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

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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.

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Broke-Ass Stuart - Editor In Cheap

Broke-Ass Stuart - Editor In Cheap

Stuart Schuffman, aka Broke-Ass Stuart, is a travel writer, poet, TV host, activist, and general shit-stirrer. His website BrokeAssStuart.com is one of the most influential arts & culture sites in the San Francisco Bay Area and his freelance writing has been featured in Lonely Planet, Conde Nast Traveler, The Bold Italic, Geek.com and too many other outlets to remember. His weekly column, Broke-Ass City, appears every other Thursday in the San Francisco Examiner. Stuart’s writing has been translated into four languages. In 2011 Stuart created and hosted the travel show Young, Broke, and Beautiful on IFC and in 2015 he ran for Mayor of San Francisco and got nearly 20k votes.

He's been called "an Underground legend": SF Chronicle, "an SF cult hero":SF Bay Guardian, and "the chief of cheap": Time Out New York.