A Very Expensive House....wow

[pbockelman.livejournal.com]

Record breaking home sale in Somerville [edited]

On March 23, 2016, in Latest News, by The Somerville Times

By Ross Blouin

The highest priced single family home listed and sold here in Somerville recently closed last week at 63 College Avenue, just two blocks out of Davis Square.

Norton listed the home last fall for $1,690,000, then it was taken off the market and recently put back on for the same amount and in one day went under agreement, at a selling price of $1,690,000.

The home was sold at full price to a young family from London, England, who will soon be moving into their newly renovated Somerville residence. The new owner, a well-known movie producer/director, is excited about moving here to Somerville and becoming involved in the community.

Mr. Norton was contracted to assist in marketing and listing the property and assisted in the selling of the property a year ago with the developer, James Douglas of Hall Avenue LLC. Mr. Douglas, a longtime Somerville developer and also a native of Somerville, bought the property and completely rebuilt it throughout from top to bottom; new everything, custom kitchen with three full and two half baths, and beautiful Brazilian maple floors throughout the home.

Originally, the home was built in 1901 in the Queen Anne/Colonial Revival style, which at the time was the end of the Queen Anne style of homes being built here in the area. Douglas not only sought out to totally renovate the building, but to also restore the exterior to its original design as much as possible.

Douglas has had a vast amount of experiences restoring and building reputable homes throughout Massachusetts as well as here in Somerville for many years. He personally oversaw all the work done over the past 9-10 months and made sure that high quality was maintained from beginning to end.

The home is to date the highest ever single family home listed in Somerville, priced and sold at $1,690,000. The Norton Group did extensive marketing of the home, and this is not the first time that Broker Donald Norton sold the highest listed home here in Somerville. In 1981 Norton, then a broker with a C21 office out of East Somerville, listed and sold the then highest priced single family home in Somerville on Benton Road for $102,000., thereby breaking two records over a span of 35 years in business.

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3 Responses to “Record breaking home sale in Somerville”

1. MarketMan says:

   March 23, 2016 at 11:07 am

   I wonder who it is, and I wonder if the family will actually live there or will be one of their homes that spend some time in.



2. SMHC says:

   March 23, 2016 at 2:50 pm

   Looks like Mr. Douglas made a nice tidy profit. Purchased for $450K. Mortgaged for $788K for the rehab. Sold for $1.7M.

Comments

moderator note

[ron_newman]

Please put an <lj-cut> tag somewhere inside this long post.

Re: moderator note

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Yes. This ad for Norton doesn't really need all this space, though I'm sure he appreciates it being reposted here.

Re: moderator note

[ron_newman]

I'd also like to discourage posting verbatim articles from newspapers. Better to link to them, excerpt them, and provide your own commentary on them.

[ron_newman]

Also, this is a shameful "accomplishment" that should be mourned, not celebrated.

[eustaciavye.livejournal.com]

I have to say I'm a lot more bothered by tiny studios renting for 2k a month than I am by a completely refurbished historical home selling for an obscene amount of money.

[leafshimmer.livejournal.com]

I agree totally, Ron.

The whole thing with real estate in the neighborhood is beyond belief.

[somerfriend.livejournal.com]

I don't know how Mr. Norton is successful, he is such a difficult person to work with.

[idealforcolors.livejournal.com]

Wow does this read like a press release from Norton.

[vonelftinhaus.livejournal.com]

I was thinking the exact same thing. Doesn't Norton reality own/half own or have some kind of direct alignment with the somerville times?

I was thinking a link to the article would be better, this seems like a copy/paste of the whole article

[ron_newman]

Norton owned half of the Somerville News. He sold it to Ross Blouin (at which point it became the Somerville Times), but their office is still Norton Realty's office, 699 Broadway in Ball Square.

timemini

[timeminihk.livejournal.com]

Interesting article.. Thanks for sharing.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

So this Norton dude is responsible for this area becoming unlivably expensive for us mere mortals, then? Awesome. :-P

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I think the people paying the money to buy have more to do with that.

And the area's resistance to building more housing, of course.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

I was mainly being sarcastic because of the way they're touting the Norton Group's involvement with the highest-priced single family homes in town, then and now.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Still, this is interesting.

[purgatori84.livejournal.com]

"A well-known movie producer/director," eh? I can't be the only one curious about that.
Also I am weeping for my chances of actually staying in Somerville permanently.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

The new owner will, at some point, become a matter of public record (assuming they didn't use an LLC to buy the place): http://gis.vgsi.com/somervillema/Parcel.aspx?Pid=14724

That listing is still showing the old owner, the developer. Anyone know how long it takes for that database to be updated after a sale closes?

[vonelftinhaus.livejournal.com]

At a minimum until all of the legal formalities have been processed and all those papers ( electronic in this day and age?) get to where they need to go and are processed. I have noticed Somerville and good amount of other municipalities stay pretty current on information. My guess is that this is all early, and very much press, information for our viewing

[ron_newman]

Real estate transactions are recorded at the Middlesex South Registry of Deeds. They may have the information before the city does.

... and they do! The grantee is John Bonham-Carter. Here is the deed, recorded just a week ago, March 17.

I'm not familiar with him, but here are his LinkedIn page and his company's website.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

And his IMDB page (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3202840/). The phrase "well-known movie producer/director" seems to be stretching the truth a bit.

[ron_newman]

Presumably related in some way to better known Helena, though I don't know the exact relation.

[purgatori84.livejournal.com]

...you are an internet wizard!
Even if he is small film, I wonder if he will make any new film jobs in the area...that would be awesome.

