As we move Unto the remainder of the alphabet, our regular readers may be Upset with our Undue Urgency in Upholding this Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Uh-Uh-Uh! Remember, we’re here to help, and that means finding anywhere in the Bay Area where prices are Up. 

Uh, right now that’s, Um, pretty much all of it.  Today we’re more Understanding of just how many places are Undulating Upwards, even the Underfunded, Underdeveloped, or Underhyped Urban Uniqueness that is… Union City.

Not even pending yet. Urrah!

3771 SMITH St
Union City, CA 94587
$449,950

3 Beds
1.5 Baths
1,216 Sq. Ft.
$370 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1953
Lot Size: 7,740 Sq. Ft.
On Redfin: 1 day
Type: Detached
Stories: 1
County: Alameda
Style: Custom, Ranch
Community: Alvarado Dist
MLS#: 40611658

Welcome to this fine home with so much to offer, new carpet, frest paint inside, large lot with access to rear from front with drive through garage. This home is zoned residental and commercial buyes should check on what type of business can be placed should that be the use selected.

So many Uses, yet zoned residental.  Say “Ugh!”

Today is Sunday, and that means… no A-Z Blog Challenge today. The schedule’s been set that we do a new letter every Monday through Saturday, and on Sunday you can go to church or look at Open Houses.  Or in the case of this story, courtesy of Burbed reader nomadic, you can combine both.

Judge Rules Against Bay Area Church Leaders In Real Estate Case

VALLEJO (KPIX 5) – A California state judge has ruled against two leaders of a prominent Bay Area church accused of bilking parishioners in an alleged investment scheme.

The judge ruled that General Assembly Church leaders Lacy Hawkins and Michael Parker operated a real estate investment company without a license, in violation of securities law.

KPIX 5 has been investigating Lacy Hawkins and Michael Parker’s involvement in the business deal, that church members said cost them millions of dollars. General Assembly Church has locations in Union City and Vallejo.

Hundreds of parishioners mortgaged their homes and drained retirement accounts on the promise of investment returns as high as 30 percent. Some said they were even promised salvation.

Yes, it’s not enough to have a religious leader in a fraud case, it has to have a realty component. And this one’s actually pretty interesting. Seems this was one of those We’re Here To Run Your Life For You kinds of churches, where you can’t even wipe your nose without permission.

And the Supreme Leader pretty much was ordering parishioners to buy into their real estate trusts or tout them to each other.  The investment vehicles weren’t exactly transparent about the real estate in them.  Unless you count the Woodlands of Ascension project they bought in Louisiana. Which was, mo konmprann, swamp.  Leadership blamed lack of progress on Katrina, but the Army Corps of Engineers said the land was always swamp.

The victims are claiming they were brainwashed into investing with the church’s leaders. We’re imagining just what kind of techniques were used. Maybe “Buy now or you’ll be priced out forever and that, my friends, is the definition of HELL.” 

Also the church leadership quickly realized that paying the real estate agent (who was part of the church) regular commissions for flipping properties was a loser… for them. The agent went from $20,000 a month to $1600 biweekly, as straight salary.  Meanwhile, the church reported to the IRS that they had paid him the commissions, so he owes more than a million in taxes.

The investment’s books were not open to the membership, either, so they didn’t realize that the vehicles were classic Ponzi schemes.

This is an Open Thread. Are you attending religious services this weekend, Open Houses, both, or neither?  And we’ll be back with the next letter in the Challenge tomorrow, G for God. Or Grab. Or both.

Yesterday we showcased the cheapest house we could find in Napa County.  Today we continue with our vineyard labors.  Except, we’re late to the grape-stomping.  Burbed reader JL sent this one in a couple months ago and we’re only now getting to it.  We apologize to all our readers who would have bought this house instantly if only we had featured it sooner.

18069 VINEYARD Rd
Castro Valley, CA 94546
Sold for $475,000

4 Beds 
2 Baths 
1,991 Sq. Ft.
$239 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1960 
Lot Size: 10,125 Sq. Ft. 
Sold On: Nov 16, 2012
Status: Sold
Type: Detached
Stories: 2
Community: Castro Valley
MLS#: 40589131
Style: Contemporary
View: Valley
County: Alameda

Beautiful upper Castro Valley home with a great private backyard that has valley views. The property has a new roof, interior doors, paint, carpet, laminate flooring, and other miscelaneous improvements recently performed. A must see!!

Here’s why JL shared this house with us.

This one is not all that notable, other than that it’s a really ugly house. But the street view REALLY sells it.

Of course it’s notable! It’s on a street with a name straight out of Napa County, which makes us wonder why the trellis is so bare. 

