The then (2007) above when sold for $935,000, the during (2009) below.
And the now for 4033 26th Street in 2010.
Back on the MLS and asking $2,595,000 for the “new” (but technically remodeled) Noe Valley home. And while not noted in the listing (or apparently any of the open house literature), 3,850 square feet if re-built as was proposed.
∙ Listing: 4033 26th Street (4/3.5) – $2,595,000 [MLS]
∙ JustQuotes: There’s Always One On (Almost) Every Block [SocketSite]
∙ Watch That First Step, It’s Bound To Be A Doozy At 4033 26th Street [SocketSite]
A number of people here have griped that the Building Department is too restricticve in issuing permits for historic properties. This proves the opposite. A much more appropriate solution would have been an addition with a setback.
remodel looks great! here are my numbers:
– net sale price at asking, after commissions = $2.465
– less purchase price of $935K
– less rebuilding cost per permits of $500K
– less holding cost (2.2 years at 4% assumed blended cost of financing and oppy cost)of $82K
– less 2.2 years of property tax of $23K
– less construction financing (assume $500K at 6% for 8 months) of $20K
= $905K profit
not too shabby. of course the architect was maybe $50K and the construction costs were double the stated amount but still not too shabby.
Resp. If it sells for that price, of course.
How is it that two years are taken to construct a brand new home, but the listing agent doesn’t publish the square footage ? Surely the builder and architect know this figure quite precisely. My guess is that the $/sqft number would not benefit the sales effort.
And what does “professional kitchen” mean ? Speaking of which it looks as if the designer has chosen the worst of all solutions for the top of the cabinets, creating an unusable “dust shelf” rather than extending them to the ceiling.
Enough with the negatives. This place is in a nice location and the developer has created an attractive product. This is how you satisfy buyers who want a new large home in a mature neighborhood. I hope they can make a worthwhile profit here.
With no intentions of dragging the dead horse of discussion from a previous post’s comments, this is a prime example of the downside of staging. I’ve never been so distracted by furnishings; I’m trying to look at the rooms and layouts but all I can think to is example photos of three star hotels from cut-price travel booking sites and this furniture store video I saw the other week.
What’s a “faade”? No spellchecking, looks like no professional photographer either with the odd angles. This all looks like haste.
without the staging, I would never have known that people put pillows on the side of their tubs.
(picture number 15).
I certainly don’t see anything offensive about the staging effort regardless if it helps increase eventual sales price or not.
The TV area (pic 16) looks very awkward, but that might be that the space is awkward.
otherwise it seems like a nice home to me. nothing extraordinary, but nice. And good location too.
resp: where can you get land/construction debt for 4%? seems too cheap;
soft costs alone for this project would have been $100k easy in addition to the construction costs. You are probably spot on with construction costs double — $350-$400/ft² depending on how much foundation/seismic they had to do.
Still looks like it could eke out some profit here if they can hit their sales price.
all-in-all, nicely done.
milkshake: the trick with the cabinets — bet they have lights on top to create mood lighting at nite…tradeoff for the dust collection up there..
I’d love to know why realtors insist on calling these “professional” kitchens. Obviously they’ve never been inside a professional kitchen, This particular one reeks of suburbia. And for $2.6M you deserve a better refrigerator.
just for the record i don’t think it will sell for asking given the other opportunities in that price range in other parts of the city. and what goon in the building department signed off on this permit for a cost of $500K? cmon
^^^ And the Photoshopped sky with wires magically erased. It — perhaps unfairly — make you wonder if the construction was done with the same level of professionalism. I’ve never had a home up for sale, but wonder if people simply don’t review the “product” their real-estate agent is providing?
An area rug?
In a “professional kitchen”?
@resp, bldg cost per permit are always understated, at least 2x. I think the bldr spent at least $800k if not more, needs to see in person. They had a good timing in terms of squeezing contractors. Building the same in ’07 would’ve been $1m for sure.
I suspect sqft is lower than you’d imagine, especially b/c they couldn’t expand much horizontally due to neighboring windows. That’s why they went up but then you get less usable sqft.
The good news for the developer is that there is no competition in this price range/location.
Unless layout is funny it would sell quickly around asking for I’d say a net profit for at least $500k
Ohh, and dont forget the costs to redo the back yard. I doubt that nice stone was there before.
This is a juicy one to tear apart:
1. In this case the 3rd story facade addition is appropriate as opposed to setting it back. Planning code allows this when you duplicate an “historic” facade.
2. Contractor doesn’t know much about window and door trim; cheesy looking around the garage door, and corner blocks are NEVER used on the exterior. The interior window casing below the sill is all wrong; you never slope cut it the way they did.
3. Kitchen cabinets, I agree, are too close to the ceiling for use. They need to be at least a foot off the ceiling for uplighting, otherwise carry them clear to the ceiling to avoid a dust shelf. poor design choice.
