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Ever wondered what $500,000 gets you in St. Louis? Dive into this home tour with me, a seasoned buyer’s agent, as we discover a house that may tick the market price box but raises eyebrows in terms of real value. In a bustling real estate market, how do you discern price from value? Watch as my clients and I navigate this surprising find.
#StLouisRealEstate #HomeTour #ValueVsPrice
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[00:00:09] Hey, how are you? So, you know, we talk about how the market is, you know, slowing and things are terrible. I wanted to talk about a house I showed last night. They wanted a half a million dollars for it, which in St. Louis, ten years ago, that would have been that would have been a sweet house.
[00:00:30] But let’s go over it. So I work as a buyer’s agent, and so I’ve been working with these buyers for a long time, and they understand the difference between price and value. So price is what you pay, but value is what you get. And so I’m always on the value side. And so what does that mean?
[00:00:48] It means that you can look at the systems of the house. So the HVAC, the water heater, all those things. What kind of shape are those in? What does the roof look like? How many years until there’s going to need to be a replacement?
[00:01:01] What is the general construction of the house? Does it look like it needs tuck pointing? I mean, things like this, those things, some agents aren’t going to pay attention to any of that stuff, but that’s not who I am. I feel like the more houses we see, the better chance you have of getting value for a home, even in today’s market. And I think that it helps keep you from getting something like buyer’s remorse, which is something that, as an agent, I would never want one of my buyers to have. So, you know, if you go nationally, you’ll see that places like Austin, Phoenix have seen declines in house prices, and I totally understand that. But in St. Louis right now, the right house at the right price and the right location is just still unbelievable, and I kind of just want to go through it. So my buyers, typically the way I work is my buyers will send me a property that they saw in search, and they’ll ask me about it and we’ll go over the disclosures. The disclosures on this particular house looked fine. It had a length of ownership that was I always like to look at, like, more than five years. If house keeps getting moved every two years, I often question, like, what is the reason behind that? Is there something that we just don’t know that no one’s telling us? This one had a nice long history, and so I was fine with it now when I saw it online, there’s things I mean, I’ve seen probably millions of pictures of listing photos at this point. And so certain things like, I’ll notice for one, in this particular house, the camera used a fisheye lens for the kitchen, so I knew that it was probably going to be much smaller than what the picture looked like, but that was fine. So I meet with them at the house, and I get there a little bit earlier. The first thing I notice is on the front, the siding is like bubbled out. Now understand this is a half a million dollar house. It’s also on the corner of a busy street and you can’t park in front of the house, which basically means if you have friends over, they’re not parking anywhere near you. Now, if you don’t like your friends, I guess that’s okay. But for other people, it’s like you’d like to be able to have your friends park all in an area close to your home at least so that they can be close if they’re carrying stuff and stuff like that. So when we walked up to the door, there was no sidewalk between the garage driveway where we had to park, and the front door. So we had to walk through the grass, which it’s just odd because you could never really park in front of the house and just go up the sidewalk because it doesn’t work that way. You’re not allowed to park there. So we go up there, and at the front door, there’s what was a storm door, but it’s just ripped off with two hinges at this point, which, as an agent, when you’re walking up to a house like you see thousands and thousands of houses in your career, you can almost tell what you’re getting into from just the front door. I mean, it’s crazy. So I don’t know if I mentioned the bubble siding by the garage, but it was like all bubbled and coming off. Which siding doesn’t normally bubble like that. So it was really odd.
[00:04:10] At this point, I pretty much know I’ve wasted my time. I mean, I don’t even need to go in the house. But I figured at this point, who doesn’t like to see good train wreck? So we walk in, go to the left is a living room.
[00:04:25] The crown molding is up, but they didn’t cut it at an angle, so it looks really odd and the paint’s terrible. Now I wouldn’t be critical if this was a hundred thousand dollars asking price. This is half a million dollars in St. Louis. This should be a good house.
[00:04:45] Walked to the next room and the floor is kind of shifted up and there’s tile that it’s all broken and cracked.
