Back in 2016, I wrote a post called Ten. Million. Dollars. which is worth a re-read (and will save me telling you the story again). The elevator pitch is that, around the corner from where I live is a cottage (not even 940 square feet) on a half acre lot which was bought for $10,000,000 by, I would assume, a Chinese national who wanted a safe place to keep his money. In the six years that have passed since then, not a single person has spent a single night there. It’s literally just an asset that has no function to anyone.
As I was walking my dogs on one last pre-trip walk at 5:30 this morning, I walked by the property, which I’ve done hundreds of times before, and it occurred to me that it would be interesting to know what the estimated value of the place was. Amazingly, I hadn’t bothered checking even one time for over six years after I wrote the post, so I fired up Zillow and……….
So…………some rich Chinese dude has taken at least a $6 million hit by putting his money into the “safety” of Palo Alto real estate. Can we just take a moment here to raise our glass to whoever the original owner was and made the deal of a goddamned LIFETIME? He must be laughing his ass off!
And, just to add salt to the wound, the new property owner gets the pleasure of paying property taxes year after year – – which, as you can see, had a modest 1,545% increase when he shelled out a fortune for this tiny home. Remember, he has to pay this every single year, and it goes higher every year.
The historical chart of its price is, naturally, somewhat wonky around the time of this purchase, since all the homes in the neighborhood had the estimated prices likewise go wonky by this completely anomalous purchase. Get a load of this………..
I mean, hey, I’ve lost almost three million bucks on my own home recently, as shown below, but I only paid $500,000 for it! And anyway, I’m a bear, so I’m accustomed to losing money! Suffice it to say, whoever this mystery buyer was didn’t exactly make the wisest choice on the planet.
