San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

They typo'd and forgot the "1" before the rest of the price tag?

slope

On google earth it's all land, all slope, virtually no access. It's a developer's nightmare. The Coastal Commission and City gov't will ask for your first born child.

How much is a parcel worth (and what can you do with it) if you don't have vehicular access to it?

They typo'd and forgot the "1" before the rest of the price tag?

Nope, they explicitly state

"Last sale aug 1993 for $115,000..This is a steal!!!"

My guess would be that access is limited, the land contains the rare blue-bellied gnat-catching muggle-whumper, or it is an ancient Indian burial ground.

Doesn't look like extreme slope to me, although they might be showing only one small part of it.

Are you certain there is no access? Or is this based on looking at the map only?

I looked at the plat map and the zoning map. This parcel is surrounded by little SFR lots on the mesas to the east and west. If there is a driveway easement to this site it isn't obvious. Even if there is a driveway easement, if it isn't wide enough and/or if they can't expand the width the city might not issue the building permit. Any more, most fire agencies want a driveway that's at least 20 feet wide for these interior lots. They'd be even less amenable to dealing if there was a lot of topo involved.

Gotta get water and sewer to this site before you can develop it. If there's a natural drainage course or if there's an open space easement that prevents getting those utilities in it can get complicated.

If nothing else, a couple NIMBY neighbors could effectively prevent development if they used their imagination. It's not that hard to do.

Developing land often looks a lot easier than it is.

Understood. Well, thanks for looking at it and giving your input!

map....

When you are in the ziprealty page for the property, go to the satellite map and them turn on parcel boundaries. Zoom down a little bit and you will see two large parcels, one rectangular and one triangular. These are the only two 5 acre parcels within that road area. I assume that the property is one of these two.

If you look at the birds eye view, you can see the huge slopes and drainage channels in both properties. I looked at the GIS maps for the area and could not find any access. Also, the only "buildable" area in the rectangular parcel is only accessible by getting a small driveway through this one house on Dakota Drive and it does not look like there is enough space to make the driveway fit.

If I were the owner of this property (assuming I could not find a complete sucker who dreams of building a house on it), I would sell it to a developer for the developer to do mitigation credits on it. Either parcel, the rectangular or the trangular, look awful. Even if you were able to build on it, you would probably be advised to make most of it open space anyways.

$195k might seem like a steal, but to make a house on it will cost you probably in the area of about $1million. And no I am not overestimating it.

The realtor's very own description on his website: topography: Slope Gentle, Slope Steep
I think they're trying to sell it w/the neighboring house, 800k something. As everyone else said, seems like it would be a nightmare to develop.

Between the two listings it looks like the listing agent is saying the property is zoned for 1 house regardless of the size. It also looks like the easement goes through 4200 which is pie shaped lot so it as surveyour said isn't proabably going to be a very useful easement for developement sake.It is likely that for these reason and becasue the value of the surrounding homes are not exceedingly high, this lots value is low. Even if you build an estate with a mansion it doesn't conform to the neighborhood and probably couldn't sell for developement/building costs.

One way I might look at this lot is to buy it but not the other house. Let it be effectively "landlocked" if that is the result.Wait until 4204,4206,4208 or 4210 come up for sale at a better price and buy it. Tear it down and do a boundary adjustment if necessary to get the required road and maintain at least two legal lots or do a lot split to the degree the city will allow since by purchasing the other lot you can put any size road they might require in.This road would probably have to be like Dakota Dr. Alternately, keep the house and the property for the
future.

Finally, if the city says you can do ten lots and topography allows,if you get the road buy the best price house of which two are for sale and the lot.Hint:Don't come back to the board and tell anybody about it until you hold title!

Obviously I am pulling this out of thin air because it requires much due diligence and luck. However, I can say that things like this do get accomplished.

I'm no mindreader but I'll bet the original plan was to scrape the house, use that parcel to provide the access to the rear site; get the site rezoned for mutiple parcels, build some townhomes or detached SFRs on a condo map and sell them off at a profit.

On paper it might have looked good, but by the time an architect has to start dealing with infrastructure and topography the complication factor blows up exponentially. There's almost certainly some hillside and drainage overlays .

I'm thinking someone got in way over their head.

Can't the parcel be broken and sold to Houses surrounding it. So they can just use it for there backyards officially.
80K X 4 homes..should be good for a quick profit.
Just a dumb question. If that was your million $ ticket, buy me a beer, I am happy..

flat earth

There are regulations in the development code that specify how many houses you can put into a property that has a certain amount of slope. Based on looking at it, I can guess that there is probably space for only one house (that is how badly the slope shows up when I look at the topographic maps). With that and the access issues, I find it difficult to see how this place can be developed.

As for breaking it up into parcels and then selling it to the houses surrounding it, there are several problems with that.

1) Who wants to buy land that is essentially useless because of the slope issues

2) The existing landowners surrounding the parcel already have a fairly large amount of useless slope in it.

3) Assuming that the property was able to be divided (big if), why would anyone want to increase the amount of land they have and increase their property tax basis?

I know a lot of people will look at the location and start thinking, hey, something can be done with it. It's what we surveyors call the flat earth tendency. It looks nice now, but when you start doing the due diligence, the surveying, the engineering, it begins to lose its luster.

Well nostra -

You got the answers! Sorry but I was off line today. My first guess would have been landlocked. Second guess was mitigation land as well. The two best buyers would be either neighbor.

SD Realtor

I knew it was too good to be true but I will look at the neighboring houses as suggested.

Thanks to all for your valuable input.

I am not one to say give up quickly for a few reasons.
It could be a case of the right project wrong people. Happens all the time. Maybe no one has found the right angle on it yet. Your name could be Nostradamus Horton or McMillin.
Some properties got left behind in development because there was still plenty of easy build land around and houses were cheap. Times have changed.

I have had success buying a splittable landlocked 20 acres and buying easements cheaply from neighbors.Not such a huge windfall because it is rural and limited to two ten acre lots but still a good deal. It doubled the value of the lot
even without splitting. Actually my neighbor just paid three times what I did for an unsplittable lot.

Anyway, you will probably hit a dead end because of some of the things we have mentioned but it doesn't hurt to look at it.Even the easy ones are a nightmare BTW. It all depends on the potential endgame and interest and ability for the project.

Double check the addresses I gave you if you intend to start with them. I deduced the addresses from the tax assessors partial map and the position and addresses of the few houses on the mls related to the 5 acre partial.

.

Will do. Thanks!

That is an interesting looking parcel - I work in Environmental Consulting and I agree that the most "likely" buyer would be a developer planning to use it as a mitigation site - even just a preserve area to offset development somewhere else.

The site does look big enough that you could "potentially" have enough area onsite that would be left open to satisfy the ACOE and CDFG (assuming the open areas were permentantly set aside as open space). Any building would most likely not impact the stream channels, which helps. I think for this parcel the Coastal Commision would be the biggest hurdle. Those observations are based only on looking at the onsite resources though, not accounting for the need to bring in utilities or gain access. Not an inexpensive project, that's for sure.