Real Estate

11 posts

US Median Home Value Map Mashup

for_saleHousing bubble alert. With interest rates low and a lot of demand now is a great time to be a seller. The nice people over at Realtor.org have layered their market data that used to only come in Excel format onto Google Maps for a nice mashup, as the internet kids like to call it.

The data below gives you a quick view to the median price of a single family detached home in different metropolitan statistical areas. Did you catch all those loaded words there? Let’s break it down.

Just remember, buy low – sell high. Continue reading

A Detroit Skyscraper Costs Less than a Condo

The Penobscot building in downtown Detroit just sold for $5M to a Toronto based company. The selling price was $5.00 per square foot for the 1M square foot building. Detroit office space vacancy rates are currently around 25%. But for the same amount of money you can get 173 Perry Street, Unit 4N in Manhattan. Assuming you live there or can rent it out the vacancy rate should be zero. Continue reading

This Mid-19th Century Fort Can Be Yours

This is some unreal real estate. An American fort built in 1844 to deter British invasion from the north, Fort Montgomery lies abandoned and unwanted at the US-Canada border on Lake Champlain. An earlier plan was halted when a surveyors’ error was discovered and the builders realized that the 45th parallel, the US-Canada border, was almost a mile south, placing the fort squarely in enemy territory. An 1842 treaty adjusted the border and the site of ‘Fort Blunder’ became the legitimate property of the United States. Continue reading

Celebrity Real Estate Porn: Ellen Degeneres and Portia De Rossi

Ellen and Portia are looking to sell their massive estate in Beverly Hills for $60 million dollars. I know, I know, this may not be as unlived in and well kept as Huguette Clark’s 42-room Fifth Avenue Manhattan apartment,  $32 million Cold War bomb shelter in Connecticut, or her Santa Barbara estate but it does look pretty nice. I mean, Ellen did buy it for $29 million initially and has put $19 million towards snapping up surrounding mansions. The new, even more massive estate sprawls across an impressive 24,000 square feet which is not too shabby for the star of Mr.Wrong.
Continue reading