Home Destroyed by Fire Could Be Yours for $800K

It's certainly not the prettiest house on the block. But a burned-out home on a 5,800-square-foot lot in Silicon Valley could be yours if you have $800,000 to spare and act fast. "This is what it's worth," realtor Holly Barr tells KTVU of the San Jose home, which Fortune reports was destroyed by fire more than two years ago. She expects it to sell in a few days, noting 10 potential buyers reached out in the hours after photos of the home were posted to Facebook Tuesday. Despite its appearance—with a gaping hole in the roof, no siding, and a leaning fence—the abandoned house in the Willow Glen neighborhood has a few things going for it: It's close to the proposed Google Village, where new offices are likely to be built. And "you save a lot of money when you … do a remodel versus a complete teardown," says Barr, noting another house nearby sold for $1.6 million.

"This sells for over $1mil, Im calling it now," reads one comment on Facebook. "Why people are leaving California," reads another. Plenty of others are experiencing sticker shock, but a rep for the Santa Clara County Realtors Association says he's "not surprised at all” by the $800,000 asking price. "Buyers are trading money for time all the time now so they can be closer to their employment," he says. Noting a similar burned-out home in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood sold last year for $700,000, Fortune reports the average price of a single family home in Santa Clara County is $1.4 million. Interested in what some might call a bargain? You should probably move now. Houses in San Jose are increasing in value by about $200,000 per year, reports Bloomberg. (There's a sad real estate game involving abandoned properties.)