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You’ve probably seen the ad for this underground missile base in New York state that’s been on the market for some time. Now you have a chance to take a virtual tour! Scout from Scouting New York went to the site and the owners were gracious enough to let him look around and take plenty of pictures. There’s a nice house on top, and part of the underground has been renovated for use as a modern living area. Then there are parts that recall the facility’s original use during the Cold War. Link -via the Presurfer
This beautiful luxury home in New York’s Adirondack State Park has an awesome secret-it’s built on top of a former launch control center, and has an additional 2300 square feet of space which lies safely underground.
And now this cabin/bunker can be yours for a mere $1.75 million! Maybe Bruce Wayne is looking for a vacation home, complete with pre-constructed BatCave? You can see more pics of this survivalist dream house at the link below.
Here’s your chance of owning a piece of movie history: the house that Macaulay Culkin bravely defended in the movie Home Alone is up for sale. The price is a bit steep, but it’s been proven to withstand intrusions by idiotic burglars.
The 4,250-square-foot, 14-room home sits on a half-acre lot and features four bedrooms, 3.2 baths, a large screened-in porch with a chandelier and, of course, the staircase sledded down by Culkin in John Hughes’ 1990 film.
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There are a lot of houses under foreclosure in Fresno, California, and many have cement ponds swimming pools that are currently empty. Instead of letting all that surface go to waste, skateboarders use the pools to test their skills, as we see in the short documentary Cannonball: Skating the Recession Pools by vimeo user California is a place. NSFW language. Link
A beautiful 1927 colonial-style waterfront home with 5 bedrooms, 3 and a half baths, and a ton of history behind it in Long Island can be yours for as little as $1,150,000. The home has had many owners, some more notorious than others.
The home gained its notoriety when Ronald DeFeos killed six family members while they were sleeping in 1974 and subsequent owners George and Kathleen Lutz claimed to be haunted for 28 days, which were detailed in the book “The Amityville Horror” (on the cover: “This book will scare the hell out of you”—Kansas City Star). However, James Cromarty, who lived in the house after the Lutzes were foreclosed upon, “Nothing weird ever happened, except for people coming by because of the book and the movie.”
Link to story. Link to listing. -via YesButNoButYes
Clayton Homes has an ad on a newspaper website offering a premium when you buy a new home -a can of beans! Link -via J-Walk Blog
I guarantee you have never seen a “tear-down” house like this one. A Minnesota company is disassembling an immense home in the prestigious Lake Minnetonka area west of Minneapolis.
This massive structure is filled with room after room of salvageable building materials in pristine condition, ranging from sprawling kitchens and custom cabinetry to a unique sauna and indoor pool slide.
At the company’s link are several pages of photos and a walk-through video.
The company saves money by inviting the public to go directly to the home to harvest materials; what remains is transported to their warehouse and store for resale.
Link.
The worldwide recession has hit a lot of people hard, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Far from it actually, as is the case with property. As the price of real estate has fallen, there are plenty of bargains to be had all around the world! The villa pictured is in Halcyon Hills, Greece.
No doubt there will be a few reading ready to point out the error in the title. Surely, it’s a mistake? Homes for less than 50K? No way! But yet, it’s true. Since the global financial debacle of last year, it’s shocking how many homes are available for sale for under US$50,000, especially in the US where the housing market was hit hardest.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Lovely Listing is a collection of user-submitted finds in the the real estate world. Sometimes you just have to wonder what people were thinking, whether it be the agent’s choice of photo, the seller’s interior decor, or the builder themselves, as exemplified above:
Dude. Check it out. The weirdest thing ever is going on here. You see? You see it? So bizarre: the toilet paper is hung on the shower stall door. Crazy!
There might be something else wrong here, too.
(Photo: Netti Asunto)
Across many cities in the United States, hundreds of thousands of foreclosed and abandoned homes turned some neighborhoods into urban blight … but nowhere is the effect as acutely felt as in Detroit.
Sweet Juniper blog has an interesting post about how nature is now reclaiming some of those abandoned houses. They use the description "feral houses," which given the condition they are in, seem very appropriate:
I’ve seen "feral" used to describe dogs, cats, even goats. But I have wondered if it couldn’t also be used to describe certain houses in Detroit. Abandoned houses are really no big deal here. Some estimate that there are as many as 10,000 abandoned structures at any given time, and that seems conservative. But for a few beautiful months during the summer, some of these houses become "feral" in every sense: they disappear behind ivy or the untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago to decorate their yards. The wood that framed the rooms gets crushed by trees rooted still in the earth. The burnt lime, sand, gravel, and plaster slowly erode into dust, encouraged by ivy spreading tentacles in its endless search for more sunlight.
