A three-bedroom, two-bath house anywhere in San Francisco for less than a million dollars is grounds to slow down and take notice these days.
Add in the fact that 2116 17th Avenue, the 1,280-square-foot, Marina-style home listed for $995,000 at the corner of Quintara Avenue, is disarmingly pretty once you get inside and that the price of the place has barely budged in a decade and you begin to realize you’re dealing with what’s become a very rare creature. (Don't spook it, it'll run away!)
The fan window in front gives the circa 1929 home's otherwise muted exterior a bit to pique your curiosity. Once through the front door you find that this seemingly unassuming Sunset home is almost unnaturally roomy, with a gorgeous, wide-open living room, bedrooms upstairs and down, a separate breakfast room (it‘s small, but it‘s there), a meditation room with sliding paper screen doors, and both a backyard and a garage squeezed in to boot.
There's a kitchen upstairs, of course. But get this: There’s a second kitchen downstairs, complete with hardwood floors and matching cabinetry. (We're half expecting an Escher staircase at this point.)
The dining room is stately (and noticeably, a separate room unto itself), and there's a marble-lined bathroom. If this house were elsewhere, we would suspect it would list for well over a million. Although, note that Trulia calculates the average price of a Sunset home as over $1.6 million these days, up more than 34 percent from last year.
On top of that, consider that this house sold way back in 2005 for $833,000, meaning that its price has increased less in 11 years than most homes in the same neighborhood have just in the last 12 months.
In fact, when you adjust for inflation $833,000 in 2005 was worth over $1 million today, meaning that the price of this house has effectively dropped over the last 11 years. Steady us, we're dizzy.
It’s no secret that brokers will sometimes intentionally underprice a home so that they can net a fat over-asking margin to boast about, but listing agent Jason Chan proposed a more thoughtful explanation for the pricing modesty here. "If I list a house like this at $1.3 million, people might expect they’ll eventually have to pay $1.6 or $1.7 or more, and then maybe not bid," Chan says.
Bernal Heights charm (with a Sunset Zip code), at less than seven-figures starting. Is it 2013 again already?
- 2116 17th [Redfin]
- Inner Sunset trends [Trulia]
- 2116 17th history [Zillow]