My Turn for the Dream Home — Meet the Big Red House

Jan 10

The scariest thing we did this October was buy a big red house. Like many of my clients, we weren’t necessarily in the market for a house and had been casually browsing, but this house found us. The moment we walked in, we knew it was the one.

She is an Italianate farmhouse, originally built as a dairy farm in 1879 in San Francisco, or so we were told - I’ll do the research at some point when we finally move in, and I figure out how to get my hands on city records in the times of Covid.

It was one of the first built in this neighborhood, and because of its location in the city, has withstood the earthquakes, subsequent fires, and everything else the city has endured over the last 143 years. For an Italianate style, she is quite simple on the interior but still feels OH SO GRAND. The almost 11-foot ceilings downstairs make the house feel larger than life. When you walk in, you can immediately tell this house is begging for lots of life within its walls.

This house and its floor plan feel very unique for San Francisco, and there are not many houses like this that remain in the city. We feel very fortunate that this piece of history showed up at the exact moment for us to love and rehabilitate.

Our experience through the buying process

We used Shawn Leonard at Flagstar Bank and it felt like we were riding the last waves of the under 3% interest rate. He is one of my go-to lenders in my business and knew he would be helpful during this process with a house that needed some love. Flagstar didn’t care that there was active pest damage, that there was a partial brick foundation, and they had a great HELOC option for us to use to handle some of the work that we are going to do for the house.

The listing agent team was fantastic. Their strategy was to list the price low to get as many offers as possible (not uncommon for SF real estate, but especially a property that required work). Thank goodness I’m a realtor and G is into data - we settled on a price that we thought would be fair and beat out 4 other offers after a marketing period of twenty days.

We had Shawn pre-underwrite us so we could go non-contingent and talked to their appraisal team extensively to see if we could waive the appraisal contingency as well. It was every bit as scary as you’d think it was, even with my experience as a realtor. I knew that the listing agent team wanted the strongest, easiest offer to work with and unfortunately, going non-contingent is what they typically like to see.

One of the good things about the long marketing period for a house like this was that we got to do a lot of investigative work before we offered. We had structural engineers, seismic-retrofitters, general contractors, and others check out the house in addition to reviewing the disclosures that were given to us. Another bonus is that I’ve been specializing in old houses for the past ~5 years, so my eyes are accustomed to looking for certain things.

What I liked about this house was the overall care that the last owner seemed to take of this house. I looked at things like:

The roof, which surprisingly was in good shape. Typically on a house of this age, someone has forgotten about the roof and it’s in pretty rough shape
The original windows, which were still there and were in great shape, including their weights and sash cords. We will have so reglazing to do to make them a bit more energy-efficient and help with noise, but it’s not a job that needs to be done today (I am pro-old windows, FYI)
The floors were real wood in most rooms (and I may have peeked under the carpets a few times and noticed the beautiful wide-plank wood upstairs). Floors are a biggie to me - I do not like the replacements I see today in homes.
The kitchens and baths had some original details like the antique toilets and sinks, but I could tell it had been updated to be like that sometime in the not too distant past and didn’t see too much to worry about on the interior.
On houses this age, the sewer lateral is likely shot and I always recommend an inspection, since they can be pricey to repair. We knew we wanted this house either way, so we skipped it, but I’m sure since we see terra cotta pipes in our basement that there is going to be some work that needs to be done. We will get an inspection before we move in, so wish us luck haha.

The foundation - I am a person who is not easily scared off by brick foundation. What type of ground is the house resting on? Landfill? Bedrock? Liquefaction? These things matter. The inspector was a total alarmist about this house, but since we knew some work had been done and it had clearly had some updating done in the 2011 work from permitting, I wasn’t scared. Also, I had a hunch that this particular inspector wanted to buy this house when we chatted, and I was right, but that’s a story for another time.
Electrical - this was sort of a mystery to us. Still is, and we are in the process of removing old wiring and updating that now haha. All sorts of things in the wall.

This house has some issues, but none that we weren’t willing to tackle to get our foot into the door of owning SF real estate. So, we went for it and it worked out. If you’d like to follow along on our process, I made an Instagram account for it called the.bigredhouse.