[00:04:54] And then we walk a little bit further and it’s the door to the outside. So we open it, it’s to the backyard, we open it. There’s a storm door there, but the front of the glass is broken out. And you walk down these newer stairs that are not the same size. Brand new wood though, and a banister that’s loose. And then you walk straight down into a pit of mulch.
[00:05:21] And when you turn around, you can see that there used to be a deck there, but they just tore the deck down. Now there’s just steps into mulch. You get down and you see there’s a she shed. Now everybody likes the she shed, right? It was cute. It was gray and pink. And yet when you actually looked inside the she shed, it was basically falling down and then towards the bottom of the property. Now this is on a hill and at the bottom of the property there’s a drain which is broken and all the water from the property from all sides will run right in this drain. Only problem with that is the door to the basement is only like 2ft away.
[00:05:58] So the minute that that gets clogged with leaves in St. Louis and if your backyard’s full of trees, the chances of that happening are super high.
[00:06:06] You’re just going to get flooded in the basement. All right, so we go back inside because we’d seen enough of the back and we go to the kitchen. The kitchen has, it’s about 10ft wide and they’ve taken out the refrigerator. Here’s a tip for you. If you see that the refrigerator is not in a home, it’s usually because it’s either on a flip, they don’t put them in or in this case, if you would have had the refrigerator in the kitchen, it would have been an even smaller kitchen. Like you wouldn’t have even been able to fit two people in there. So now you’ve got this half a million dollar house with a kitchen that’s almost unusable.
[00:06:44] You’ve got an addition where the tile is all trashed. None of the finishes are even remotely interesting. So we decided to go upstairs. Up the stairs to the one side is a bathroom, which is kind of odd, bathroom off the stairs, you have to go up like three stairs and then to the right. And then as we go up, the first thing we see on the left is a remodeled bathroom. Now that was in the pictures and that was fine, but what wasn’t in the pictures was the tile floor that was spongy, which is never good for tile and uneven, okay? so then the next room is the bedroom. And off the bedroom on the back is another bathroom. So now you’re surrounded by bathrooms in the master.
[00:07:32] And that was also a photo worthy for listings.
[00:07:38] That one had the spongy floor as well.
[00:07:43] Go to the other bedrooms after that. One of them looked like they could lock the door from the inside or lock the door to their kids so they couldn’t get out. Basically a dungeon on the second floor, two small bedrooms and that was it.
[00:08:01] We went to the basement, and it had been a finished basement at one point in time, but they had torn all the drywall out, at least most of it, and left some of the soggy drywall, like you could see the water stains. Because, of course, what happened was the water was going to come in through the basement. There was no question. So you’ve got an unfinished basement, half million dollar house.
[00:08:25] Walked outside.
[00:08:28] And I told my, if you’re a shifty real estate agent, if you’re a shifty buyer’s agent, the first thing you say is, at what price are we writing the offer? now I hate those people.
[00:08:42] I hate that people are that stupid. I hate that you would think that’s a way to treat your clients, but that’s what they do.
[00:08:49] I could tell immediately that this was not going to be the house for them. And I was like, man, that is a dump. They agreed and we left. And one of the things that happens with buyers is they get kind of sad. They’re like, “I’m really sorry I wasted your time to see this awful house” And I’m like it’s “Okay. This is my job, and I like to see a good train wreck just like anyone else”.
[00:09:14] This morning, I get up, there’s an email from the agent that they’ve accepted an offer on the house.
[00:09:21] The house hasn’t even been on the market for 24 hours, and someone has put an offer in on this house, likely over asking, and it’s an absolute dump.
[00:09:29] And so I just wanted to tell you that even as of this is September 23, 2023, and there’s houses on the market in St. Louis that are absolutely disgusting and still getting full price offers and quick offers. I mean, this house was only available to be seen starting at 10:00 a.m. On Friday. We got there at seven. So that’s all I have.
