Where Insanity Bleeds to Common Sense: Part III

Location, Location, Location…

There are few real estate axioms truer—besides, perhaps, those relating to the industry’s use of hyperbole—than the one which states that location is everything. Place the finest house you can imagine, trimmed with the most decadent details, next to a garbage dump and all you’ve got is a tasteful, yet inexpensive, room with a phew. Place a 200 square foot shack on the shores of the Hamptons and what you’ve got is an income property.

As I stated in an earlier missive, when we first bought our house, the City of Beacon was one of the least desireable locations in all of Dutchess County. If you were house hunting in those days, Beacon was the last place on earth that a real estate agent would have wanted to show you a house. Property was cheap, Main Street was shoddy, the schools had a reputation that was nothing short of horrible, and there was no indication that anything was going to change. But the saliant point here is that real estate was cheap. Because you could often buy a house for less than—and sometimes well less than—$100k (a price less than half that of houses in neighboring communities) real estate agents tended to use the other three points to direct prospective buyers toward the, ahem…, higher commissions. Fortunately, we came upon an older real estate agent who, knowing the kind of place we might be interested in, told us that he’d seen a house in Beacon that he thought would fit the bill. He pointed us in the general direction and told us to have a look.

What we saw was wonderful. Not wonderful in the, “This is the house I’ve dreamed of all my life!” sense, but in the, “Wow, what a beautiful setting.” sense. The house, while definitely small and rather poorly put together, was sitting at the base of Mount Beacon and right next to a seasonal (read this, running strong 10-11 months yearly) stream. And there were hiking trails literally right out the back door. We were breathless. We had a giddy sense of first love. We’d drive by the house at all hours of the day and night just to have a distant look. I even went so far as to change the direction I drove to get to the grocery store just so I could swing by and have a look; a detour which probably added an extra 10-15 minutes to my trip. But I didn’t care because I got a chance to see the house. Finally, we made arrangements to meet the owner and take a look inside. But, unfortunately, the price ended up being way too high.

We spent the next several months looking at many other houses. (I swear, we had a packet of real estate listings about 60-90 thick.) But we never found anything we liked… or at least liked as much as we liked the little house by the stream. Or more to the point, the stream with the house beside it.

So we drove by again, only to find that there was no longer a sign in front of the house—which scared us half to death. We were certain that we had lost the moment and that the house was gone. We dug up the phone number for the owner and gave him a call to see if the house was still for sale. It was, and the price was much more negotiable than it had been before, bringing it well within our reach. We were ecstatic.

It wasn’t the best town. It wasn’t the best price. It wasn’t the best house we ever could have imagined. But there was something about the place. Something earthy about the way it nestled into the base of the mountain. Something lovely about the running stream. Something pure and beautiful about the location. And for all its seeming flaws, it was the location that we just couldn’t live without.