Weekends are a bit different at the Irvine Housing Blog. We don’t get as much traffic as during the week because everyone has a life, and hopefully, they are out living it on the weekend. We are. It is a good time to try out different things and see how people like it.
Today, you will probably think I am a realtor. Today’s property I am profiling simply because I think it is beautiful. It is ridiculously priced, and it has been on the market a long time, but it is a beautiful home. I will probably never be in a position to own something like it, but it is nice to dream…
Price: $2,449,900
7 Meryton
Irvine, CA 92603
Beds: 5
Baths: 4.5
Sq. Ft.: 3,400
$/Sq. Ft.: $721
Lot Size: 0.41 acres
Type: Single Family Residence
Style: Traditional
Year Built: 1995
Stories: Two Levels
View(s): Hills, Panoramic, Trees/Woods, Has View
Area: Turtle Rock
County: Orange
MLS#: S491216
Status: Active
On Redfin: 151 days
Unsold in 90+ days
Opportunity knocks! This elegant estate offers the ultimate in privacy and resort-like grounds. Situated on a cul-de-sac & w/ only one neighbor, this spectacular home showcases incomparable detailing & sophistication thruout. Perfect for entertaining, it even includes putting greens w/ 6 holes! Granite countertops in kitchen, powder & thruout master, custom wall color, sculpted carpeting & more. It’s in a great location and is incredibly private. Move in for the holidays!
Opportunity knocks! An opportunity to overpay for real estate.
sophistication thruout — interesting oxymoron.
Move in for the holidays! Don’t you wish?
Actually, this house has a good lesson about sales and marketing. This house is well presented and it has everything someone could want in a home, and yet it isn’t selling. THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH!!! It appears that all the marketing in the world cannot overcome a price tag that is simply too high.
That is a gorgeous house. Love the den (but it would need lots more bookshelves). And how does the den’s denizen get the books that are there down to read them? I have a thing about 2 story windows and 2 story rooms period. How are you going to clean those windows? Get cobwebs off the ceiling? Change any light fixtures that might be up there? Also, usually the rooms that have the 2 stories are anti-cozy.
Mind you I like ceilings that are higher than the standard 8 feet, just not 2 stories.
I suppose if you could really afford a house like that you could afford a covey of servants to figure out how to do all those things. I betray my essentially mid middle class upbringing, I suppose.
—–
This is a really beautiful house. However, the builder could have done a little better with the interior millwork in the living room and could have put more bookcases in the library. Good millwork could easily be added to the living room and maybe the seller would want to give back, oh, about $500,000 to allow for that, and for the fact that the price is too high to begin with.
I like a 10′ -12′ ceiling but not double height. It makes for very cold rooms and stratospheric heat bills in this cold midwestern climate, even though that hasn’t stopped builders in this area from building or buying extremely lofty lofts or houses with double-height rooms.
I believe the recent fad for double-height rooms will fade quickly as people see that elevated fuel prices are most likely here to stay. Many people have already discovered that double height rooms are not easy to deal with for other reasons, mainly that most homemakers are not cut out to be climbing double-length extension ladders just to clean windows and change light bulbs. You have to erect scaffolding to hang pictures.
Nice house, the comparison to the sardine cans being built in Newport Coast, Northpark or elsewhere during the boom for the same price really highlights the difference.
The Kool-Aide was flowing freely yesterday at the OC Register. Today’s entire Marketplace section made me want to hurl the paper out the window. From the WTF $1.25 million asking price on the Laguna Niguel “Compare Your Home” at the top of Page 4 (last sold in 2002 for 670k) to the idiotic price some FB just paid for a Fullerton POS 1950s tract home (690k), and the dufus family that bought a house in Garden Grove with the comment: “…the margin that I cut with the seller will be enough if the price goes down 1 to 2 percent more. So I said, ‘Why not?'” That’s not a typo – he really said “one to two percent.” There’s so much other laughable stuff – here’s just one more sample: a family bought a house in Anaheim Hills without being able to sell their old home in Whitter. “So, after two months of trying to sell it, they took it off the market and plan to rent it out instead. ‘It’s just not selling for what it’s worth.'”
