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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

Interview with the author https://www.digitalesbild.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/inexplicably-b...

"KP: Is it important for you that the photos actually originate from real estate marketplaces? If so, how do you verify their origin?

AD: Yes, that’s actually really important, otherwise the blog is just unverifiable user-generated content. If an image is submitted without a link, or no agent’s logo on the image, or I can’t find the source online, I tend not to use it. I’m sent lots of images taken by agents of something funny or shocking they’ve seen in a property that day, but if the image hasn’t been taken for the purposes of marketing the house, I don’t use it."

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This is incredible given some of the listings. The fact one of the pictures is the house on literal fire, coupled with this context, goes to show that some people really don't belong anywhere in marketing or sales.

When I see something like that I just assume the realtor knows they’ve been handed a dud listing and is expending as little effort on it as they possibly can.

And it got sold! I happen to remember this

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64389615

I suppose leading with a picture of it actually on fire is better than a post or pre fire photo.

Life imitates art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFwS_Dqd-IU

(Scene from Synecdoche, New York.)

Of course it got sold. The seller was completely honest about the condition of the property.

You're going to have to disclose the fire. May as well use it to get lots of people looking if you're confident in the rebuild.

I do like imagining trying to sell it during the fire based on apparent damage done and the perceived capabilities of the fire dept. in stopping it.

The Crassus approach? https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/crassus-fire-briga...

I thought that too. First fire department - ruthless!

Would that not be a total writeoff, given that it's a timber building?

Only after insurance is factored in https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc515

Not sure what taxes would have to do with it?

You'd have to bulldoze that flat and start from scratch.

Write-off is an accounting term that would seem not to have a meaning outside of taxes.

Its meaning outside of taxes is something which has dropped to zero value. So if you damage your car beyond repair, for example, that would be a "write off". It means it's not worth the repair costs because it's cheaper to buy a new one.

Right. What it doesn't mean is that the thing being written off is valueless, though. I've seen several perfectly safe and drivable cars written off because of cosmetic damage that would have cost more to fix than the car was worth. But the cars were otherwise fine.

Except this part:

> because it's cheaper to buy a new one.

is not true. A write-off is because the repairs exceed the fair market value of the thing being written off. But the thing is used, not new. The fair market value is likely to be well below the cost of replacing it with something new.

> It means it's not worth the repair costs because it's cheaper to buy a new one.

No, it just means insurers are assholes rigging the game.

A simple example: my personal MacBook broke. MacBooks are written off in 5 years. My insurer only wants to pay the surplus value (€200).

I tell them okay, instead of the €200 find me a replacement MacBook of the same model and year with approximately the same config. “Sorry sir we don’t do that.”

Okay, do they think I can find the same MacBook for €200? “Probably not sir..”

Fuck insurers.

Our old house had problems. When we listed it, the best prospect thought we were stupid not honest, so he kept trying to get us to lower the price when inspection turned something up. In retrospect maybe a picture with the proverbial roof on fire might have been a good idea.

Here's the thing about getting a house loan: If you try to buy a house for too far under or over market value and can't explain why it's that far under market value, it sets off all sorts of red flags for lenders. Before we bought that house we passed on another because it was a unicorn in its neighborhood and our agent was having a terrible time coming up with documentation of comparable listings in a reasonable distance from the house. And then I discovered water damage and we bailed.

If you buy it for 15% under market and have a bunch of inspections that say why, that's less of a problem.

In New Zealand, houses can be sold “as is” which means cash only. It usually means that insurance cannot be acquired for the house, and mortgages always require insurance. It means there are bargains still available in my city (Christchurch) because there were so many houses damaged by the earthquake a decade ago. There are still houses that are about 2/3 the price compared to similar insurable houses. Few people can buy the as-is properties because most people need a mortgage to buy a house. People with cash usually buy better houses. A saw an as-is sold the other day to a buyer from the US.

Insurance policies have some queer rules that all insurers share - perhaps due to building code, or maybe due to a common reinsurer?

Your floor cannot have more than 50mm (two inches) drop between two corners of the house, as it can’t be insured. Unless you can show the unlevel floor existed pre-earthquake, in which case you can get insurance! Wierd.

All used homes in the US are sold “as-is”. It’s caveat emptor doctrine.

Now, there are laws against misrepresentation. There is a disclosure form that is required which asks you about defects. The seller can admit them or decline to answer, but if the seller knowingly lies about a property defect you can sue to recover damages.

Real estate agents have a lot of liability here because they are bound to disclose things that could have been “reasonably known” - which is a definition that can be tortured in every direction. For example, bedrooms: in my state a bedroom must have a closet to count as a bedroom. Except sometimes it doesn’t have to have a closet to count as a bedroom. The exceptions are literally described as “some older homes had bedrooms without closets” - but “older” and “bedrooms” is left to the interpretation of your legal council and the investigator when it becomes an issue.

Property in Franklin, Tennessee is obscenely expensive, for no good reason.

How did they not say "fire sale"??

> The pair - natives of North Manchester in the United Kingdom who now live in Houston, Texas with their three children - had been searching for homes near Nashville, Tennessee when they came across the property.

Why is the BBC clarifying what country Manchester is in but omitting where Tennessee is? Very strange for a British publication.

RE: the fire, problem properties are actually a hot market... flippers love those. In reality that's a fantastic photo for marketing purposes.

“Motivated seller”

Firesale

Hot market indeed

It’s a great excuse and the price is usually right to rebuild to your taste. Almost all new construction happens in areas that are newly developed. It’s cheaper to rebuild these houses than to tear down one that’s sold for a price that includes the structure.

Isn't the damage from the fire trucks' water worse than the fire damage ? It's like the whole house going through a very long car wash. Wood, electricity must be wrecked.

