The weirdest house in the WORLD

[Kathy in FL]

Why me? Why do I get this stuff?

This is a 8,000+ square foot home. It's pink. Not nice, unassuming pink but PINK. It's a (no, this is not a typo) a ONE bedroom home. Plenty of bathrooms, mind you, but only one bedroom. The master bath has a KITCHENETTE. Three fireplaces, FOUR hobby rooms, a sunroom, an "animal" (this is what the blueprints call it...they have four dogs) room that is specially reinforced for hurricanes, and a BAR with a BANDSTAND. Not like a bar in your kitchen where you eat breakfast...but a BAR with a Budweiser frog neon sign and electric guitars. The house is MOSTLY finished...missing trim in some places, unpainted drywall, no facia, etc. There's a big giant hole in the back yard where they're apparently thinking about putting in a pool sometime. (There are very tall weeds growing in the hole, so I guess they've been thinking a while.)

Then, there's the guest house. Three thousand sq.ft. Eight bedrooms, each with its own bath, decorating theme (think, Elvis and the Washington Redskins) and exterior door. Living area. No kitchen. Owner tells me they've purchased the fencing so that each bedroom can have it's own attached dog run. No, I'm serious. They have lots of friends with dogs, apparently.

Bear in mind that this home is not in Jacksonville. It's in redneck north Florida where the average house is a 1980 doublewide and high-end homes with 2,500 sq.ft. on 10 acres will run $150,000. The subject is sitting on 100 acres, but the lender only wants to take 10. (They've surveyed it out.)

The lender wants the appraisal on a URAR. They're aware the house is weird.

Would you: Ditch the URAR and use cost approach? Use the biggest homes you can find in three counties (2,400 sq.ft. MOL) and make HUGE adjustments? Leave your market, go 60 miles to Gainesville and use a few 4,000 sq.ft. homes? (That's as big as they get there.)

If I didn't have to have the thing done in 10 days I'd be laughing myself silly.

HELP ME!!
Kathy in FL

 

[BarbaraNJ]

Sorry to hear about your assignment.

Like I told a trainee once, "you're not an appraiser utill you pull up to your subject, take a look at it, and mutter to yourself : Oh sh**. why me??.

I just wrapped up a tax appeal for a client who purchased a home for $975,000 and it had ONE bedroom.

Anyway, cannot help you with the whole thing, but I suggest that before you go looking for sales, find out if all the improvements are legal and conforming. This guy may have stuff there that not even the tax man knows about. The "guest house" sounds like a Super 8 Motel !!!!

Also, read up on "overimproved for the area" and take an external or functional deduction.

I would shy away from a cost approach, particularly if the improvements are non conforming. Even if everything is conforming, there is Still the overimprovement issue and the functional obsolescence of the one bedroom.

Finally, you Will have to go outside your area, but check with the lender FIRST. Don't even bother going five, ten or twenty miles away if your client won't accept it. Suggest you go for age (go back 2 years for similar sales, if necessary) over location, but once again, this needs to be cleared first.

Certainly don't envy you.


___________

The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

We have a whole community of "one bedroom" homes that state so on the architect plans to circumvent requirements for septic system lateral lines. Seems the state requires X many feet per bedroom depending upon perk rate. So many 3000 SF homes are called 1 bed, but have a sewing room, a study, library, music room, etc. It stinks...sometimes literally and realtors have been sucessfully sued for selling them for multi bed houses.

Cost Approach can be done on the URAR, but some software refuses to let you weight the cost approach, automatically inputting the Sales Approach value. I would opt for any log, geodesic, screwball home i could find that was under 3 years since it sold and refer to them all as unique market properties of limited appeal.

 

[Richard Carlsen]

This is either a redneck heaven sent get-away NASCAR weekend mansion built by a 4-grade graduate lotto winner who loves to party and run coonhounds

Or

It is a first rate example of a house built by a psychopathic person bent on destroying an appraisers sanity.

Triple your fee, say to heck with the sales comp approach (they can't sell this thing on the secondary market) and use the cost approach with tons of functional depreciation. In a one-of-a-kind, the market approach does not apply.

(And good luck)

 

[DHerbst]

I had a proposed home not long ago, not nearly as unusual but at least 4000 sf and $500,000 more than any thing else that had sold in the county. I did the appraisal and charged 3x normal proposed house fee.

They would not pay because they said I made the home sound like a white elephant.

Finally negotiated fee down to 1.5x and they overnighted me a check.

They found an appraiser from 90 miles away that thought the house would blend in well with all of the surrounding manufactured homes, and the house was constructed.

 

[Kathy in FL]

RICHARD!

Shame on you! Good advice...but your southern profiling!! (OK...here I should state that, yes, I watch NASCAR...my brother--in-law is working the Daytona track right now...and I own TWO bloodhounds that I'm teaching to track. People, not coons. ) OK, I also have to admit, I looked at this house and my second reaction, after OH MY GOD was, hey this is pretty cool!!
(My third thought was to check for unusual hardware in the ceiling of the bedroom. Not professional, I know, but I wondered.)

Actually, both homeowners are speech therapists at the local high school. Go figure.

Still scratching my head...
Kathy in FL

 

[Pamela Crowley (Florida)]

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Kathy, Richard was not 'Southern' profiling. The part of Michigan he lives in has the same neighborhood 'qualities'.

 

[Judy Whitehead (Florida)]

Kathy - I hope to stop and visit with you on one of my trips to/from Tallahassee one of these days (or one of these football weekends!)

What a hoot!! You are only slightly removed from Brooksville, Florida, where I am!

We, of course, are becoming very metropolitan.

Again, sometimes we have to put on our "real estate sales" or whatever hats - and you picky guys with the USPAP guidelines take it like a joke - and ask yourself - who the H...would ever buy this thing? Realistically and at what price? We had one like it in the county and it finally sold for less than half what it cost to build.

On the serious side - what would it take (functionality speaking, of course) to turn it into something "marketable" that "the Market" would be interested in - in other words, what would it cost to turn it into something a HUGE family could or would live in - charge that in depreciation and write a novel for your addendum.

 

[Larry Lyke]

Kathy --

Sounds like a scary place and house. And a pretty dangerous assignment.

The only thing I know for sure is that the Cost Approach won't solve any of the appraisal problems. It'll only emphasize (somebody else provided the word above) its white-elephant status.

On second thought: H&B is tear house down and sell off 10-acre lots for doublewides.

 

[Thomas N. Morgan]

Kathy,

I do not believe it is possible to get a reliable estimate of value using traditional appraisal methods. I believe that's what I'd tell the lender, then decline (or withdrawn from) the assignment.


Thomas N. Morgan
Ocala, FL