You know, it is awfully hard not to feel smug and superior when I read stuff like this.
It looks like they did the movie trick with wetting down the sidewalks and streets. Hey, at least the REALTOR(tm) is trying!
A few dumb questions about location. Is that a dry wash behind the property? Could a brush fire flare up that canyon and catch this place from the rear? Does Irvine get mudslides?
That’s a lovely house…
… but maintaining the pool and the grounds is a LOT of work.
Unless you have boatloads of time (ex. retired) or boatloads of money (ex. pay someone to maintain it), you’re probably better off renting and going to common areas maintained by someone else.
Those beautiful, park-like grounds are something to maintain, yeah, but if you are in the bracket that quaiifies to buy a home like this, you should be able to hire the help you need. Face it, an upper-bracket lifestyle is not cheap.
Swimming pools really don’t take a lot of maintenence as long as you stay up on it and do the little chores as scheduled. Relatives of mine who have pools say the pool itself is very little trouble, and that the bigger concern is potential liability.
The property pictured is so beautiful, it’s worth a little bit of trouble.
I wouldn’t know if it’s immediately adjacent to a fire corridor, but, yes, that would be a sale-killer for me.
We all have our dream dwellings. Maybe in the next life I’ll get to have a 20s-vintage triplex with a terrace on the 10th floor of 20 E. Ceder in Chicago.
Hope Irvine Renter writes a book and makes enough money off it to buy this place for his price.
Get busy, IR!
Stupid is actually right. People who are retired don’t want the hassle of huge home maintenance, and people with the money to pay won’t be looking for an Irvine tract home. This owner will be taking a huge shaving in the coming recession. Bye bye!
One of the Inland’s hottest housing developments does a cool-down
06:27 AM PST on Sunday, November 4, 2007
By DUANE W. GANG
The Press-Enterprise
FONTANA – Just north of Interstate 210 sits one of this city’s marquee developments — the “Beverly Hills of Fontana” as one resident recently described it.
Sierra Lakes includes more than 1,800 homes, an 18-hole championship golf course, 62 acres of retail development and a 20-acre park
As the Inland area has grown, adding 771,000 people in six years, Sierra Lakes is typical of the developments that have attracted them.
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Click to enlarge
And like other areas with vast tracts of new development, Fontana and the Sierra Lakes community are now bearing the brunt of the slumping housing market. Thousands of foreclosures are recorded in the area each month.
“Where there is boom there is now bust,” Fontana Councilwoman Janice Rutherford said in an interview.
Riverside and San Bernardino counties saw more than 11,300 foreclosures and notices of default in the second quarter of this year alone. Fontana had more than 700, as did the cities of San Bernardino, Riverside, Moreno Valley and Corona, according to RealtyTrac, which compiles real estate data.
Now, some residents are on edge, and Fontana and other city officials are looking at ways to maintain the look and feel of their communities as foreclosed homes begin dotting the landscape, even if it means using city crews or, like other cities, going after banks and other institutions to force them to maintain the homes.
“When a home in a neighborhood is foreclosed, typically the landscaping begins to go unmaintained, the home falls into disrepair,” Rutherford said at a recent council meeting. “That creates a blight problem for the neighbors who are still there. It creates a value problem for homes in the neighborhood that are not in foreclosure.”
Signs of the Times
In Sierra Lakes, the southwest corner of the 700-acre development had the highest density of foreclosures and defaults in the city during the second quarter, according an analysis of foreclosure data by The Press-Enterprise. Property values are dropping by more than 10 percent in some parts of the development, the San Bernardino County tax assessor’s office reported.
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Stan Lim / The Press-Enterprise
The Sierra Lakes development in northern Fontana had the highest density of foreclosures and defaults in the city during the second quarter of 2007, and property values are dropping by more than 10 percent in some parts of the neighborhood.
