Are these H St. NE / Capitol Hill houses priced appropriately?
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Anonymous
Not sure what your point is? Yes, a powder room can be added in a renovation. No, there is not a huge supply of Hill houses in desirable locations. Each house has a different set of characteristics that may be more or less important to buyers' individual concerns. For example, our house is in a fantastic location, zoned for great elementary, has a really nice outdoor space, fully finished basement, no parking. Someone who prioritizes location and school is going to put it #1 on their list. Someone who prioritizes outdoor space and doesn't care about parking, likewise. Someone who wants a turn-key flipped house with a powerroom but care less about location or outdoor space will put it further down on their list. |
Anonymous
| Street parking isn't as bad as other popular areas and there are parking spaces to lease or buy. With super easy metro access, keeping a car isn't a necessity. Uber, Lyft and zip car can be used when really needed. With climate change and car/gas prices, not really prudent to keep cars. |
Anonymous
| Most Capitol Hill homes come with some sort of outdoor space. |
Anonymous
To be fair, people who are into historic urban homes, know, accept and often embrace the constraints. Its not limited to Capitol Hill or DC but valid from London to Stockholm to Paris. |
Anonymous
| Its hard for McMansion crowd to wrap their heads around it. |
Anonymous
Yeah, the people insisting that no first floor powder room is a dealbreaker have either never been inside a Hill row house or they have $2 million budgets. Either way, they aren’t the buyers for a 900k row house near H Street. |
Anonymous
With today's lifestyle where both spouses are at work, kids at daycare or school and dinner parties or houseguests happen no more than 15/365 days, you don't base your house hunt on powder room and similarly low importance factors. |
Anonymous
That's not exactly true. There's a big variety: Some have deep back yards with lots of landscaping; some have tiny concrete patios. |
Anonymous
+1, there are actually a lot of Hill homes that have no backyard/patio space at all because of the way the block is laid out out. We used to live in one with a postage stamp front yard and that's it -- no parking pad, nowhere to put a deck. It was a rental and I think the new owners may have put in a roof deck. But roof decks on row homes are tricky -- having your only outdoor space on the top floor is not that functional. It's hot and far from the kitchen, and depending on the house it might be hard to put in a little sink and fridge even. Just depends. When we lived there, though, we were also within 5 blocks of two large parks and an elementary school with playground and field. We missed being able to sit on our patio to eat, but did not want for outdoor space or somewhere for our kid to run around. |
Anonymous
[x] Doubt the 90% claim. [ ] Believe the 90% claim. Maybe if you only look at flips, but if you live around here that number seems a tad high. |
Anonymous
Our former house on the Hill was tiny, like 1600 sf, and had a powder room on the first floor. So did all the tiny houses our friends lived in. (If other posters are going to claim their own personal anecdotes as actual data, then I will too.) |
Anonymous
Unless that includes the basement, 1600 sf is not tiny for the Hill. Not even small. |
Anonymous
| If you live on Capitol Hill, you don't need a huge backyard or 3 car garage. Its an apple to orange comparison. If you compare it with other nice areas of DC, these are perfectly good sizes, not so much compare to a far flung suburb. |
Anonymous
Same, I know very few people with no first floor powder room. I think this was a major thing in the 90s/00s, where people who were selling homes prioritized putting them in (often as part of a kitchen renovation because it tends to be most cost effective that way to do it). And people who bought put them in, especially if there was only one bathroom upstairs, which is common. I’m not saying you HAVE to have a powder room, but I’ve lived on the hill a long time and first floor half baths are very common. It’s now a lot harder and more expensive to renovate (and the standards fir a good reno are higher) so maybe some homes that never got one added are less likely to get them. But I’ve even seen tiny powder rooms in 750 sq ft homes. The idea that buyers on the hill don’t care doesn’t ring true to me at all. It’s a compromise people might accept, but most people prefer it. |
Anonymous
| If i really like a house and it fits my budget, my decision to buy wouldn't depend on a powder room. |