Yet like yesterday’s home, the photographer gives us some of those artistic stairway views.  Plus the kitchen shot is completely awesome, that is if by awesome we actually mean another word that starts with “aw.”

The street view, you say?

Indeed.  These must be the “other miscelaneous improvements.”

We’re not just having Black Friday deals, we’ve got the cheapest housing all throughout the Bay!  Today we’re looking for the cheapest house in Alameda County.

Think you can’t afford a house? Boom. You could buy this one and still have enough left over for… oh… ANOTHER HOUSE.  The argument e-store is now offline.

1351 91ST Ave
Oakland, CA 94603
$39,888

1 Beds 
1 Baths 
634 Sq. Ft.
$63 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1927 
Lot Size: 2,725 Sq. Ft. 
On Redfin: 5 days
Status: New
Type: Detached
Stories: 1
County: Alameda
Style: Traditional
Community: Oakland
MLS#: 40596586

Nice started home, good for investor. Bring your offers

That’s right! Bring it!  When you do, maybe you can figure out what’s in the structure in the back and why the roof looks, um, distressed.

They did say it was a nice started home. You just have to figure out what they started.  But look on the bright side.  It’s a gated community!

We’re always interested in ways to measure how Special a place is.  A website called areavibes.com has a Livability Index that has some interesting assumptions.

First, let’s see what it makes of some places most of us agree are Not Particularly Special (by which we mean we wouldn’t live there for free and we also wouldn’t live there unless we were paid Larry Ellison’s stock options).

Here’s areavibes on Detroit.

Detroit, MI is “Somewhat Livable.”  The only “A” grade it received was in cost of living, and that’s because the city will pay you to take one of their excess houses so they don’t have to pay to tear it down.  We can’t imagine what kind of city would merit a “Completely Out of the Question.”  Let’s move another to another Perennial of Pwnage: Stockton.

I can see the new Civic Motto over City Hall (if they have any staff capable of hanging banners): Stockton! Four Points More Livable Than Detroit!  But they are an important four points, as Stockton is considered “Very Livable.”

We now move on toward the Bay Area, but not the Good Part.

When Stockton has finer amenities than you do, and their weather is better too, plus your housing costs are unacceptably high to anyone outside the Bay Area, what’s the point of even entering the race?  Let’s try a better zip code.

Ooooo!  Exceptionally Livable!  And what’s really exceptional is that if we type in an actual zip code, the score went down.

Good luck figuring out why.  Finally, we arrive at the pinnacle of Real Bay Area Living.

We invite you to try to score higher than that, either in the Bay Area, or anywhere else.  And we don’t want you to think these “grades” are completely pulled out of Mitt Romney’s car elevator.  Here, for example, is what the housing grade is based on:

Cupertino scores higher than average in every category.  Why would they be marked down for better numbers?

This is also your Weekend Open Thread, so go crazy.

It’s Monday, and you know what that means! Time for more listing #winning!  Let’s start the work week with this Castro Valley catastrophe, which will have someone feeling castrated about yet another home selling shortly.  Thanks very much to Burbed reader JL for sending this house in, especially because we really need more East Bay listings.  To poop on!

If you’ve had an eye on a home of dubious virtue, and you’re thinking it belongs on Burbed, please send it to one of the email addresses in the upper right corner.  You’ll be glad you did!

4777 NOREE Ct
Castro Valley, CA 94546
$499,000

4 Beds 
2 Baths 
2,125 Sq. Ft.
$235 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1971 
Lot Size: 5,002 Sq. Ft. 
On Redfin: 46 days
Status: Active
Type: Detached
Stories: 2
County: Alameda
Style: Contemporary
Community: Castro Valley
MLS#: 40589048

Roomy and inviting upper valley home in the Vannoy Elementary area. Large livingroom with fireplace plus a dining area. Bedroom and full bath on ground level. Large kitchen overlooks attached FR and rear decks. Inside laundry. Attached two car garage. Storage galore!! Quiet cul-de-sac location.

Here’s why JL nominated this house for some good ol’ Burbed lovin’.

Lovely staging. Needs more flags! Love the confederate flag on the bed of this one.

Wow, that is indeed a Confederate flag.  Should we tip the owner that California entered the Union as a Free State?  Maybe that’s why they took it down while they looked for another wall that didn’t have so many flags on it.

So, come to this listing for the standards, stay for the Burbed Housekeeping Seal of Approval! 

Evident pride of ownership starts in slowly with this listing but continues to build as you make your way through the photos.  Click on through to see what we mean.