For-sale signs dot dozens of streets throughout Sierra Lakes. Brown lawns mark foreclosed, vacant and unsold homes, as do the warning signs and notices posted on windows. Dusty fliers and sun-bleached, unread newspapers sit on front porches and driveways, waiting to be retrieved by homeowners not likely to return.
A large plywood sign propped against the garage door of one Sierra Lakes home begs someone to come to the homeowner’s aid. “Help!” reads the sign in orange-neon paint. “Going to foreclosure.” The sign says the home is worth $530,000 but will sell for $440,000, scratched down from $450,000.
“We are barely holding on here,” said Jean Beauford, 35, who bought into Sierra Lakes three years ago and has seen her monthly mortgage payment jump from $1,641 to $2,500 because of an adjustable interest rate.
At the same time that foreclosures are on the rise, home values are declining and sales dropping off.
Nearly 500 homeowners in Fontana received property tax reductions this year because the value of their house declined, for a combined $15 million decline in assessed value, the assessor’s office reported. That’s an average of $30,000 per home.
County officials expect the number of people receiving temporary reductions, through Prop. 8, to rise sharply when they study property values again in January.
Meanwhile, Riverside County reassessed values on more than 31,000 residential and commercial properties earlier this year, and saw a $610 million decline.
“You see a lot of pockets, and these pockets are in new developments. As the downturn continues, you will see these pockets grow,” said Jim Erwin, a former assistant San Bernardino County assessor, who left the office last week. “It will appear that a virus is consuming the map.”
The glut of unsold new homes on the market and new foreclosed homes is what accounts for most of the drop in values, Erwin said. Other factors, such as cosmetics and the look and feel of a neighborhood, can push values down but those have a less of an effect, he said.
Nahum and Bertha Ambriz have lived in Sierra Lakes for about two years. The couple and their three children live next door to a foreclosed home. Nobody has lived in it for at least eight months, Nahum Ambriz, 46, estimates.
As two of their children played in the front yard, right at a stark demarcation line between green and brown grass, the couple said they are worried as neighborhood home prices fall.
“Right now, we’re OK,” Nahum Ambriz said. “But later, I don’t know.”
Pitching In
Facing the decline, Fontana is starting to gather a list of foreclosed homes and notifying banks that they, too, must be responsible property owners, Rutherford said.
The city also is considering notifying residents and urging them to pitch in to help maintain foreclosed homes in neighborhoods. City crews might be called in to help.
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A plywood sign with neon-orange lettering sits in front of a Sierra Lakes home, pleading for help to prevent a foreclosure.
“We are exploring options,” Rutherford said. “I do have a concern about how our neighborhoods look and feel.”
Councilman John Roberts wants something done, especially when it comes to those brown lawns, the tell-tale sign of a foreclosed or vacant home.
“It really sends a horrific message to the community when they start seeing different lawns turn brown in their neighborhood,” Roberts said at a council meeting. “It has the effect of reducing the value of the neighborhood.”
As the person faced with pressing people to keep their property appearance up, Ted Porlas, the city’s code enforcement manager, said, “Folks are angry and they want someone to be angry at.”
But there is only so much the city’s eight code enforcement officers can do.
It’s not practical to go out and inspect every foreclosed home. Currently, officers respond only to complaints, but at the same time do check nearby homes and neighborhoods out of fairness, Porlas said.
In addition, many foreclosed homes are taken over by large companies, making the problem more difficult, he said.
“It really isn’t effective to prosecute a corporation criminally for a brown lawn,” he said.
Facing the same issue, Murrieta in Southwest Riverside County is considering a law to impose civil penalties on homeowners, including banks and other financial institutions, that do not maintain the homes they are trying to sell. The council is set to take up the law this month.
Back in Fontana, code enforcement has about 1,200 active cases, with less than 5 percent from foreclosed homes, Porlas said
But the numbers are rising. “The numbers are ratcheting up, surely,” he said.
“Staff talks about it more often these days,” Porlas said. “Certainly, more than the same period last year.”
‘We Haven’t Seen the Last’
Shelbie Gatten, 26, lives next door to a vacant house in Sierra Lakes. Trash litters its yard. A broken basketball hoop teeters in the driveway.
