Apropos of nothing, my favorite money pit is back on the market. For those of you who aren't as fluent in Redfin as myself, here's what you can glean with no skill whatsoever: - Listed in July 2017 for $350k, didn't sell - Price dropped $25k eleven months later, didn't sell - Price dropped $75k four months later with another realtor, didn't sell - Price dropped again with another realtor a year later (think it was $290k), didn't sell - Price dropped again, didn't sell - Turkey finally went for $245k riiiiight before things went hyperbolic with COVID So really, some schmuck (this schmuck) is asking you to pay him $750k for holding this land for eighteen months, which don't get me wrong? Happens. - BUT - The original listing from 2015, when I first started watching it (I mean, waterfront! Next to a park! $350k!), had a legit tree through one room. There was a landslide in the kitchen literally obscuring the dishwasher. Place was red-tagged hard. You can still see some of the horrorshow from the 2017 sequel. Because I watch this stuff, I was rather interested to see the house whose hillside is busily covering this property go in 2018 for about $1.2m. There was evidence that their yard had been growing... erm... smaller... but disclosure about the fact that nature was in the process of transferring topography from one parcel to another was absent from the notes. And really - there's probably $4m worth of retaining wall that needs to be built there. And it's not on the property in question, but uphill from it. If you were to find yourself a semi-talented realtor they might inform you of some of this shit. But there are more realtors than listings right now so your odds of hitting a talented one are slim. Despite that, though, this property tax suck (which is delinquent, by the way - Vlad hain't been paying on his dream house) is being listed "for sale by owner" because either (1) the ethical abyss that is the realtor's code actually has a bottom or (2) Vlad is too cheap to pay a realtor ten percent of whatever price they think you might actually get for this perpetual negative amortization scheme. The best part is simply googling the address will give you some background. The Lords’ former house was built in 1990, permits show. The construction met building codes of the day. Only later that decade did the county adopt its first rules for building near so-called critical areas, including places with high landslide risks. A previous owner applied for permits to rebuild the house after slide damage in 1998, county records show. He also obtained approval to build a large retaining wall engineered to shield the house. Convincing county planners that it’s safe to rebuild again could be tough. “If there is a fix, somebody’s going to have to be able to prove it to us,” county permitting manager Tom Rowe said. “And that’s not going to be easy to do. Bottom line.” and still, they persistedCounty planners have documented slides on the property going back two decades. They classify it as a landslide hazard area. Digital images reveal evidence of historic slides as well.