$1.295 million in Los Altos gives you 200 amps!
On Monday, we showed you what a $1.295 million dollar house looks like in Greenwich, CT where the income regularly tops $500k. Let’s look a house in that price range here in the Bay Area:
MLS-2.com: Property Details
1295 S SPRINGER RD, Los Altos,CA,94024 - $1,295,000
3 Beds 1580 Sq.Ft. Aprx. 2 Car Garage MLS#: 760630
2.0 Baths 9,147 Lot Size 56 Yrs Old Aprx. List Date: 2007-10-31What’s new on MLS-2: Search by % Price Drop // Search by “MOTIVATED SELLERS”
Description - 1295 S SPRINGER RD, Los Altos,CA,94024
Best Price in Los Altos! Great Starter Home for Someone Looking for Fantastic Los Altos Schools and a Quaint Village Township! Surrounded by Beautiful Mature Redwood Trees, New Tile in Bathrooms, New Water Heater, New Electrical Panel with Upgrade to 200 amps, Walking Distance to Shopping. Disclosures Available, some work has been completed.
Wow… 200 amps. How many amps does that house in Greenwich, CT have? Probably like 8 or something.
And does that Greenwich house have a room like this?
Nope. Probably not. It’s probably all nice and stuff - which means that in true East Coast tradition, you have no freedom. Freedom, as we all know, was invented in the Bay Area in Berkeley - and this house is a classic example in that you have the freedom to renovate and make it yours.
Another devastating strike against Greenwich. I can’t imagine why Regis Philbin would want to live there and not here in Los Altos. He must hate freedom.
January 30th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Where’s the servents quarters located?
January 30th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Great Starter Home ??? For a couple of Google-aires??
The words Los Altos and starter home do not belong in the same paragraph in a Real Estate Ad.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:54 am
“Starter home” = run down shanty. Even if it is over a million.
I can’t wait till I can move to Austin.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Conveniently located on a Foothill Expressway offramp. I wonder why the Realtor(tm) didn’t highlight the “wonderful ambient noise.”
January 30th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Austin crime stats are pretty awful…
http://houston.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=Sunnyvale&s1=CA&c2=Austin&s2=TX
January 30th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
You mentioned that, Burbed, but in the northwestern suburbs I don’t foresee a problem.
Plus, anything that doesn’t involve a daily commute on 101 is fine by me. And, with all the money I save on the mortgage, I can afford a fence. And an alarm system. And a dog.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Great Starter Home(tm)? This is getting depressing.
January 30th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Sometimes I think we could have stayed in the Bay Area, prices are coming down, etc., and then I see something like this and realize in places we would want to live, with good schools, the prices aren’t that much better. The rain in Portland is bearable, and we have a home. Our mortgage is affordable, and we are waiting to see if interest rates drop more and then refinance at possibly 1% less than our current rate. Hedda, living in the ‘burbs isn’t so bad.
January 30th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Burbed:
If you’re going to compare this area with that Other Tech Area, best to compare like to like.
Sunnyvale vs Round Rock:
http://houston.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=Sunnyvale&s1=CA&c2=Round+Rock&s2=TX
Or
San Jose vs Austin:
http://houston.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=San+Jose&s1=CA&c2=Austin&s2=TX
But thanks for the nice site!
January 30th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
“Surrounded by beautiful redwood trees”…which will have to be cut down because the neighbor installed a solar panel on his roof.
I also like the bit about “disclosures available — some work has been completed” That sounds rather ominous. I’m picturing a situation where three or four rooms were stripped down to the studs and then the owner ran out of renovation money…
January 30th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I’m somewhat familiar with the area - a nice blend of yuppies, high-speed traffic, and redneck holdouts driving old American built gas-guzzlers gunning around hoping to hit one/some of the annoying Spandex-clad bicyclists that day. Any day. It’s not close to anything so there’s no reason to walk anyway - which means you won’t walk anywhere, you’ll get into your Lincoln EarthRaper or whatever you’re driving (as long as it’s taller than the neighbor’s SUV) and go places - mainly places outside of this area because this is one of those “there’s no ‘there’ there” places.
January 30th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Am I the only one who is waiting for a book from ex-sunnyvale-renter? I would put that on my Amazon wishlist right now.
January 30th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Damn, Dawg, I’d be a writer indeed if there was any money in it. Sigh. But that’s the old economy, this is the new…….. no one makes any money writing now.