[00:09:54] I just want to share these stories with you. I wanted to get them down on video, because as I go through my career, I’m starting to see, like, I’ve been in the business a long time, and I need to start writing down what I’m actually seeing and how crazy it actually is. Because I don’t think that if you were just generally looking at houses, you would believe that the things that I see. So that was last night’s showing, half a million dollars doesn’t get you much.
[00:00:30] But let’s go over it. So I work as a buyer’s agent, and so I’ve been working with these buyers for a long time, and they understand the difference between price and value. So price is what you pay, but value is what you get. And so I’m always on the value side. And so what does that mean?
[00:00:48] It means that you can look at the systems of the house. So the HVAC, the water heater, all those things. What kind of shape are those in? What does the roof look like? How many years until there’s going to need to be a replacement?
[00:01:01] What is the general construction of the house? Does it look like it needs tuck pointing? I mean, things like this, those things, some agents aren’t going to pay attention to any of that stuff, but that’s not who I am. I feel like the more houses we see, the better chance you have of getting value for a home, even in today’s market. And I think that it helps keep you from getting something like buyer’s remorse, which is something that, as an agent, I would never want one of my buyers to have. So, you know, if you go nationally, you’ll see that places like Austin, Phoenix have seen declines in house prices, and I totally understand that. But in St. Louis right now, the right house at the right price and the right location is just still unbelievable, and I kind of just want to go through it. So my buyers, typically the way I work is my buyers will send me a property that they saw in search, and they’ll ask me about it and we’ll go over the disclosures. The disclosures on this particular house looked fine. It had a length of ownership that was I always like to look at, like, more than five years. If house keeps getting moved every two years, I often question, like, what is the reason behind that? Is there something that we just don’t know that no one’s telling us? This one had a nice long history, and so I was fine with it now when I saw it online, there’s things I mean, I’ve seen probably millions of pictures of listing photos at this point. And so certain things like, I’ll notice for one, in this particular house, the camera used a fisheye lens for the kitchen, so I knew that it was probably going to be much smaller than what the picture looked like, but that was fine. So I meet with them at the house, and I get there a little bit earlier. The first thing I notice is on the front, the siding is like bubbled out. Now understand this is a half a million dollar house. It’s also on the corner of a busy street and you can’t park in front of the house, which basically means if you have friends over, they’re not parking anywhere near you. Now, if you don’t like your friends, I guess that’s okay. But for other people, it’s like you’d like to be able to have your friends park all in an area close to your home at least so that they can be close if they’re carrying stuff and stuff like that. So when we walked up to the door, there was no sidewalk between the garage driveway where we had to park, and the front door. So we had to walk through the grass, which it’s just odd because you could never really park in front of the house and just go up the sidewalk because it doesn’t work that way. You’re not allowed to park there. So we go up there, and at the front door, there’s what was a storm door, but it’s just ripped off with two hinges at this point, which, as an agent, when you’re walking up to a house like you see thousands and thousands of houses in your career, you can almost tell what you’re getting into from just the front door. I mean, it’s crazy. So I don’t know if I mentioned the bubble siding by the garage, but it was like all bubbled and coming off. Which siding doesn’t normally bubble like that. So it was really odd.
[00:04:10] At this point, I pretty much know I’ve wasted my time. I mean, I don’t even need to go in the house. But I figured at this point, who doesn’t like to see good train wreck? So we walk in, go to the left is a living room.
[00:04:25] The crown molding is up, but they didn’t cut it at an angle, so it looks really odd and the paint’s terrible. Now I wouldn’t be critical if this was a hundred thousand dollars asking price. This is half a million dollars in St. Louis. This should be a good house.
[00:04:45] Walked to the next room and the floor is kind of shifted up and there’s tile that it’s all broken and cracked.
[00:04:54] And then we walk a little bit further and it’s the door to the outside. So we open it, it’s to the backyard, we open it. There’s a storm door there, but the front of the glass is broken out. And you walk down these newer stairs that are not the same size. Brand new wood though, and a banister that’s loose. And then you walk straight down into a pit of mulch.
