Another day, another postcard from the increasingly bizarre alternative universe that is Silicon Valley.
This time, it's the eye-popping story of a 908-square-foot, lovely-seeming home in Palo Alto, California, that hit the market in February for an asking price of $1,927,000.
Not only did the Stanford Avenue home, built in 1937 and described by Curbed San Francisco as a "teardown," sell, the site reports it brought in $623,000 over the asking price — that's a final sale price of $2,550,000.
Curbed reports:
Complete with hardwood floors, a brick wood-burning fireplace and exposed wood beam vaulted ceiling, the well-worn abode was lovely in its own right. But the real selling point here was the lot, approximately 7,500 square feet of it, and the location, four blocks from California Avenue and around the corner from Peer Park.
In all likelihood, this home will be torn down for a new construction.
One commenter on the post pointed to a truer example of a teardown less than a mile away, on Oberlin Street in Palo Alto: a 760-square-foot two bedroom home sold "as is" at the end of 2016, in what appears to be serious disrepair, for $1,315,000.
The listing for the house and lot on the Girouard Properties website advertised it as "an opportunity to build your dream home."
The house on Stanford Avenue is only the most recent, and hardly the most egregious, example of the burgeoning bubble on the Bay.
In the last two months, we've reported on the Twitter employee earning $160,000 a year who says he's just scraping by in San Francisco, the Facebook engineers earning between $100,000 and $700,000 a year who asked Mark Zuckerberg to subsidize their sky-high rent and the fact that Google employees could buy five houses for the price of one — if they left Silicon Valley.
