For parts of every year since 2012, you've seen 1410 N. Ardmore on the market in Manhattan Beach in some form.
With its recent sale (just last week) at $1.565M, we now can try to capture some of the story behind it.
But let's first start at the end. That's a good purchase price for a 4br/3ba, 1600 sqft. house right near downtown on a lot that's a bit over 4000 sqft.
In fact, when advising a potential buyer for this property way-back-when (Dec. 2015), we gamed it out to be worth $1.600M... if the situation were normal. Which it wasn't back then.
One data point in support of a $1.6M-ish price would be the corner lot nearby at 1400 Ardmore, same size, which sold for $1.596M in Oct. 2013. The local market had risen since then, making an interior lot worth something comparable. (They built new on that site at 1400, changed the address to 505 14th and sold recently for about $3.700M.)
So the buy now at just a tick under $1.600M looks decent.
Turns out it's the second sale of 1410 Ardmore in the last 6 months.
A very, very long-pending sale of the property closed in October 2016 for $1.220M. The most recent sale was just a quick flip. Someone managed to buy it under market and pulled a quick profit out of it.
So now, let's try to go back in time and cover a bit about what wasn't normal about the repeated listings of the property from 2012-2016 and the recent short-sale offering in December 2015, which eventually culminated in that Oct. 2016 sale.
An October 2012 short-sale listing for 1410 Ardmore emerged at an unbelievable come-hither price: $800K. They showed the property in escrow for the better part of 2 years after that. The price was adjusted up to $1.261M midway, in Oct. 2013, implying that this was a lender-approved price for a short sale. But no sale ever closed. It finally went off the MLS in Oct. 2014.
The cycle repeated. A Dec. 2015 short-sale listing of the property came out at that same come-hither price: $800K.
The alarm bells were ringing. Too good to be true. But so was Dave's phone. We told seemingly dozens of people who inquired that it was going to be a challenge, and wasn't going to sell for $800K. We hinted at the red flags strewn about the property and the listing, opining that the home might not ever actually sell. If it did, it would surely be a tough road.
But finally, one buyer came to Dave and was undeterred, and decided to give it a go. We submitted a cash offer at $1.200M. The agent at the time represented that they were receiving an absolute torrent of offers. Ours was pretty good, but didn't win the day. After a long series of follow-ups, we were led to believe that they had settled on an offer near $1.800M.
That was that. Or so we believed.
As noted, we were always skeptical that the property could transact at all. This property seemed to have been tied up in a net of icky weirdness for several years. There had been foreclosure notices on and off for years.
For our buyer client, we had a title company review the records on the property. Title gingerly called it "a mess."
Where to begin? Was it the fact that the property was purchased in 2006 for $1.200M, only to be sold again in 2007, unchanged, for more than double that, at $2.500M? Why would that happen? And what, exactly, was going on with that buyer? Was he tied up in some sort of complex court case regarding asylum? Why was he paying waaaaaaaaay too much for a Manhattan Beach home at the same time?
The first foreclosure notice came 13 months after that $2.5M sale.
There were more foreclosure actions in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2015.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, people kept getting added to the title.
Our title company suggested that perhaps "multiple deeds were recorded to stall the sale," meaning that there might have been an effort to complicate any foreclosure or other forced sale.
Oh, and title told us that there was a looming bankruptcy case in there somewhere.
Multiple loans, multiple owners, courts involved... We're just scratching the surface here.
So, to be a buyer in 2015 looking at this property, with its ultra-low come-on list price, you almost felt like a pawn in some great, unfathomable game.
No conventional buyer or conventional financing were going to work here. It would take patience, luck and a lot of fussy legal paperwork to clear the property up for acquisition. A title insurance policy could only be written once it was all truly buttoned up.
It would take the equivalent of an icebreaker. A buyer who could just plow ahead and break through the mess and charge, patiently, forward, until the destination was reached.
It turns out they did settle with a buyer like that for 1410 Ardmore. Probably not the first one, and certainly not at that supposed $1.800M offer price.
For breaking through and helping clear all the issues with the property, for suffering uncertainties and indignities that we can only speculate about, the icebreaker buyer got a deal.
Foreclosures and short sales are supposed to be deals. We don't see many like that here in MB. At 1410 Ardmore, there was one.
The acquisition price of $1.220M from last October wasn't reported on the MLS, despite the fact that the home was listed on the system and was showing as "pending" from January 2016 to November 2016. (The agent is an out-of-area practitioner who appears to specialize in distress sales like this one.)
On Nov. 3, 2016, they "canceled" the MLS listing. Tax records show that the sale had occurred a month earlier, on October 4, 2016.
On Nov. 9, 2016, the new listing for 1410 Ardmore came out, with a list price of $1.599M, eventually selling close to that.
Estimated profit for that "icebreaker" buyer: a quick $300K.
Finally, a part of this story that's simple.
And presumably, this means a clear title for the current owner. That's pretty much the least you can expect, but you only notice how important "normal" is when you don't have it.