4. Staging is typically junk: looks like a senior citizens home or a funeral parlor. terrible. Why all the different room colors? This is what decorators do, not architects.
The developers I know are quoting 200 to 250 a foot for their own builds. I met with one this morning and that is what he said. Sight unseen I think this looks like a 600K job or so.
Board Games!!! Yay!!! (picture 17)
* flaps hands together excitedly *
without knowing how much the owner put down i assume 4-4.5% is a fairly accurate blend of financing cost (5.5-6%) and opportunity cost of the down payment (insert your assumption here). Anything more than this and you start getting posts arguing that opportunity costs on down payments do not really exist.
and yes, i know reno costs are always way understated which was my final point. seems ez to slip by the bldg deparment when it’s a $20K bathroom remodel but for them to miss $500K of unreported upgrades just shows their stupidity/carelessnes. good for people like me trying to give as little as possible to the government in property taxes.
it would be interesting to see the difference in upgrade costs reported to the SF DBI vs. reported to the IRS on this project cuz you know he ain’t gonna show a capital gain to uncle sam.
Let’s hope for “11 offers over asking some all cash”
Editor, Don’t forget the mid-construction link. Zoned RH-2 — another lost opportunity; will be interesting to see if the market still has an appetite for these monsters…
[Editor’s Note: Cheers (and since updated).]
As I mentioned previously, the market for the big, nice area-5 2M+ SFR looks pretty good right now. Seven have sold or gotten into contract in the past three weeks.
@noearch – small off-topic nitpick: please do not use “an” in front of “historical.” It’s grammatically incorrect, and just doesn’t make sense. You don’t pronounce it “istorical,” and “an” is only used in front of vowel sounds, which “h” is not. Would you ever say or write “an history lesson?”
I don’t know why people do it. I think some douchey politician or newscaster started it and it just caught on. Sigh.
Oh, the house looks nice, but some misses on the remodel. Still, turning a crap shack into a livable residence is private money spent with some public benefits – hope they make a bit of profit on it.
UPDATE: Re-written to reference our mid-construction update (which we had indeed forgotten) and its 3,850 square feet as proposed (but not noted in the listing or apparently any of the open house literature).
Anyone else not a big fan of the facade? It looks a little tract-home-ey to me. Maybe because of the window/door trim quirks that noearch mentioned.
Not a big fan of the kitchen or the staging, but inside it seems nice and not extraordinary as ex-SFer said.
Regarding square footage……I agree that it should be included in the marketing materials as it helps with cost per square foot and also, how large some of the rooms might be. A 2500 sq. ft. home with 4 bedrooms and 3 baths is a very differently scaled home than a 2 bedroom, 2 bath home.
Unfortunately, many real estate companies absolutely will not allow printed square footage because of the multitude of lawsuits in the past. Blame it on the system and not the agent.
@grammargoon — it’s British English vs. American English. And many people who write it that way do pronounce it “an istorical.” Both are correct.
Thank you cr at: I was just about to mention that, from my on line research, both uses of “an historic” or “a historic” are correct. It does have a lot to do with how the would sounds when pronounced.
I prefer “an historic”.
where did the power lines disappear to?
^^^ The photoshopper ate ’em.
why are the windows out front not centered. looks weird.
The windows on the front facade are not centered, as you say, for a number of reasons:
1. The original facade (an historic facade) had the windows not centered. That entire floor was lifted up on full level, with the original window locations left in place.
2. The new lower level added 3 windows that align with the original window locations above. It makes sense and looks historically original. It doesn’t look “weird” but rather more quirky and original to me.
The off-center windows don’t bother me, but they look awkward over the garage door, which is centered. It makes the facade look strange. Also, the cornice, which was proportional to the smaller structure, now looks too small for such a tall building.
Nice place for the well-to-do car. Oh, and look, there’s a door on the side for humans too.
you can still see the power line reflections in the windows and the building on the left has them disappearing up into space…
LOL Alexei, You nailed it!
yea, what a brilliant observation..I’ll have to write that one down.
Maybe the windows are centered with respect to the property lines?
No. Wasn’t serious. Resp’s answer was probably the best.
Mine was just intended to be ridiculous, and therefore, funny.
the windows are off center because the left window used to be the front door which was left-justified against the left wall of the house (as it should be). the 2 right windows then divide the rest of the house into 3 equal sections.
agree that the house now looks stretched vertically. calling this “historical” appears to be a stretch too.
good grief, tipster! are you serious?
@noearch
Actually it is incorrect to state that Planning allows you duplicate an historic facade. In fact they discourage it explicitly. Page 51 of the Residential Design Guidelines has an example of a third story addition very similar to this one as an example of what NOT to …
“Design the materials, detailing and form of an addition to be
compatible with the historic building. However, it should be
clearly distinguished from the original building so it can be
understood as a more recent change.”