“It is not just this one,” she said. “We see plenty. It would be nice if they at least would keep it up. I don’t know how they expect to sell it.”
Kevin Parhm’s girlfriend bought into Sierra Lakes about a year ago. As he took a break recently from washing a car at her home, Parhm, 38, a Rancho Cucamonga-based loan officer, said the housing crisis will only get worse.
“If you had a pulse, you could get a loan,” Parhm said, pointing to house after house on the street that is now vacant.
“All areas have been hit hard, especially the new development,” he said. “Until the market bottoms out, it is not going to change. We haven’t seen the last.”
To be sure, much of Sierra Lakes remains an idyllic place. Children play in the streets. Mothers take their children for afternoon strolls. Golfers tee off on the community’s lush course. Even the foreclosed homes, despite seeing better days, are not yet falling down.
There are fewer foreclosures on Delta Woodall’s street in Sierra Lakes. It was one of the areas first built. She reminds friends who live in other cities that the northern end of Fontana is a pleasant place to have a home.
Even with the foreclosures on the rise, it’s less noticeable on her street.
“It still is upheld,” she said of the neighborhood.
Still, even Woodall, 34, is worried. Her son has a friend in the neighborhood whose family home went into foreclosure. And she bought her home 2½ years ago and has “a bad loan and our payment just went up,” she said.
“It is a fear if you bought at the peak,” Woodall said at the possibility of a foreclosure. “It is a scary thought.”
“She reminds friends who live in other cities that the northern end of Fontana is a pleasant place to have a home. ”
LOL!
From October thru April of every year the wind blows so hard there that it can strip the paint off your car.
Fontana is a miserable place to live.
The problem isn’t the pool, it’s all the pretty vegetation surrounding the pool, with all the leaves and plant detritus that fall in the pool. We perpetually have pine needles falling in the pool; you have to keep after it all of the time. Also, here we have a big weed problem; one must keep after that all the time too. My sporadic gardening would have a HOA assn down on me all the time.
Also, outside lawn furniture will be perpetually dirty.
That being said I’ve known retired people who have found that keeping up with all the maintenance is a satisfying hobby.
Why can’t the City and/or HOA simply fix things up and then put a lien on the property? At closing the title agent will require the lien to be paid, and the bank will have to cough up. In some Miami-Dade jurisdictions, if you do bad long enough, they will put a $50 or $100 dollar a day lien on you, and if you continue to do bad, they may not negotiate it down when you wake up later.
IR,
What do you think is a realistic price for this house?
Curious,
RICK
This is house reminds me very much of a place in Scituate, Massachusetts that I lived in for a few years in the mid-1990s. It, too, was 3,400 square feet. I had .75 acre, but some of it was unusable so the .41 acre attached to this property is comparable. I didn’t have a pool; one of my neighbors did, and it would have cost about $100,000 to install one in my backyard if I’d wanted it.
I paid $400,000 for the place in 1994. With a pool and some more upgrades, let’s call it $550,000. The same house today shows $950,000 on Zillow. With a pool and those upgrades, let’s call it $1.1 million. The neighborhood is every bit as good as anything in Irvine, and then some.
And that’s Zillow, mind you. We know how inflated they are. One of my brothers lives in the Boston area and he tells me it’s a disaster there. Nothing selling, etc. So, it’s an open question whether you’d have to pay $1.1 million for my old house. I doubt it. There is a price for everything, and everything at its price. Yes, this is a very nice house. So was mine. But it’s not a $2.5 million house. Not even close.
I want to know what idiotic lender gave them a mortgage for the house in Anaheim Hills….
“The Beverly Hills of Fontana”…..now that sentence alone made this blog a worthy read this fine Sunday morning.
This is a total McMansion, are there any nice houses in Irvine? Its unfortunate that everything being built in Orange County has zero personality (I guess the homes need to match the people?)
This is gonna be good!
