, marked down from the original 37, on two blocks south of White Oak Blvd. at the damp end of the Heights. There’s been no new construction in the district — which was designated just last fall — and residents have been working hard to keep it that way.
Wood tells Chronicle reporter Robin Foster that neither the Realtor nor the owner of the house told him that the house at 536 Granberry was in an historic district before he signed a contract to buy it:
COMMENT OF THE DAY: PRESSURE TO CONFORM “The maximum conforming loan at an 80% LTV translates to a selling price of just over $520k. Given the current interest rate premium on jumbo mortgages, new-builds that are just a little over this amount are tending to languish on the market, whereas those in the sub-$500k range seem to still be selling briskly. If I were a developer planning on putting up some $600k+ houses, I might re-think my plans and target buyers who can take advantage of the current low rates for conforming loans.” [Angostura, commenting on Latest Greenwood King Report: On the Double!]
This 4,148-sq.-ft. 4-bedroom, 4-bath home on three-quarters of an acre in Piney Point Shadows is listed for sale on HAR at $1.1 million. But don’t waste your time making an offer for anything less: The sellers won’t take it.
At least not until after April 22nd. And even then, not unless the auction for the property the listing agent is holding on that date fizzles.
Following up on a comment made on this site recently by another reader — noting Houston’s recent but storied “tradition of adopting styles that clearly evolved in climates very different from ours” — Swamplot resident Robert W. Boyd sends in photos of a notable exception: the Bermuda Woods Apartments in Spring Branch, near Long Point and Gessner.
Boyd reports after his visit:
The townhomes are superficially like Bermuda–the pastel colors, the long vertical window shades.
Isn’t that the idea?
Thanks to some helpful Swamplot commenters, we have more of the scoop on that railroad-track-side townhome featured on this site yesterday. The project, developed by Northgate Custom Homes, is called Villas at the Heights. And yes, units are still available!
114-M Heights Blvd., which has the front-row seat on the railroad track just north of Center St., is in fact listed at the same price it started at when it first hit the market, a week and a year ago. However, it’s been marked down three times and up twice since then, reaching a low of $296,900 last May and a high of $324,900 last August. Today, you could snap this place up for a mere $299,900!
If you like the track frontage but feel a bit nervous about owning a townhome that directly faces busy Heights Blvd., you might prefer Unit A in back, available for the same price. It’s the same model, which Northgate calls “The Blue Violet.”
A peek at the interiors of the development’s model home:
WELCOME TO BIZARRO HEIGHTS. WHAT ARE YOU DRINKING? Waving a highly abbreviated feature-comparison table, blogger tshu declares the new Washington Ave. is really “Bizarro Heights.” When will the custom neighborhood street signs go up? “For better or worse, Washington Avenue now provides all the elements that the Heights traditionally could not: trendy bars, restaurants, and large apartment complexes. . . . The explosive growth along Washington can be partly attributed to the support from the neighboring Heights area.” [Feed the Heights]
Looks like HAR has responded to some Swamplot reader criticism and added a bit of needed real estate to the bottom of the charts in its latest report — as well as a thin white line to indicate actual, non-adjusted values. The changes and the addition of the latest numbers show a market that doesn’t seem quite so steady as last month’s HAR report made it seem.
There were 25.9 percent fewer property sales this February than last, according to the report. But our reader’s 3-month-moving average chart doesn’t look any worse than last month:
The solar-powered portable building fashioned from recycled shipping containers that’s been waiting patiently at the corner of Hyde Park and Waugh since last September isn’t just the sales office for the Mirabeau B. condo. It’s also a prototype.
Designers Joe Meppelink and Andrew Vrana of Metalab have teamed up with ttweak Renewables (creators of the Mirabeau B.’s sales graphics) and Harvest Moon (the condo’s developer) to market the structures, which they call SPACE. That stands for Solar Powered Attractive Container for Everyone — though more likely it’ll be for companies that want a sales center that also works as a big green sign.
A reader writes in to poke fun at a few “awfully massaged” charts included in last week’s monthly MLS report from the Houston Association of Realtors, calling them “the unintended consequences of crazy average-it-all-together-to-create-a-veneer-of-stability reporting”:
….the latest monthly sales numbers for single family and condo/townhomes are ACTUALLY OFF THE BOTTOM OF THE CHARTS!!
HAR’s sales-volume charts show 12-month moving averages, but even that isn’t enough to keep the latest numbers from dropping through the floor:
The unintentional comedy arises from the fact that the latest values very prominently highlighted in the boxes (2,827 & 203) are well below the scale on either of these sales volume graphs. . . .
It also reveals WAAY TO MUCH data smoothing on their part which calls into question their credibility. Their charts convey almost no information -on purpose.
Okay, but if you’ve got any actual information to share, break it to us gently, please:
OLDER NAMES FOR HOUSTON’S NAUGHTY BITS The East Downtown Management District rolled out its new EaDo identity package last month, but John Nova Lomax prefers the older and rougher neighborhood names: “The 400 block of deep Milam was a sink of vice and sin called Catfish Reef. Lower Washington Avenue was a swanky district called Vinegar Hill. A good chunk of Fourth Ward, or FoWa for short, was given over to Houston’s Red Light District (ReLiDi) and was known as The Reservation, while the toughest corner in Fifth Ward (FiWa) was known as Pearl Harbor. Mid Lane near the non-yet-built Galleria was a Mad Men-like seen of whiskey-fuelled poolside soirees that earned it the name Sin Alley. Even the Richmond Strip seems evocative compared to these moronic, truncated, New York-wannabe handles.” [Hair Balls; previously in Swamplot]
MAYBE HE JUST LIKED THE PARTY HAT ON TOP? Mayor White takes a turn hawking the expensive rentals at the Finger Companies’ One Park Place highrise Downtown. Rick Casey thinks he could have delivered a better pitch: “When it comes to a place to live, people are motivated by a dream. Only a pocket-protected city planner could have his dreams triggered by such phrases as ‘residential infrastructure,’ or ‘leisure destination,’ or ‘luxury multifamily rentals,’ or ‘price points lower than you would think,’ or ‘landmark project on a unique site.’ The mayor managed to stuff all these infelicitous phrases and more onto a single page. One can only speculate why White wrote the letter. He had already done enough, it seems to me, by marshalling the money, the research and the architects to build Discovery Green, a beautiful and exciting 12-acre park across the street from Finger’s property. It’s the best front yard an urban dweller could want, and the city mows the grass.” [Houston Chronicle]
“Ronald McDonald will soon have all of his parking spaces back,” writes Swamplot tipster Michele, who also sends in these photos from yesterday. They show the sales office for Randall Davis’s canceled Titan highrise — which hung out in the McDonald’s parking lot on Post Oak for many months — boarded up and readied for its next location and rebranding assignment.
