Sound the Trumpets: John is Sold

Here we go with another big-dollar sale in MB...

512 John is pending at last. Most recent list price: $3.99m.

The full saga as covered on MBC includes:

• A discussion of the home as a "masterpiece" and evaluation of the rental option ($20k/mo.).

• News about the $400,000 price increase mid-listing, featuring this quote:

Do the people who bought 512 John earlier this year really mean to sell it?

• Description of the $750,000 price cut which guaranteed the current owners a net loss.

• A story this week estimating those losses at $316,000 (with 6% cost of sale, which may or may not apply here).

Yesterday marked 205 true days on market for this home – more than the 152 DOM showing in the listing, but less than the 450 days showing in the "CDOM" field. (That's a head-scratcher, but we believe our source.)

So at this point the question is only how bad of a hit the sellers take.

What's interesting about this one is that the financial loss appears to reflect a builder's misperception (overestimation) of the market value of the home in the first days of 2007. The home was essentially taken in trade, we're told, no doubt at a price the new owner believed to be a below-market bargain at $4.075m. Seven months later, the market has proved that opinion wrong.

We expect hard-core market watchers to have a fine sense of prices, but anyone can make a mistake – especially this year.

John makes 5 escrows for September SFRs west of Sepulveda, and a new contingent sale was posted today, too – 505 3rd on the South End, listed at $1.949m and purchased in 2005 for $1.6m. So we're at 6 now for the month, all of them over $1.5m.