(more…)

Today’s featured home was sent in by Burbed reader waiting_for_the_fall.  We’re delighted to receive it, not only because this is the first contribution from this long-time regular we’ve seen in a while (or maybe even ever), but also because it’s from a part of the Bay Area we don’t cover as often as Silicon Valley.  This house is in the East Bay, and a part we don’t get too many nominations for, and best of all, it’s selling for less than not a lot of money.

Remember, if a house is in Northern California, it too can be Burbable!  Send your favorites on in to one of the email addresses in the upper right corner.

8633 Briarwood Ln
Dublin, CA 94568
$425,000

Zestimate® $406,121
Est. Mortgage $1,489/mo
Beds: 4
Baths: 2
Sqft: 1,338
Lot: 7,649 sq ft / 0.18 acres
Type: Single Family
Year built: 1963
On Zillow: 1030 days
MLS #: 40562786
View Virtual Tour (opens new tab)

This is a four bedroom/two bathroom home with 1338 sq. ft. The roof is approximately nine years old and Dual Pane Windows throughout. Plus Converted garage into a large beautiful family room w/storage. The living room has a gas burning fireplace. Huge private backyard with a large patio and tall trees. RV Access Parking is a PLUS!

Here’s what wftf said when sending us this place:

Will you please check out the price fluctuations on this craptastic house?  It made me dizzy reading the wild price gyrations on zillow.
And it is pending!

I give up.  The banks are winning.

Did you know you can’t spell wftf without wtf?  Because wtf is definitely the best reaction to the price gyrations on Zillow.

So is this house in the Real Bay Area or isn’t it?  It more than doubled in the ten years between 1996 and 2005, but then… not so much.  Since buying this house for 630 big ones, the current owner has tried listing it at $674K just two years later, and then started throwing prices at the wall seeing if any of them would stick.  Not sticking in addition to $674K were just under $600K (with lucky 8s!!!), reducing it to $429K (just 3 months later). 

Price goes down, price goes up.  Plus at least four different agents, at four different brokers.  It all adds up to an eyepopping over thousand day old listing!

Then again, perhaps this lovely room is what’s keeping the buyers away, since it appears to have girl cooties.

Remember the basic premise of The Producers?  If you oversell interest in a Broadway show, and then deliberately produce the worst musical you can, none of your investors will complain when they lose all their money… and you keep their 40,000% ownership.  So our intrepid producer duo went off in search of the worst script they could find, and… hilarity ensues.

So why hasn’t anyone tried this idea with real estate as well?  Maybe it’s because not enough in the industry figured out the same trick: in a market downturn you can make more money not selling houses than you can selling them.  Read on to know it Tolls for thee.

How did Toll Brothers survive the housing slump? By keeping buyers’ deposits

By Matthias Gafni, Contra Costa Times
Posted:   07/27/2012 09:12:51 AM PDT, Updated: 07/27/2012 05:00:58 PM PDT

As newly minted empty-nesters, Daven Sharma and his wife, Anu, spent 2010 searching for a spot for their dream house with views of San Francisco Bay. They found it in the Hayward hills, within a Toll Brothers development.

Shortly after plunking down about $100,000 in deposits, the couple’s dream fizzled. The Sharmas lost not only the house, but their deposit, attorney and arbitration fees — and a sense of justice.

Critics say and records show that Pennsylvania-based Toll Brothers — the nation’s largest luxury homebuilder, with developments in Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties — has made it a regular practice to collect forfeited deposits from prospective homebuyers. In fact, it was the builder’s No. 1 source of profit during the down years of the housing market, according to a Maryland class action lawsuit.

From fiscal years 2006 to 2011, according to its own SEC reports, the publicly traded company retained $123 million in forfeited deposits from 3,300 prospective homebuyers.

Read that again: during the housing slump, the number one source of profit was forfeited deposits.  At least that’s what one lawsuit says.

There are 155,000 results for the search Toll Brothers Lawsuit.  This website has quite a story to tell.  While it’s about severe construction problems, the other part of the story is the lengths their attorneys would go to to avoid fixing the house.  Ellen Nevens has been fighting Toll Brothers for twelve years.  That’s a lot of time and effort to build a house badly and then not fix it.  It would be much easier to not build it in the first place. 

And that’s what happened to Daven and Anu Sharma when they put a $98K deposit on a Hayward hills homesite in a Toll Brothers community.  The Sharmas found out what many others have previously experienced: the sales contract has little flexibility on loan funding.  And if, or maybe we should say when, the loan isn’t funded, the contract says no loan means Toll keeps the deposit.  The Sharmas indeed lost in arbitration, plus they had to pay another $5600 in fees.

