If you buy this lakeside house, in an exclusive gated community, for $1.46 Million, the seller will throw-in his 5 pre-WW I fully-restored cars–including a 1904 Curved Dash Oldsmobile. Or, the cars and the home are available for separate purchase.
This is an ideal opportunity for those who want cars without A/C, power windows, electric PS, and automatic transmission. They also feature very low engine power*, mechanical brakes on only the rear wheels, and zero passenger protection, so these are ideal for those who don’t want any of those pesky, new-fangled features on their car.
Actually, thats not a crazy price for a home in north Jersey. My daughter bought a 13 year old custom home in Tenafly last year for two million $. I was astounded.
Depending on the actual condition of the house, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal. I can tell from the few pics that the house is in need of some serious updating but if it’s structurally sound and has a number of functional outbuildings that’s a more than fair price compared to what I’m used to in the Pacific NW. The price for the cars is of course dependent on the audience, but doesn’t seem to far out of line.
Are housing prices in NJ in line with that asking price? I ask because just yesterday I was in a group discussion about gas prices. I filled up a company car in the Seattle area and paid 4.29. A coworker in the Somerset, NJ office said gas around there was 2.89. Another team member in Los Angeles paid 5.29. Seems like NJ is awfully cheap.
The price of that house does seem cheap. My home, in Somerset, is a relatively modest 26 year old house, on 2/3 of an acre, and based on “comps” in my neighborhood, it would sell for $850k-875k. The house in question is in a gated community, in a very upscale area.
Huh??? This is a 1.5 million dollar home. Most career-type jobs in this country pay between $40k-80k per year. Even with two average incomes, that barely lets you afford a $400k home, and that’s a stretch. The number of people who earn enough to afford a 1.5 million dollar home is exceedingly small.
Your perspective is skewed. It’s very inexpensive to live in Arizona. Northrop Grumman bought Orbital-ATK. After doing so, they discovered that employee costs were significantly less than their other facilities, mostly in Los Angeles. NG started moving projects to Gilbert, AZ and expanded the facility. You are applying Phoenix cost of living to NYC Metro, and the COLA is much higher there. It’s higher because enough people can afford it. BTW, those NYC Metro costs pale in comparison to SF Bay Area costs.
The house in question is not an average house for average people. It’s a luxury home on a lake in a gated community. It’s not a home a typical working class family would live in.
My point was that for what you’re getting it’s a pretty good deal.
The parents of a friend bought a small farm in northern Indiana back in the late.1940s. Along with the farm came a school bus route and a school bus. In those days, the bus belonged to the driver in rural areas. My friend’s mother drove the bus route.
To me, having a bus and route would be a better deal than a house with a fleet of cars. The bus and route would be a source of income.
Gas is fairly cheap across the state. Hardly anything else is. My house was built in 1964. It’s an ordinary tract house, 2400 sq. ft. 4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths. Current value is about $380,000. Real estate taxes are $10,000 per year. Most of that goes to the school system, which is among the best in the state.
And CRAP like lane-keep assist, which thinks it can center a car in a lane better than me, and blind-spot detection (educate people how to correctly set their side mirrors).
Or replacing hard climate and radio controls with a stupid touch screen.
It all depends on the level of income in a particular area. Of the 3,000+ counties in The US, Morris County–where this home and antique cars are located–ranks as #14 in income, with a median household income of $117,298.
Only 12 miles away from that home, the locals shop at the very toney Short Hills Mall where the stores include Tiffany, Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier, and other extremely high-end shops. At that mall it’s not unusual to find a Bentley Bentayga or a Rolls Royce Ghost displayed in the pedestrian areas of the mall. (Currently, they are only displaying a Porsche 911, a Porsche Taycan, and a Range Rover SV LWB.)
There is also a Lucid showroom, which always seems to have a lot of browsers. The mall’s valet parking area is always interesting, with an eclectic assortment of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and the occasional McLaren.
I knew someone in college from Short Hills, a gated community even in the 1960s. He said that they had security guards at the gate wouldn’t let anyone in that they didn’t recognize unless a resident alerted them ahead of time that someone was coming.
Most of Short Hills (which isn’t actually a municipality, as it’s just the most upscale part of Millburn, NJ) isn’t actually gated, but it’s definitely very ritzy.
A bit of trivia–The “village” was created by the heir to the “spring window shade fortune”. That’s not a joke!
Stewart Hartshorne’s father actually invented the roller window shade in the mid 19th Century, and the family became millionaires, as a result. Stewart improved on his father’s invention, and added to the family fortune.
His pet project was this very early planned community, which was designed for an easy commute to NYC for bankers, brokers, and others who made their money in Manhattan.
The zip code where I live has no homes for sale for less than $400K. The zip code where I work has a few 1 bd condos for that price.
At some point money is just a number on paper that you can use to buy things. The actual number isn’t really relevant, just the end result of what you can and can’t afford in your environs.
And with that cost of living comes the pay, we can do the same job but the pay will be more inline with the demography of your area… A small family can have a decent life (not rich) for about $78,000 a year, outside of Nashville, cut that down to about $60,000 if you watch your budget…
We do have a lot of folks around that are house and or car broke also… lol
Because as I migrated from my 30s through my 40s to my 50s, I’ve learned what matters in automotive sensibilities, and grown at least an iota of common sense.