OK, sorry to ruin your positive vibe, but that house is at least $1 million overpriced. Lots of $800k houses from that era went up around here, and they did not perform all that well and are now about $1.5M, and this is a beach area. What intrinsically makes that house worth more? Seriously, people are fleeing the brush adjacent neighborhoods.
And that house looks a little dated too. Soon to become a maintenence headache. In five years, you would really notice it. Is that what you pay an extra million for?
I swear IR said, right at the top that house was ridiculously priced.
And while the home isn’t my taste, I can still respect IR’s for thinking it’s nice.
That said, one thing that I do think is interesting that came up a few times in the thread above is about maintenance. The cost and/or time involved in maintaining a home such as that and keeping it in that condition is significant. And while I do agree that people who spend two and half million have enough to hire a pool and landscape company, it does point out how, in the bubble inspired bigger and better mentality, we’re still slaves to our homes. For me, this backwards. I love my home and don’t resent spending time and money maintaining it but even assuming I could afford the competent help in doing so, I just can’t imagine that it would enhance my life that much. I don’t want outside help in my home. I certainly don’t want to be in the position of being forced to hire help or dedicate a big portion of my time to keeping my home and land up. It’s one reason I sold a home on five acres in Florida. I was a slave to the bloody thing.
Anyway, interesting look IR and I hope you continue to finding the time to post something to chat about on weekends. Thanks.
Not the fault of the people…Someone designed this silly community from the Irvine Co apartments to the McMansions. No diversity in function or form. Unique properties do not exist in this town.
Like communism, the puppet masters of this area of Orange County have created a lifestyle that will fail. All the new stores, the new homes, and the fancy cars has created a spending frenzy. The South OC real estate market that will explode worse than any other is only a symptom of the greater ill that has changed the surrounding hills and strawberry fields into a modern eastern europe.
There are a lot of people who dont buy in to the lifestlye but too many people have and now they are imprisoned by their own want to be accepted. This place is destined for a values revolution. Plenty of OC people have class, education, have toiled, travelled the world, been charitable, things that form character. The problem is where they live, not who they are.
I think the maintenance issue is a red herring. Look, all houses need maintenance. Bigger ones tend to need more of it, and if you have a pool then you need even more maintenance. The only problem with this place, at least from the pictures, is the price.
Just because it’s overpriced doesn’t mean there’s anything else wrong with it. In fact, that was part if Irvine Renter’s point: Here you have this splendid house, but it’s been sitting there because the seller has overpriced it. There’s nothing like a market crash to deflate people’s pretenses and fantasies.
By the way, I think this place is a good deal nicer than my old place in Scituate. I think it would have taken another $250,000 or so to bring it up to the same level. This would imply a $1.55 million Zillow price for my old place if equivalently upgraded. I’m no authority, but my gut feel says this house will ultimately go for $1.5 to $1.75 million or so. It’s so overpriced that I have to wonder whether they want to sell it.
Anything less than $1.5 million would be a pretty good deal, I’d say. Of course, that would depend on whether it’s really as nice as it looks, and on what the neighborhood is like. And if we really have the full-blown catastrophe that some people are expecting, well then all bets are off, aren’t they?
no.
OK… unlike most of the clowns who “expectorate” their opinions with nary a twit of knowledge and a Santa Ana windstorm of self righteous opinions…
I have been in that neighborhood and in several of those homes. Heck I drive through that place a lot. Even got a speeding ticket on Ridgeline…
That is one very nice area… it has two issues with it, though.
One, The corner of Ridgeline and Turtle Rock drive has a bunch of expensive apartments and condos. The homes proper are on the perimeter along side the north and west sides.
By itself this is not a problem as the area is meticulously landscape and the price of those condos/apartments will keep the riff raff in Northwood Pointe and Costa Mesa..
Two, the area is a gated community and a bit out of the way. Hence, it will not attract a lot of drive in looky loos so it’s kind of hard to sell a house.
Rurthermore, to have a such a large lot and 5 bedrooms in TR is a real positive in TR, and this house has a lot more going for it than the McMansions that were built years later in TRidge.