Previously on Neatorama: 100 Abandoned Houses (also in Detroit)
Buildings are creatively converted or utterly demolished all the time to make room for highways and other large-scale civic problems, but the laws vary on what can be done when a single hold-out structure stands alone against a sea of fat-cat developers, builders and architects who all want nothing more but for them to move.
Sometimes they successfully force out residents or bribe them with offers that range up to 20 times the value of the home and real estate – but in many cases they simply have to give up and build around them, creating so-called ‘nail houses’ that stand apart from their surroundings.
In some cases, these incredible stand-alone structures have huge fan bases of individuals who applaud their willingness to stand up for their property.
After the big real estate bust in Phoenix, Arizona, a new trend is afoot: a boom in the market for foreclosed homes, where investors buy properties then lend it back to the (former) owners turned renters:
With this sweltering desert city enduring one of the largest tumbles in housing prices for any urban area since the Depression, there is an unrelenting stream of foreclosures to choose from. On some days, hundreds are offered for sale at the auctions that take place on the plaza in front of the county courthouse.
There is also a large supply of foreclosed families who can no longer qualify for a loan. And that is prompting a flood of investors like Mr. Jarvis, who wants to turn as many of these people as possible into rent-paying tenants in the houses they used to own.
Real estate got just about everyone into trouble in Phoenix, and the thinking seems to be that real estate is going to get everyone out.
The low end of the real estate market here — and in some equally hard-hit places like inland California and coastal Florida — is becoming as wild as anything during the boom.
David Streitfeld of the New York Times has more: Link
(Photo: Joshua Lott / NY Times)
The real estate market may be bad everywhere, but it is particularly bad in Victorville, California, where the real estate crash has turned quite literal. There, failed developments are being torn down because the cost of demolishing the houses are cheaper than completing and selling them.
Peter Y. Hong of the Los Angeles Times has more:
The Victorville demolition is one of the most dramatic ends to a bad bet made during the housing boom, but abandoned developments have become an all-too-common sight in California. Nearly 250 residential developments totaling 9,389 homes have been halted across the state, according to one research firm.
The developer of the Victorville project had hoped to sell the houses for more than $300,000 as they were being built last year, Forrester said. But reality quickly diverged from that vision. Home prices have tanked faster in San Bernardino County than any other Southern California county during the downturn. In March, the median home sale price for the county was $160,000, down 43% in a year, according to the San Diego-based research firm MDA DataQuick.
Officials of Guaranty Bank of Austin, Texas, which took over the development last year, were unavailable for comment. But Victorville city spokeswoman Yvonne Hester said the bank decided not to throw good money after bad.
"It just didn’t pencil out for them," she said. "They’d have to spend a lot of money to turn around and sell the houses. They just made a financial decision to just demolish them."
Link (Photo: Christina House / LA Times)
Do the two logos look similar to you? They do, according to the trademark attorneys of Re/Max, a national real estate franchise. They’re challenging the trademark application of a real estate startup Rehava, which has a new commission structure that is different than the established culture:
Adam Scoville, Re/Max’s legal counsel, said he can explain.
First of all, both names start with "r" and have logos with accent lines near the letter "e," he said.
"It goes beyond that," Scoville added. "If you chop the top off of the ‘h,’ you (almost) have the ‘m’ in Re/Max. The next letter is an ‘a,’ and if you take the ‘v’ then you have half of an ‘x.’ "
Steve deGuzman, Rehava’s broker-in-charge, said he doesn’t buy it. He said the trademark challenge is harassment and a form of corporate bullying that will cost his firm thousands of dollars.
"It’s a huge distraction, particularly for a startup and also in this kind of a market," deGuzman said.
He suspects the Colorado-based franchise is challenging the trademarkbecause of Rehava’s controversial commission rebates, which some in the industry see as a threat to traditional compensation standards.
The retro-fitted futuristic world of the film Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford may not be as far away as one might think. Director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic dealt with such classic questions of “what does it mean to be human” while depicting the city of Los Angeles in the year 2019 as a smoggy dystopian future, a cultural melting pot brimming with skyscrapers, flying cars and inescapable corporate advertisements. Almost 30 years later the film is hailed as an overlooked masterpiece and has inspired multitudes of designers, engineers and artists.
Now you can also add “Real Estate Developer” to that list. Sonny Astani, a Los Angeles real estate mogul, is hoping to make one part of the film’s dystopian future a reality with 14-story animated billboards.
The plan is currently undergoing environmental review and pending approval by city officials. Officials are wary of anything billboard-related at the moment as downtown L.A already has its fair share of distracting lights and signs that have drawn complaints from area neighborhoods.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by whitespace.