Jim Daman had to sue to get some of his $104K deposit back on a home in Danville.  When Toll Brothers didn’t build his house within the promised six months, he watched its market value sink.  He eventually settled for $70K.   Compared to the Sharmas, he did well.  Someone the corporation won the arbitration, claiming that customization had been done and they had outlays.  Yet the photo of the dirt lot above is all that was in place when the Sharmas cancelled their contract because their current house didn’t sell.

Here’s the contract language that one attorney called confusing, Daman called “99.9 percent in their favor” and another tried diagramming on a whiteboard to understand it:

Buyer’s failure to fulfill any of such conditions or the termination or expiration of the mortgage commitment after it is received, for any reason, shall not release Buyer from its obligations under the Agreement.

A latter attorney notes that Toll offered some of his Pennsylvania clients loan commitments with conditions that made no financial sense, such as amounts far larger than the agreed sales price.  When buyers balked, then Toll would keep the deposit, claiming they were in breach.

“They can make more money by not building the house,” he said.

While the Sharma’s Arundel Drive homesite is not listed, this nearby home on Stonebrae Road is.  It looks quite lovely when photographed with a sunset, and it’s “within the gates of TPC Stonebrae Country Club.”  According to the virtual tour, the builder is not Toll Brothers, but a firm called True Life Communities who seem to be avoiding any hint of describing themselves with specifics.

But given the story of the Sharmas and their Arundel Drive site being so nearby, we assumed it was the same community.  (In fact there are several different builders.)  And if you buy this house you’ll have quite the run of neighbors to entertain!

This site does not get out to the East Bay enough.  Thanks very much to Burbed reader Jeremy from Hayward for doing the legwork for us, with this vintage villa in Castro Valley.  Remember, if you want us to cover more hella-fine houses from your hometown, be sure to send some in!

Today’s house is one you may be able to pick up with your income tax refund.  Now who says there isn’t affordable housing in the Bay Area?

5939 E Castro Valley Blvd
Castro Valley, CA 94552
$199,900

BEDS: 3
BATHS: 1
SQ. FT.: 1,390
$/SQ. FT.: $144
LOT SIZE: 1.74 Acres
TYPE: Detached
STYLE: Contemporary
STORIES: 2
YEAR BUILT: 1900
COMMUNITY: Castro Valley
COUNTY: Alameda
MLS#: 40567572
SOURCE: EBRD
STATUS: Active
ON REDFIN: 16 days

Bank Owned !!! CONTRACTOR Special !!! Home needs Extensive repairs or may need to be torn down. LOT’s of POTENTIAL for this 1.75 acre lot.

Here’s why Jeremy sent us this classic structure:

All I can say is Best. Addition. Ever!!!

No Kitchen? Need extra space? No problem! In the East Bay we just knock out a wall and drive our RV up next to the house, some duct tape, and viola! Mama’s new kitchen!

Oi….at least it’s not $1million!

This has got to be a whole new level of WTFness, even if it didn’t have that lovely support post right next to the RV entrance.

Here’s another view of the RV.

Hoe.  Leigh.  Crap.

Jeremy followed up with:

Do you get a break on a combined auto/home policy for this?

Do you pay property tax or car registration?

It is pretty spectacular. Loving the retro dwell-ready colors on the RV as well….

Be sure to head over to the listing, because there are plenty more photos, although most are of the house without an RV parked in the middle of it.

Lot’s of POTENTIAL, indeed.  Too bad the listing doesn’t specify if the RV stays.

Bunus: Location, location, location!

Here’s another vaguely castle-like home from Burbed reader Tracy.  See how many castle-ish amenities you can identify.

5345 WILLOW GLEN Pl
Castro Valley, CA 94546
$790,000

BEDS:5
BATHS: 4
SQ. FT.: 5,180
$/SQ. FT.: $153
LOT SIZE: 0.5 Acres
TYPE: Detached
STYLE: Custom
STORIES: 2
YEAR BUILT: 1992
COMMUNITY: Castro Valley
COUNTY: Alameda
MLS#: 40555097
SOURCE: EBRD
STATUS: Pending
ON REDFIN: 45 days

Custom home located in a nice quiet Castro Vally neighborhood. Has possible in-law or 6th bedroom. 6th bedroom. Great amenities throughout the home. Must see to appreciate!

I’ll spot you one: It used to be worth a lot more money.  Or at least not a lot more money.  It sold in 2004 for $1,375,000.  Then again, the overbidding could have taken this baby right back to where it should be.  If you’re not sure where it should be, check out the similarly sized castle across the street.