This Two-Bedroom Palo Alto Bungalow Wants $10 Million

This Two-Bedroom Palo Alto Bungalow Wants $10 Million

A better and more bonkers deal than it sounds

April 29, 2016

The average Palo Alto home costs anywhere between $2 million to $2.5 million these days, depending on who you ask.

So if you had, say, four times that much to spend, you could buy the likes of a six bed, six bath, 6,000-square-foot, 1904 Victorian for $10.3 million, or a brand new, five bed, five bath, 5,000 square foot Feldman house for $9 million.

Or, you could drop $10 million on a two-bed, one-bath bungalow circa 1921. It’s 936 square feet and evidently hasn’t let a photographer inside since it was built (the ad provides only images of the admittedly spunky looking, aqua-colored exterior).

That’s $10,681 per square foot. That’s a lot.

SocketSite points out that 961 Lincoln Avenue is more of a land deal than a home listing: The average-sized house sits on two parcels totaling nearly 25,000 square feet (a little over half an acre), which means this is more like a $400 per square foot offer.

Point taken. …but it’s still a lot of money.

You could buy more than a full acre in land-scarce Palo Alto for $344 square feet instead. Or10,000 square feet for a mere $234 per foot.

Or you could buy four of these existing homes at market rate, demolish them, and in most cases end up with both slightly more land and change back for your $10 million.

Okay, admittedly, there are some flaws in those plans, first being that none of those properties are contingent and the other being that none of those other lots are in the Crescent Park neighborhood. Not all land is created equal.

So some buyer might decide that eight figures is worth it regardless of how (little) there is on the site. Is it a shrewd deal in the making? Or a sign of the madness of our times?