If you were planning to gut the place to flip it anyway this is not a problem.

That much damage means it's getting gutted to the structure to be repaired anyway. And wood is pretty much impervious to water, especially a one-time thing like a drenching from a fire truck. We build houses in pouring rain all the time, it's not a big deal. Sometimes it adds a week or so to the build time, but frequently it has no effect at all.

Not exactly the same but close. There was a listing a couple blocks away from my current house. Nice brick colonial. Listing said "completely renovated". The exterior had been painted. In zillow, you can click a "see it in Street View which I did. The image was of a house gutted by a fire. I remember thinking "how could the listing agent not notice that?" and then "Perhaps there's nothing they can do in Zillow to turn off that feature". Well, the following week the Street View images had been updated. Which resulted in me wondering if there's a special Google hotline to request a driveby.

A youtube video from the buyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbbwv-ZbXDk

I don’t know what compels people to live in these McMansions. Perceived status? Second vacation home? Fuck you money?

American lifestyle is so wasteful. It’s disgusting. Climate change is impacting everyone and these rich assholes continue to waste resources on shit like this.

There is no near-term direct consequences for their choices. The feedback loop is too long. Not sure how to solve for that.

I agree that it's wasteful but let's leave "climate change" out of it and call it what it really is: ecological load.

Maybe they just like them? There's no accounting for taste.

You don't know what a McMansion is. This place is an actual mansion.

You shouldn't have asked ... https://mcmansionhell.com/

The guy will pump the mansion and sell it for $5M in 3 years

Man, that's actually pretty fascinating - to watch that then the 10th video in the series (from a month ago) where the roof is getting shingled. I'm usually turned off by the "broadcast yourself" lifestyle but I'll admit this one is pretty cool.

HGTV, eat your heart out.

Pt 10 link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebagb6zxZuU

If you're in the business of making content and advertising yourself... I could see how buying a burnt mansion would be compelling.

At the end of the day, my perspective is that builders like decreasing risk.

Anything saved after a fire is a risk. What's still structurally sound? If so, what are its new limits?

Custom = time and money. And everything in a post-catastrophic damage rebuild is custom.

Sure you can do it, but it might be cheaper (from a total cost perspective) to demolish and rebuild from scratch.

> The fact one of the pictures is the house on literal fire, coupled with this context, goes to show that some people really don't belong anywhere in marketing or sales.

Namely, honest people who aren't total shitbags always trying to put one over on their fellow human beings for profit.

https://terriblerealestateagentphotos.com/post/7073623358404...

For anyone else who wanted to see that one specifically.

Nah, whoever chose that photo knew exactly what they were doing - they chose a photo that will appeal to their target market, which is people looking to get deal on buying a house that they will repair and flip for a profit.

The picture simultaneously shows that it is a nice, stately house, and also that it suffered significant damage which it needs to be repaired. It's the perfect choice.

There is zero chance that anyone in the market for a house in general would choose to buy this one, so there's no point in choosing a pretty picture which hides the damage. You'd just be wasting your time and that of your potential customers.

This was my initial impression to, but up-thread there’s a link to an article about the buyers. Tl;dr they are wealthy, wanted a house in the area, and are “super stoked” to rebuild it and live there forever.

Well that's the other target market, those who buy it for the land to build a custom home.

In both cases, the marketing was correct. It's sorta a miss for the article author to not understand that.

IIRC that's not a flip house. That's in a wealthy, desirable area and what is really being sold is the land. It's not nearly affordable enough to make flipping a good business plan.

That's just flipping for wealthy people.

> goes to show that some people really don't belong anywhere in marketing or sales.

Yes, for example, people who think it's a bad idea to show a picture of that house on fire.

You can't hide the fact it's burned before. It would be illegal. Making it clear so the potential clients think it's cheap is your best chance.

The worst ones aren't the funny ones where the homeowners have terrible taste, or the one on fire which was brilliant marketing for a home nobody was going to buy under the assumption it hadn't been on fire.

The worst ones are the subtly bad ones that just manage to make perfectly adequate rooms look much dingier or more cramped than they actually are because they settled for the first cheap snap they could manage without caring at all about the lack of lighting and didn't even move stuff like clothes drying racks that fill up floor area.

There's a particular flat I might actually consider buying that's on the market for a third less than the identical flat upstairs for over a year without selling. One of those listings has a "view" photo that shows extensive river estuary views on a sunny day. The other has the basically identical view on a day so wet and grey all you can see is the road and warehouse roofs.

Reminds me of Dennis Reynolds from Sunny trying to unload his "amphibious" land-to-sea engineered Range Rover in the river on an unwitting buyer

And for that reason the horse photo is still one of my long standing favourites: https://terriblerealestateagentphotos.com/post/62824754189

With my parents we rented a house once in Italy. There were two ponies in the garden, they just walked all over the house whenever they wanted to. There was one in the kitchen most of the time. In the early-mid 80's people just accepted whatever (as my parents did, after driving 4000Km there and back with my dad chain smoking in the car and us kids in the back not wearing seat belts). The whole experience involved breaking at least half a dozen laws & regulations.

My mom has two mini donkeys and also used to let them walk through the house.

We've got a couple of semi domestic bungarras that come through the cat door and sun in window / warm near the fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_goanna

This must be the inspiration for Salvatore Ganacci "Horse" clip, the vibes are eerily similar.

I like that they try to authenticate the photos as being from actual listings. Of course people could generate crazy photos. These are kind of just slightly bad, which makes it interesting. Also, I think the captions add a lot.

Does the author steal the photos or asks for permission?

It sounds like they accept submissions, since they rarely put up photos that don't have links to the actual real estate listing the pictures comes from.

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