$782,000 Over Asking For a House in Sunnyvale (mercurynews.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: A house in Sunnyvale just sold for close to $800,000 over its listing price. Your eyes do not deceive you: The four-bed, two-bath house -- less than 2,000 square feet -- listed for $1,688,000 and sold for $2,470,000. "I think it's the most anything has ever gone for over asking in Sunnyvale -- a record for Sunnyvale," said Dave Clark, the Keller Williams agent who represented the sellers in the deal. "We anticipated it would go for $2 million, or over $2 million. But we had no idea it would ever go for what it went for." This kind of over-bidding is known to happen farther north in cities including Palo Alto, Los Altos and Mountain View. But as those places have grown far too expensive for most buyers, future homeowners have migrated south to Sunnyvale, a once modest community that now finds itself among the Bay Area's real estate hot spots.

Comments

Re: Stupid, or hoping to make a killing?

[MightyMartian]

Exactly. If Southern California is anything like Seattle or Vancouver, those ranchers being sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars over the asking price aren't being bought by people who intend to live in them, they're being bought by people who intend to build some form of multi-family dwellings; ie. condominiums, townhouses and the like.

In some cases it's also foreign buyers looking to park their money in what they view as a secure and stable market. The Chinese are big purchasers for this reason on the West Coast, and I know in Britain you have wealthy Russians and other Eastern Europeans burying their assets in property.

Whatever the case, these sorts of sales are not by normal buyers, and the West Coast from British Columbia down to California is having a very peculiar kind of real estate boom. Every attempt to tamper with it up here in British Columbia has had only a modest short-term effect, and though rising interest rates may dampen it a bit, I'm not sure considering the kinds of buyers we're seeing that it will have that serious effect. It's a damned weird thing happening.