This addition is completely inappropriate.
@Actually
I think you are misreading the Guidelines doc.. While they do have a picture of a similar looking building, they are saying it is bad not because someone added a third floor, but because they changed from a peaked roof to a flat roof. This building kept it the same, so it’s ok.
There are conditions when, in fact, you CAN duplicate an historic facade. There are several examples alone, that I know of in Noe Valley.
If you continue the facade straight up to the new third floor addition, flush with the existing front face of the building that is allowed. You must replicate all of the existing details such as windows, trim, siding, cornices, etc.
Two were completed recently like that; one on Sanchez near 29th (west side) and one on Elizabeth near Sanchez. Both houses were existing 1890’s 1 story Victorians with elaborate trim, bays, etc. Each one had a full floor added. The additions were beautifully built and once completed you could NOT distinguish the old from the new.
Any building in SF over 50 years old is defined by the Planning Department as being an “historical resource”..
I know..at times pretty ridiculous..Their rules, not mine.
For an addition to be approved or disapproved you have to go thru a long set of forms and questions, 43 pages, and submit those to the Planning Dept. to prove or disprove that your property is an “historical resource” or not.
I’ve done this now for several properties and each time it adds about 2 months to the review process and several $1000 in fees.
I viewed the property. The buzz was that it would go for well over asking, and the listing agent priced it to do so. It’ll be interesting to watch.
@ R
There are numerous references in the guidelines, including page 51 that specifically state that any addition should not mimic the existing historic facade. I actually worked on the Residential Design Guidelines so I am familiar with their intent.
@ noearch
They may have made it through approvals but that is not the intent of the guidelines.
Each project can be reviewed as “unique”, and there are some projects that are very carefully designed to allow for the new facade to match the original. I cited several excellent examples, and it is possible.
The projects cited went thru extensive 311 reviews with neighbors and with the Preservation Specialists at the planning dept.
The Design Guidelines have some very broad interpretations when it comes to actual projects involving so called “historic” facades.
I actually worked on the Residential Design Guidelines so I am familiar with their intent
so we can blame you for all this nonsense these “guidelines” cause?
Finally someone willing to take accountability.
alas.
@geo: Thanks for your comment. I would be very interested in your take on some of the projects I mentioned here in Noe Valley. They were built around 2007-9…very well constructed, beautiful, authentic details and in each case the new 3rd floor addition and facade was NOT set back but duplicated the original. They are handsome and sensitive additions.
So these examples reinforce my case that the Design Guidelines allow for broad interpretation. The key, I believe, is that the projects were WELL designed and WELL constructed.
noearch — can’t picture them off the top of my head, post a link or address, would love to take a gander at them.
thanks
@geo: you’re welcome. Here are the two projects I mentioned previously. Both were originally 1 story over garage, ornate original Victorian facades. Both had 3rd story additions which aligned with the original face and had the materials and details duplicated.
1570 Sanchez near 29th st.
436 Elizabeth St. near Sanchez.
Would appreciate your thoughts or any info you may have on these two remodels. thanks.
Noearch — had a nice ride to those two properties yesterday after work. Though Vics are not my cup of tea, they were very nicely done, couldn’t see how anything like that could take away from the original. Importantly, the proportions worked with the expansion.
The owners should be pleased as punch with the results.
Thanks for sharing those.
Both very nicely done, I remember seeing the Elizabth one but I think it was owned by the GC, it’s usually really expansive to replicate a nice facade.
3976 19th street is the most impressive example of that IMO.
clipper/diamond was also nicely done.
Noearch, how expensive is such facade, compared to a modern stucco with aluminum windows or what they did with the Twitter guy’s house on Duncan?
I was really hoping that “Actually” in an earlier post would comment about how these two projects were approved if they were really outside of the Residential Design Guidelines.
AS for cost of replicating an historic facade like the two I mentioned, that’s VERY hard to say. That’s like asking “how much does a car cost?”…depends on many factors, but I’m sure the cost is more than a cheap stucco facade with aluminum windows. I would budget easily $60-100k alone for the facade..But remember, those two projects involved ADDING a 3rd floor, not just a facade. In that case the cost was probably $300-400/sf.
Its a shame the facade turned out so poorly. It’s not hard or that much more expensive to do something tasteful. Look at the shingled building going up on 23rd/Noe and the Gray building/white trim on 23rd/vicksburg
In contract as of March 12th, apparently. But they just updated it within the last day or two I think.
Sold for 2.595M.
I toured this place. Very spacious and done in a high-end style (not mine). I have to say i’m surprised the seller hit his number. Congratulations to him. For me, this particular sale does say something about market strength for good listings in good locations.
Sold for $3M yesterday for an apples to apples gain of 405k in 35 months.