This house in Silicon Valley sold for $938,000 this week | Hacker News Reader

This house in Silicon Valley sold for $938,000 this week

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14 pointsericras21 comments

Ugh, these posts go viral everywhere.

Land has value, people. In fact, it’s usually the majority of your home value.

If you don’t understand this and are outraged by people paying money for land, you probably have no business purchasing real estate.

I understand your statement. That doesn't change the reality that most people, even well-compensated white-collar software developer types, cannot afford to spend a million dollars on housing, especially if all that is actually buying is a piece of land with an uninhabitable shack. There is a real, potentially destabilizing housing situation happening up and down the west coast right now.

Well that land is expensive to prevent some guy from simply building a shack for himself.

The more expensive the land, the more likely you’ll build a whole stack of shacks.

In a normal market a developer would buy that land and stick 4+ townhouses on it. But zoning I'm sure prevents that.

I looked up the MLSListings entry and it says zone "R1-8" - that's a new one, usually I see R1 and R2 or R-M which respectively mean only 1 unit, 2 units or multiple units allowed. Not sure if this is an MLS-ism or R1-8 is actually a synonym for R1 or R-M.

Also this lot is in the Willow Glen area which is quite desirable (close enough to city center but still residential-ish neighborhoods).

Deflationary headline: "land with decrepit house sells for market rate near Silicon Valley"

"Land sells for normal price in expensive neighborhood" is not nearly as excitable a headline, true.

It's also not as meaningful. "Home values so high this tiny lot sold for $983,000" would also be accurate. It's weird to assume people are dumb and can't interpret headlines.

You misinterpreted it, otherwise you wouldn't call the lot small. It's a normal lot in an expensive place. If this were in Manhattan or Dubai this would not be news. The headline was intentionally misleading and you 100% fell for it (but I won't call you dumb, that doesn't seem very nice).

That's a little pedantic. It's a tiny lot for a single family home.

Right that's because the value of that land is insane, and getting worse, and out of reach for nearly everyone. No one's outraged someone bought it. No one's saying "hey that's an awful investment".

People are outraged that the housing market in the area is broken, though.

[Here is the Zillow listing](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1375-Bird-Ave-San-Jose-CA...)

It's just for the property value, they're just tearing the house down. The "house" really had nothing to do with the transaction, as crappy as it is.

It likely had negative value since it costs money to demolish and would be more expensive as an empty lot unless you can save the fireplace or something that you can't build in a new build.

I wonder if it's easier to get permits to build there if the current place is in that condition.

Interesting question, since California has so so many building restrictions for eartyhquakes and whatnot. New construction on old buildings is very expensive here, so maybe the price was actually boosted upwards because this would be such an easy lot to build on, without the normal teardown costs of a more modern building.

I'd love to know where it was, and what a house next door that wasn't dilapidated would have sold for.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/1375+Bird+Ave,+San+Jose,+C...

If you go to street view, turn around and it's the house behind the green construction barrier. According to other realtor sites, houses in the neighborhood average $1.16 million.

You can usually figure that out based on the cost of materials to build + land value. Building houses those size probably costs $250k in the SF Bay, so the house next door is probably worth $1.1mm to $1.2mm.

The house is 1,100 sqft for a single story. You'd likely demolish and put up a 2-story 2k sqft unit with a cute small-ish backyard.

What the house next door would sell to next door to the dilapidated house, or next to a well-maintained house?

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