Hot Property: Acting couple sells in Los Feliz Oaks

 

Actors Melissa McCarthy ("Samantha Who?" and "Gilmore Girls") and Ben Falcone ("Joey") have sold their home in the Los Feliz Oaks neighborhood for $2,495,000.

The 3,832-square-foot redone traditional has four bedrooms, 4 1/2 bathrooms and two offices.

The two-story house, built in 1940, was sold for its asking price, and I'd say pretty quickly too. It came on the market in early May. The couple had purchased the property in 2006 for $2.1 million.

-- Lauren Beale

Thoughts? Comments?

Photo: The house features formal living and dining rooms, 9-foot ceilings, hardwood floors, French doors, two second-floor terraces, laundry areas on the first and second floors, a flat grass yard and a pool with spa. Credit: Jeff Ong / Postrain Productions

Comments

[Will]

Beautiful entry hall. Can't say much for that yellow buffet in the hall however.

[L]

Good for them, looks like a very nice home

[David]

Will, that's a foyer (not a "hall"). ;-)

[sheila]

hmmm. is this what is meant by a "softening at the top of the market?" an increase of 20% from the peak?

[DF]

What an awful financial decision by these purchasers. The market has been steadily declining since 2006, and they bought for _more_ than the sellers paid in that year? Ouch. They either have terrible judgment or so much money they don't need to worry about taking a massive loss.

To give some indication of how excessive this sales price is, the Case-Schiller curve predicts that this house should cost $1.447 million. Agents can bloviate about how the high end is crash-proof or how pretty the entryway is, but even by conservative estimates, this price is grotesquely inflated.

[DT]

We don't really know if this was a good purchase or not. If there was $1M of renovations made after the house was bought in 2006, then there is actually a huge loss on the sale.

Real estate, unless you get lucky and buy in a down year and sell a few years later in a boom year, or buy in a quiet area that suddenly becomes hot, is a very bad investment. Even the fact that home prices historically rise by 3% a year, doesn't mean that one actually get's a return of 3% a year.

For instance, if you bought a house in 1959 for $25K and sell it for $110K today, you did get a 3% annual increase in house price, but after paying real estate tax for 50 years, maintenance, and likely a remodel or two, you're left with a major negative return.

It's like buying a mutual fund and it returns 10% a year but the broker charges a 5% annual fee as well as a 25% "maintenance" fee every 5 years. Not a very good deal.

Real estate is almost never a good investment. Buy a house to live in(although one should buy smart and not overpay like anything else they buy-some people spend more time researching buying a $1000 large screen TV than in buying a $750,000 house), not to use as an investment.