I’m just asking. But why, in a city where it might typically cost you between $4,000 and $6,000 to rent a nice 5-bedroom house, is this home on Berkeley’s Panoramic Way (precise address unknown) being advertised for rent for a princely $30,000/month?
I’m prepared to believe it is a “unique and magnificent retreat with panoramic San [...]
Posts from ‘November, 2008’
Stratospheric Rent for Panoramic House
For One East Bay City It’s Boom Time
While the rest of the Bay Area, and the nation as a whole, sees new housing construction projects grinding to a halt, or put on indefinite hold, one East Bay city is bucking the trend with plans for thousands of new homes to be built over the next decade.
According to a piece in this month’s [...]
Not Exactly Picture Perfect in Piedmont
OK. Have a guess. What price this house (above)?
I’ll give you a clue. It’s in Piedmont. So you know already it’s going to be overpriced. But what do you think of $3,500,000?
Yes, 342 Bonita Avenue, known as The Wetmore House, was built in 1878 and is Piedmont’s oldest intact home, and yes it’s on the [...]
Berkeley Architecture Given Big Apple Approval
So ecstatic was Nicolai Ouroussoff about UC Berkeley’s new Toyo Ito-designed art museum (above) that he appeared to forget that it hasn’t been built yet — and indeed is still seeking funding:
“The interstitial spaces seem to swell open and close up to regulate the movement of people through the building; the self-contained, honeycomblike spaces, by [...]
Oakland’s Most Expensive Home Finds a Buyer
What was once the most expensive home on the market in Oakland has gone into contract — after well over a year on the MLS.
2 Westminster Drive in the Oakland Hills (above) started life at $4.5m, and its price was cut and sliced down to $2.8m (a 38% reduction). It is now in contract — [...]
Tuesday Snippets
Manhattan comes to Temescal (above)? The Creekside Project, a mixed-use development with 102 condos and nearly 6,000 sq ft of retail space, has been approved. Located at the intersection of 51st and Broadway where the vacant Global Video building now stands, it will be designed by Hauser Architects. [Oakbook]
Not surprisingly, another Berkeley home identified by [...]
Twist on Traditional: Oakland Home that Fools
This is one of those optical-illusion homes. Look at that classical facade with its wash of stippled salmon-hued plasterwork — 1900s one imagines? A Burgundy-Tuscan blend built for a family of some wealth in the days before newfangled motorized vehicles.
Wrong. This 4/3.5 abode at 5801 Buena Vista Avenue in Oakland was erected just 14 years [...]
Link Love: Best From the Wires
Inside Will Wright’s Oakland Hills home (above) [NYT Magazine]
How to be a good neighbor [Apartment Therapy]
Even a hedge fund haven feels housing pinch [NYT]
30-year mortgage rates fall to 6.04 average [SFGate]
Longest on market in Berkeley: 523 days and counting [Redfin]
[Photo credit: Jason Madara, NYT]
Quite Possibly the Best Deal in (Oakland) Town
Given that the price on this 4/3.5, 3,600 sq ft home at 5230 Cochrane Avenue has been slashed by nearly half a million greenbacks — or 28% – this might just qualify as the deal of the year, let alone the week.
It’s really a tale of the times. The house, which was built in 2005 [...]
Italian Villa Finds its Price: $1m Less than Asking
“San Francisco has nothing to compare with this home,” I overheard a punter saying when I visited the open house for 250 The Uplands in Berkeley’s Claremont neighborhood early this year. Nearby, a certain celebrity literary couple were snooping around the sumptuously appointed master suite.
This 4/5.5 “Italianate villa” — designed in 1934 by Houghton Sawyer [...]