FREMONT >> “Home is condemned. Enter at your own risk.”
Those aren’t words you generally see on a listing for a million-dollar home. But they failed to deter buyers interested in one property in Fremont’s pricey Mission San Jose neighborhood.
The decrepit three-bedroom, two-bath house on Bruce Drive sold late last month for $1.23 million, even though it’s uninhabitable. That seven-figure price tag, for a house described in its Redfin listing as “beyond fixer,” further highlights the intensity of the housing shortage inflating Bay Area home prices.
Despite the home’s condition, buyers lined up, said listing agent Larry Gallegos of Better Home and Gardens, Reliance Partners.
“It was nonstop,” he said. “Nonstop phone calls and emails from the day I put it on the market until the day it went pending. Nonstop from morning ’till night.”
Gallegos received at least three all-cash offers for the home, which was on the market for about a week. He requested cash offers, he said, because lenders typically won’t put up funds for a house in such poor condition.
The house ended up selling for about a quarter-million dollars over its asking price.
Gallegos described the home, which had sat vacant for years, as “totally unlivable.” Water came in through holes in the roof, and mildew covered the ceilings, he said. But that didn’t matter to prospective buyers, who hoped to tear down the house and build their dream home on the roughly 9,400 square-foot lot.
“They didn’t buy the house,” Gallegos said. “They bought the dirt.”
Watching a condemned home sell for more than $1 million is the new Bay Area normal, said Nancie Allen, president-elect of the Bay East Association of Realtors.
“If you’re not used to seeing this all the time, then it’s shocking to you,” she said. “But this is not shocking to me.”
Last week the owner of a burned-out house in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood listed the property for $800,000. Holly Barr, the realtor selling that house, said the price is standard for the desirable location.
Similarly, the Mission San Jose neighborhood, where the condemned house sold last month, has long been one of Fremont’s priciest — partly because of its high-quality schools, Allen said.
But 64-year-old Gallegos, who has lived in Fremont most of his life, remembers when it was an affordable city.
“My father’s first house in Fremont cost $13,000,” he said. “Times have changed.”
The median sales price for a single-family home in Fremont was nearly $1.3 million last month, according to the Bay East Association of Realtors. And prices have been climbing all over the Bay Area.
The median value of a home in San Jose is $1.1 million, according to Zillow. It’s $1.3 million in San Francisco, and $800,000 in Santa Cruz County.
“Because there’s such low inventory on the market,” Allen said, “people are getting into whatever they can.”
