If you have €7,000,000 you want to spend before capitalism collapses, you can scoop up Château du Bouilh, built for Louis XVI on the eve of the French Revolution, never occupied by royalty, and lovingly preserved to this day, with period interiors to match. Read the rest
This is the former Newark, Ohio headquarters of The Longaberger Company, a basket manufacturer that went under last year. This week, the developers who bought the property announced that it will become a luxury hotel. According to WCPO, "project officials say the exterior look of a basket will remain intact." Well duh.
From Wikipedia:
The seven-story, 180,000-square-foot building was designed by The Longaberger Company, and executed by NBBJ and Korda Nemeth Engineering. The building opened in 1997. The basket handles weigh almost 150 tons and can be heated during cold weather to prevent ice damage. Originally, Dave Longaberger wanted all of the Longaberger buildings to be shaped like baskets, but only the headquarters was completed at the time of his death.
(Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)
image: Derek Jensen (public domain) Read the rest
A developer plans to transform the massive Nazi-era St. Pauli anti-aircraft and air raid bunker in Hamburg, Germany into a "design and lifestyle hotel," as described by a spokesperson for the Spanish hotel chain NS Hotel Group designing the property. The structure is currently used as a concert venue and art/music studio space. According to the spokesperson, there are plans for the rebuilt facility, seen in the rendering above, to also hold a World War II memorial. The bunker hotel project comes on the heels of other Nazi-era structures that have been redeveloped. From the New York Times:
Read the restIn 2018, the former Gestapo headquarters in Hamburg, where Jews, gay people, Roma and other people targeted by the Nazis were tortured and murdered, a cluster of high-end apartments, luxury boutiques and offices opened for business. Protests ensued.
A never-completed holiday resort that Hitler had intended to be used for workers through his “Strength Through Joy” project has been converted to luxury apartments.
The challenge when integrating these sites into modern-day landscapes is “how to reconcile commemoration and consumption or consumerism,” said Thomas L. Doughton, a senior lecturer at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts who takes students on tours of Holocaust sites across Europe to explore the politics of memory.
Dr. Doughton said there were parallels to places in the United States, including plantations where African-Americans were once enslaved and the sites of atrocities against Native Americans, that have been commercialized at the expense of a blunt reckoning with historical oppression.
Jerry Falwell, Sr founded the Moral Majority, brought evangelicals into the voting booth, elected Ronald Reagan, and changed the face of American politics forever; his son, Jerry Jr now commands the Falwell empire, including Liberty University, which now has $3b in assets. Read the rest
This incredible offshore fortress and defense gun tower at Pembroke Dock, South West Wales, UK is for sale. Read the rest
Saddleback Cay, the private island seen in the Fyre Festival promotional videos, is for sale. Only accessible by boat, the 35-acre Bahamian island features seven beaches, a main house, and multiple cottages. It's yours for just $11.8 million, FEMA tents and cheese sandwiches not included.
(CNN)
First American Financial Corp is a Fortune 500 company that insures titles on peoples' property; their insecure website exposed 885,000,000 records for property titles, going back 16 years, including bank accounts (with scanned statements), Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, scanned drivers' licenses, tax records, mortgage records, etc -- when notified of the error, the company (which employs 18,000 people and grossed more than $5.7B last year) closed the misconfiguration. Read the rest
An Orlando homeowner owned a second lot next to the house. He added a pool that straddled the property lines. Then, following foreclosure, the two lots were sold to different owners, one of whom erected a fence. Over the pool. Through the garage.
When you're just dipping your toe in the real estate market
It's all so very "Florida"! Cities that don't enforce setback rules. Cities that tolerate structures spanning multiple residential lots. Sales that split combined lots into multiple lots without consideration of what is on the lots. Inspectors, appraisers and mortgage lenders saying "this is fine!". People building fences over pools and through garages. Read the rest
York's Wild Kingdom Zoo & Fun Park in York, Maine is up for sale. For just $14.2 million, you could be the proprietor of this beachside attraction complete with the likes of lions, monkeys, lemurs, camels, pigs, deer, kangaroos, a butterfly kingdom, paddle boats, miniature golf, bumper cars, and a haunted house. No lowball offers though.
According to owner Joe Barberi, a realtor called and “asked if we would consider selling the park. Not getting any younger and everything having to do with its price, I told him he was free to pursue the idea.he could find someone who would like to buy it and would be willing to pay the price without any negotiations then, fine, it’s a deal,” he said.
Barberi's a patient man.
“For now, it’s business as usual,” he said last week. “71 days until opening.”
You could be the new proprietor of Katikati Naturist Park, a popular nudist resort in Bay of Plenty, New Zealand! The 5.7 hectares (approx. 14 acres) features motel units, cabins, tent sites, a swimming pool, mini-golf, saunas, and, of course, hot tubs. It's listed at NZ$380,000. From Stuff.co.nz:
The park is surrounded by gardens, a secluded bush drop and a river. Guests are able to partake in mini golf, pétanque and swimming, provided they abide by the "compulsory nudity" rule.
Of the park, (Coffeys property broker Matt) D'Anvers says "there are no sexual overtones whatsoever" and that guests are "simply people who love to run around with no clothes on".
"There are quite a lot of families that go there."
Interested parties may want to visit the property on New Year's Eve for the annual "World Famous Nudeoke" event.
Cheap Old Houses is one of my favorite Instagram accounts. The folks behind it scour real estate listings around the U.S. to find and showcase cool old homes being sold at ridiculously inexpensive prices, i.e. real estate pR0n. Sure, most of the houses are in places I'd never move to or they are "major fixers" but they're all under $100K. Well, it seems that the feed is becoming too popular, as evidenced by this PSA they released on Friday:
View this post on Instagram
Here are some examples of these cheap old homes:
View this post on InstagramRead the rest
Like the billions in public money destined for Amazon's benefit and that of the world's richest man, it's all perfectly legal.