[00:05:21] And when you turn around, you can see that there used to be a deck there, but they just tore the deck down. Now there’s just steps into mulch. You get down and you see there’s a she shed. Now everybody likes the she shed, right? It was cute. It was gray and pink. And yet when you actually looked inside the she shed, it was basically falling down and then towards the bottom of the property. Now this is on a hill and at the bottom of the property there’s a drain which is broken and all the water from the property from all sides will run right in this drain. Only problem with that is the door to the basement is only like 2ft away.
[00:05:58] So the minute that that gets clogged with leaves in St. Louis and if your backyard’s full of trees, the chances of that happening are super high.
[00:06:06] You’re just going to get flooded in the basement. All right, so we go back inside because we’d seen enough of the back and we go to the kitchen. The kitchen has, it’s about 10ft wide and they’ve taken out the refrigerator. Here’s a tip for you. If you see that the refrigerator is not in a home, it’s usually because it’s either on a flip, they don’t put them in or in this case, if you would have had the refrigerator in the kitchen, it would have been an even smaller kitchen. Like you wouldn’t have even been able to fit two people in there. So now you’ve got this half a million dollar house with a kitchen that’s almost unusable.
[00:06:44] You’ve got an addition where the tile is all trashed. None of the finishes are even remotely interesting. So we decided to go upstairs. Up the stairs to the one side is a bathroom, which is kind of odd, bathroom off the stairs, you have to go up like three stairs and then to the right. And then as we go up, the first thing we see on the left is a remodeled bathroom. Now that was in the pictures and that was fine, but what wasn’t in the pictures was the tile floor that was spongy, which is never good for tile and uneven, okay? so then the next room is the bedroom. And off the bedroom on the back is another bathroom. So now you’re surrounded by bathrooms in the master.
[00:07:32] And that was also a photo worthy for listings.
[00:07:38] That one had the spongy floor as well.
[00:07:43] Go to the other bedrooms after that. One of them looked like they could lock the door from the inside or lock the door to their kids so they couldn’t get out. Basically a dungeon on the second floor, two small bedrooms and that was it.
[00:08:01] We went to the basement, and it had been a finished basement at one point in time, but they had torn all the drywall out, at least most of it, and left some of the soggy drywall, like you could see the water stains. Because, of course, what happened was the water was going to come in through the basement. There was no question. So you’ve got an unfinished basement, half million dollar house.
[00:08:25] Walked outside.
[00:08:28] And I told my, if you’re a shifty real estate agent, if you’re a shifty buyer’s agent, the first thing you say is, at what price are we writing the offer? now I hate those people.
[00:08:42] I hate that people are that stupid. I hate that you would think that’s a way to treat your clients, but that’s what they do.
[00:08:49] I could tell immediately that this was not going to be the house for them. And I was like, man, that is a dump. They agreed and we left. And one of the things that happens with buyers is they get kind of sad. They’re like, “I’m really sorry I wasted your time to see this awful house” And I’m like it’s “Okay. This is my job, and I like to see a good train wreck just like anyone else”.
[00:09:14] This morning, I get up, there’s an email from the agent that they’ve accepted an offer on the house.
[00:09:21] The house hasn’t even been on the market for 24 hours, and someone has put an offer in on this house, likely over asking, and it’s an absolute dump.
[00:09:29] And so I just wanted to tell you that even as of this is September 23, 2023, and there’s houses on the market in St. Louis that are absolutely disgusting and still getting full price offers and quick offers. I mean, this house was only available to be seen starting at 10:00 a.m. On Friday. We got there at seven. So that’s all I have.
[00:09:54] I just want to share these stories with you. I wanted to get them down on video, because as I go through my career, I’m starting to see, like, I’ve been in the business a long time, and I need to start writing down what I’m actually seeing and how crazy it actually is. Because I don’t think that if you were just generally looking at houses, you would believe that the things that I see. So that was last night’s showing, half a million dollars doesn’t get you much.