Good news is bad news.
After a few years of throwing away flyers that developers were dropping off on our doorstep, a developer came by that I couldn’t ignore. He told me that he purchased the house next to ours and plans on putting up an apartment building. He said he was very interested in our house; we scheduled a time to meet and invited him in. He arrived with his partner and before even taking off his shoes had offered us 1m dollars for our house. 15 minutes later he was up to 1.2m
I’ll skip the 3 months of phonecalls, emails, open houses, and haggling.
What I learned is our house is in one of the highest residential zoning classes. Corner lots on wide streets (where we live) is the most desirable situation to be in, it offers 100% of the lot to built with a FAR of at least 3 at most 4.8. This means without any special approvals 14 to 15 apartments can be built on our lot. Market would support rents of about 3000-3300 per apartment. The rent on 1 apartment is more than our current mortgage. The lucky owner will have a building worth over 12m.
The bad news, when we go to sell in the future it is guaranteed our home will be torn down. We are very fortunate and will catch a windfall, but we would be foolish to think that our hard work renovating adds any value to the home at this point, and that is painful to admit. Ow.
We will continue to maintain the property but it is very unlikely any large or expensive renovations will happen at 3401 Farragut road. It does mean we get to spend more time with our daughter, sooo there’s a blessing in disguise if I ever got one.