The two employees decided to the buy units just before the first press reports surfaced that Amazon was likely to choose Long Island City for its new headquarters, Mr. Aguayo said. The buyers now live in New Jersey and Queens, he added.
While employees aren’t permitted to buy and sell stocks based on nonpublic information, several real estate lawyers said they were aware of no such prohibition for real-estate transactions.
The WSJ reports no "reliable figures" on sales in the area since Amazon's announcement (and immediately before it, evidently) but it's explosive. One brokerage says it sold 150 condos in the last four days, 15 times its normal volume. Read the rest
Have you ever wondered if someone died in your house, or worse?
Enter DiedInHouse.com. A simple $11.99 search through them will tell you everything you (probably don't) want to know.
A query on this website will uncover if a specific address is "stigmatized," meaning that it's got issues beyond its physical condition. Sellers are generally not under legal obligation to share if something horrible -- like a murder, suicide, or, say, a meth lab -- has happened on a property. And they certainly aren't required to disclose "paranormal" activity.
Software engineer Roy Condrey founded the site in 2013 after getting a strange text.
Read the restThe website’s creation begins like a ghost story. ...Condrey received a text message in the middle of the night from one of his tenants that read: “Did you know that your house is haunted?” Condrey went down a cyber rabbit hole seeking, but not finding, an easy way to determine if his property had indeed seen a gruesome crime or fatality.
“I went online to find a ‘Carfax’ of sorts for deaths in homes and I didn’t find anything, but I did find pages and pages of people asking if there’s a way to find out if their house is haunted,” says Condrey, who rents out several properties. He later learned through his data collection that, in fact, at least 4.5 million homes nationwide have had documented deaths take place on the premises. The number of homeowners that know about the history of their home, however, is unknown.
The Hollywood studio that crushed Lance Bass' dream of buying the Brady Bunch house has been revealed. It's HGTV. But the amount they paid has not yet been disclosed.
'N Sync singer Lance Bass ... was “heartbroken” when his deal fell through after the bidding deadline. In an Instagram post, he wrote that an undisclosed corporate buyer wanted the house "at any cost."
Bass doesn't seem to have any hard feelings, though. In a tweet published Tuesday, the singer explained, "How can you be mad at HGTV? My television is stuck on that channel." He added, "Kudos, HGTV. I know you will do the right thing with the house. That was always my biggest worry. I can smile again."
Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced the sale Tuesday morning:
“One of our projects for HGTV will speak to those Brady Bunch fans on the call... You may have heard that the house from the iconic series was recently on the market in California. I’m excited to share that HGTV is the winning bidder and will restore the Brady Bunch home to its 1970s glory as only HGTV can. More detail to come over the next few months but we’ll bring all the resources to bear to tell safe, fun stories about this beloved piece of American TV history.”
Buy, buy, buy.
Previously:
Here's the story of how 'N Sync's Lance Bass won and then lost the Brady Bunch house
'N Sync's Lance Bass tweeted on Friday afternoon how he had won the bid to buy the real-life Brady Bunch house.
Super excited to announce they accepted my offer on the #BradyBunch house last night!!! This is going to be a fun project!
— Lance Bass (@LanceBass) August 3, 2018
A couple of Brady kids congratulated him.
Actress Maureen McCormick (Marcia Brady), wrote:
Congratulations! ❤️❤️❤️ May all your problems from here on out always be solved in a half hour! 😉
— Maureen McCormick (@MoMcCormick7) August 4, 2018
Susan Olsen (Cindy Brady) wrote:
View this post on Instagram
But by Saturday night, he shared that the agent called to tell him a Hollywood studio was willing to buy the house "at any cost":
Read the restMarcia Marcia Marcia! Im feeling heartbroken today. As many of you may have heard, we placed the winning bid on the iconic Brady Bunch house—at least that’s what we were told. The agent representing the estate informed us we made the winning bid (which was WAY over the asking price) after the final deadline for all offers had passed—even writing up the “winning bid” for my team after informing me of the good news.
The house at Klump Ave. and Dilling St. in Studio City, also known as the Brady Bunch house, has been put on the market for $1.885 million.
The Brady Bunch house, a Traditional-style residence near the Colfax Meadows neighborhood, was used for outdoor representations of the beloved television family’s abode. That included the show’s opening and closing scenes as well as numerous interludes to denote the time of day. Interior scenes for “The Brady Bunch” were filmed in studio.
Violet and George McCallister bought the two-bedroom, three-bathroom house in 1973 for $61,000, records show. The series ran from September 1969 to March 1974 before moving into reruns in syndication.
Ernie Carswell, a Douglas Elliman agent who is listing the property, said the split-level house has been updated and upgraded but retains almost the exact interior decor from that era, though the layout does not resemble the TV show home.
The article reports that Carswell is expecting many lookie-loos and to thwart the masses, he will not be holding any open houses. Interested buyers will need to book an appointment to see the "never-ending attraction." There's also a chance that its new owners will tear it down as it "sits in an area that has been ripe for tear-downs and new development." Caswell says the sellers would prefer to sell it to someone who will preserve it.
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So, I have a funny story about this property. A few years ago I had the opportunity to ride in a Wienermobile. Read the rest
London's property market continues its implosion, brought on by a combination of tightening capital controls (much of the market exists to help offshore criminals launder their money), Brexit, and a long-overdue correction to a wildly inflated market. Read the rest