Anyway that’s one of the more sterile and cultureless areas of the BA and that’s really saying something.
January 30th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
If you think the commute on 101 is terrible, wait till you hit the roads in Austin. How about 30 minute commute to the grocery store in bumper to bumper traffic to go 3 miles?
Due to ill planning, it is a nightmare to go anywhere in Texas. Been there, done that. We lived in (purchased) the most beautiful house in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods and moved back to the bay area to rent again. It is so wonderful not to have to be in a traffic mess every time I leave the house.
Our quality of life here is 10 times better than it ever was in Texas, there’s a lot more to life than owning a home.
January 30th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Due to ill planning, it is a nightmare to go anywhere in Texas.
I think that’s called “freedom”.
January 30th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
This site http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21326693
lists “5 cities with the worst gridlock”.
Austin is nowhere. San Francisco is only second to New York.
It also says “Traffic delays cost each Bay area commuter $1,121 in lost wages per year.”
January 30th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Wow I didn’t realize Austin was that bad. You could walk faster than driving there.
Now it’s well known that in the city of SF, having a car is hell. I had my nice fashionable Prius and never took it there. SF is great without a car.
In Silly-Con Valley, I went car-free for several months and it wasn’t bad at all - at lot of places took less time to get to. Just before going car-free, once incident comes to mind: I was at HSC Electronics and got talking with a gal who must weigh 350. She was on a bike. We agreed to go check out this farmer’s market or something on Lawrence and ECR. Since her bike would not fit in my car, we agreed to meet there and I told her she’d beat me - she did, by a couple of minutes. And this is a huge person who travels at about the speed of an 8-year-old on a BMX bike. Not a speedster.
January 30th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
That’s a good article. They forgot Honolulu, where it’s possible to travel at 1 mile an hour. And everyone’s car-obsessed there, much more so than in SF. You see people walking in SF all the time, but in Honolulu only “losers” walk. The cool thing to have there is a scooter, a little moped thing, and a lot of people did in the 80s. But now those are considered “undignified” or something.
January 30th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
esr: Yes, well, you’d be surprised at how fast you can go when you ignore silly things like red lights and stop signs.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
I have a very hard time believing that traffic in Austin is so terrible. They don’t have Caltrans, for one, so the highways have to be better maintained, plus they don’t have asshole Google employees in their Minis clogging the roadways.
My plan was to live near where we work, which will be in northwestern Austin, so I really don’t think it’ll be that bad.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:41 am
They don’t have real freeways and normal roads in Texas. They have these things called frontage roads (with a very dangerous yield system) that run along 2 lanes of “freeway” in each direction. If you want to get from point A to point B, you have to pass point A, go to the turn around and double back until you reach your destination which is directly off the frontage road; everything is located off the frontage road.
We doubled the amount of gas we used every month when we lived there, and my husband worked from home.
It isn’t an issue of gridlocked freeways, try getting off the freeway and you enter onto a surface street traffic nightmare. They do not have enough roads to accommodate the growth the past decade has brought. They have master planned communities where there is only one way in and one way out of the master community. Living near work won’t help when the surface streets are clogged.
No public transportation in Texas and not a hope in the world that you can walk some place. Downtown Austin is not as walkable or livable as downtown Sacramento.
Austin has all the same kind of people that silicon valley has, so you have all the rude people and attitude without the beach, a real city, or the mountains.
Texas is full of wonderful people, however you will be hard pressed to find those people in Austin. Many people in Austin believe that they are smarter, and more sophisticated than other Texans.
hedda- you may love Texas (it’s not a bad place, albeit not the place for me) but don’t move there thinking you are going to spend less time in traffic. With more and more people moving there from California the traffic is bound to get worse, at least 101 has a car pool lane.
January 31st, 2008 at 12:24 pm
This house is next to 280, not 101. If you’re going north from there, there’s no traffic. If you’re going south, it still beats the daylights out of 101.
January 31st, 2008 at 6:39 pm
This house is on a frontage road next to foothill expressway. By bike, one can get to downtown San Jose in about 1 hour (about 14 miles). It takes 30-45 minutes to get to downtown Palo Alto by bike going up Foothill expressway. One problem is the priuses can’t be heard as they fly by you on Foothill. Several times I’ve almost been hit by cars as they ride and (fill in the blank…eat, talk on phone, shave, brush hair).