Burned Out Walnut Creek Home Sold for More Than $850k

Photo from Melinda Byrne/Key Realty

Deep sigh. No, this is not a headline from the The Onion. This is a real thing that actually happened and well…I’m just flabbergasted. It almost reminds me of the scene from The World According to Garp where Garp and his wife are looking to buy a house and an airplane crashes into it. Garp says to the realtor and his wife “We’ll take it! What are the chances of that ever happening again. It’s been pre-disastered.”

Well, this house has definitely been pre-disastered

As Andrew Chamings reported at SFGate, “The home at 254 Tamarisk Drive was ravaged by a two-alarm fire on Sept. 11 last year. The roof collapsed and the garage was reportedly fully engulfed in flames. Firefighters determined that the blaze appeared to have started in the garage, though a cause wasn’t revealed.”

But that obviously didn’t stop the Bay Area’s blazing hot real estate market. On Friday, Dominick Reuter at Business Insider reported that, not only did the home sell for over the $850,000 asking price, it had 13 offers and sold after being on the market for just a week.

For fuck’s sake.

Apparently the median listing for houses in Walnut Creek is $1.2 million but realtor Melinda Byrne of Key Realty, the real estate agent for this burned out shell of a house, told Business Insider that “houses routinely go for $2.1 million, depending on size and condition.”

She also told Business Insider that “Fixer-uppers usually have walls. In the case of this property, it’s literally transparent.”

Deep sigh.

You can read more about this little bit of insanity right here.