Now then, I happen to know those homes are selling. Since my son’s garage band drummer’s parents sold their house on the west end -with no view- for just under 2MIL about three months ago. So, there has to be something with this particular house that we don’t see.
My gut feeling is that this house would have sold by now if they had priced it at 2MIL, I think they are just a bit too greedy and going into the winter they will be stuck for a while longer.
So, there. This is the opinion of someone who actually knows something about that exact subdivision.
Oh, yet another thing… it’s home like this one that will set the price for TRidge
Which means that very few homes in TRidge will sell for over 2MIL.
Interesting. If the city is successful in its demands against banks that will really drive the banks to sell these homes, most likely by lowering prices This will make it tougher for anyone in the area trying to refi, among other things.
When I wrote $1.5-$1.75 million, I was figuring that the seller will continue to be stubborn until the evidence is even more overwhelming. tonye, your $2 million bogey makes sense, but I’m wondering if their window of opportunity (at that price) has already closed. What do you think?
Give me Eastern Europe any day. One can only hope that Irvine turns into another Prague, Budapest or Sofia (but with OC incomes, of course)
My family used to own a house like this, and lemme tell you, it’s not nearly as nice to own this sort of thing as it is to look at.
The sheer amount of maintenance you have to do to run something like this is REDICULOUS. Yeah, you can hire a ton of staff to do it, but you still gotta manage them.
One house we had like this was something like 70k of maintenance per year. Another was about 50, but was in a low cost area (st louis, MO).
I think that late fall and winter are never a good time to get top price for a home. Most of the home buying around here happens in spring and early summer as buyers are setting up for the school year.
Since IUSD is a very good district you see pressure then, and since our neighborhoods are mostly family oriented, the schools make a big difference.
Window of opportunity? I dunno. The homes in TRidge are ridiculously priced and their lots are tiny. Even if TRidge homes drop below their Phase 1 price ( around 1.5 mil + view ) this home has a big and deep lot with privacy. So, I think that if these people price their home between 1.8 to 2.0 MIL they should be able to sell in the spring.
Which, of course, paints a very, VERY dire picture for TRidge and Quail Hill.
We don’t have problems with cold rooms in SoCal. If anything, the high ceilings are desirable in the summer as the hot air rises and you can open one of the high windows to let the hot air out. The biggest hassle is cleaning the windows, but that’s what window cleaning services are for.
And no, very high ceiling are not a fad at all. Homes in Turtle Rock have had double high and cathedral ceilings since 1970. It’s very common in SoCal. This is NOT a recent fad around here.
I can imagine an extra $500-600 of maintenance per month to keep the grounds and the pool in check, the inside, well it’s 3400 sq ft. It’s a big, but not that big to require a dedicated housekeeper.
I like how it appears to be secluded and private, something that is rare in Irvine. Sure the house seems a bit dated with the vaulted ceilings, but it’s nowhere near as bad as many 70’s and 80’s tract homes with popcorn ceilings and wall to wall carpeting.
I think they overpaid in 1998! at the 1.2M price.
It’s going to be more along the lines of Krakatoa eruption than Vesuvius.
It looks big enough to me to require THREE dedicated housekeepers.
Or at least two, plus a gardener.
All those floors to polish, all those surfaces to wipe, all those windows mounted 10′ up.
I’m intimidated enough by the maintanance on a 6-room, 1600 sq ft cottage, which is why I am an apt dweller.
“The Beverly Hills of Fontana”
Otherwise known as Rialto.
This house is realistically worth between $800,000 and $1 million which is around $235-$294/sqft
I would probably pay around $850k for it if I could afford it. If you take 2000 pre-bubble prices, I don’t think it is quite a million dollar house.
This house is worth only 800K in your dreams or maybe if you move the house to Iowa or Kentucky. The only way for prices in Turtle Rock to go down that dramatically is if all of the old people suddenly die at once. A huge percentage of people who live in that part of the city have lived there for over fifteen years, some more than 30 years, and they are in no hurry to retire to Costa Rica or Panama.