[lilaia.livejournal.com]

The Bonham-Carter family has had money for a long time. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonham_Carter_family)

[ron_newman]

The answer is here.

[craigindaville.livejournal.com]

This is news the same way that the Norton Group amazingly kept "winning" the Best Real Estate Agency award from the Somerville News (now Times) every year.

[irilyth]

Maybe DSLJ should have Shameless Self-Promotion Day once in a while, where people can feel free to post press releases about how awesome they are, and then not do that the rest of the time.

[teko.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I'm sure proud of Mr Norton for making a whole lot of money! Gold star!!

[secretlyironic.livejournal.com]

Well, what are we doing to increase the supply of housing in the greater Boston area? Very few MA communities have permitted the construction of any multifamily housing at all in the past few years, and every new development is greeted with outrage by neighbors.

In Union Square, the developers initially planned for more units of housing to replace that funeral home, but it was forced to shrink. In Porter Square, we're still waiting on the St. James Church buildings. Don't even think about the Mass & Main development at the Quest Pharmaceuticals site - that's barely even in the drawing stage and it's drawing protests from people terrified that more housing will ruin their neighborhood.

When you can't build, and the area is desirable, only the rich will be able to buy.

Somerville is better than most at this, but this is something that's a problem throughout the region, especially in the outer burbs: Arlington, Lexington, Belmont, Westie, Rozzie, I'm looking at you.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

> Somerville is better than most at this

Is it? My impression was the opposite, but it's not based on more than Somerville's anemic population growth. (3% over 23 years, vs. 12% for Boston, Cambridge, or MA.) Granted, it's the densest place in the region to start with.

Yeah, the outer burbs are mostly low density, though also transit poor. Boston's guilty too: if it got up to Somerville density (about a 40% increase) it could take a quarter million more people, well more than Cambridge and Somerville combined.

[secretlyironic.livejournal.com]

That's what I meant, yeah - that Somerville's already pretty densely built.

I mean, it's not as bad as the Bay Area, which as far as I can tell consists entirely of billionaires and homeless people, but ... that's the direction we seem to be trying to go.

[ron_newman]

There aren't many places you can build in Somerville without tearing something down that's already standing. Sometimes the old building is an auto body shop that nobody will miss, but more often it's an attractive home or apartment building that people like living in as it is.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

My impression is that even if no one's living in a house, like this one, it's much easier politically-legally to spruce it up and sell it as luxury (as here) than to tear it down to build an actual apartment building. Often that would outright violate the zoning, and even if it doesn't there's lots of community resistance, at least going by Cambridge/Porter Square.

[ron_newman]

I have mixed feelings about that. I live in a four-story, 50-unit apartment building put up in the late 1920s, which replaced several single-family houses. If you wander around the Day and Orchard area, you'll find a number of other such buildings. I think they're attractive additions to the neighborhood.

But wander over to Chester Street and you'll find a number of totally ugly and charmless apartment buildings erected in (I think) the 1970s. They also added needed housing units, but at the expense of the neighborhood's attractiveness. Somehow developers forgot how to make a building beautiful during those intervening 50 years.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Aesthetics are nice but IMO way less important than affordable housing.

I suspect a lot of the older artistic buildings is due to labor being cheaper then. Fancy carvings? No problem! Or else having been built for fairly well-off people in the first place; I grew up in a streetcar suburb swallowed by Chicago, that had started out as "get away from the city" but turned into "immigrant incubator".

[somerfriend.livejournal.com]

Ron, when you label high priced housing as shameful, and then in the same breath say but I don't want any apartment buildings built, it makes YOU part of the problem. It is possible to build apartment building in a style that is not 1970s. Just sayin'. If aesthetics is more important to you than housing being affordable, at least be intellectually honest that that is the choice you are making and go with it.

[ron_newman]

I'd like to see apartment buildings, but preferably on parking lots rather than replacing existing old houses, and also preferably with some concern for aesthetic beautiy.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I don't see that many parking lots in Davis, or walking through the rest of Somerville. I mean, some, but not enough to make a big difference, and you do need some parking, which eventually means a big garage somewhere.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Ah, yeah. Densely built, but not really denser than it was in 1990, either.

And still 1/2 the density of Brooklyn, and 1/3 the density of Paris, so it's not like it's maxed out, either. :) Though the lack of area infrastructure would hurt. I think the area suffers from excessively local government, plus a T that's controlled by the state legislature instead of the people it serves.

[pywaket.livejournal.com]

Another good example of density working is Le Plateau in Montreal. Considerably denser than Somerville, and quite a nice neighborhood. 100K people in just over 3 square miles. And it's not like it's lacking for shopping, either. There's practically no place in the area where you're over a 10 minute walk from a good sized grocery store, plus there's plenty of other shops selling almost anything you might need. Also, great restaurants. Awesome public transit. Plenty of green space. And rents are considerably lower than Somerville.

We could learn something from other places, like that.

[davisdenizen.livejournal.com]

This "transit poor" aspect has been much on my mind as I've read various discussions on this topic lately. I know we're talking about the MBTA, which would seem to make any thought of a timely solution moot, but logically it seems to me that making "the outer burbs" as accessible by public transit as possible would relieve some of the problem, especially for those without cars who work in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville and who also love the culture of these cities. That population, often struggling to afford rents here, would be a lot happier about living further out if they could easily get in for work and leisure both. I have a vague sense that there are organizations working for better access to the city, but I'm not sure who they are. Anyone here know?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

So, they call this a single family home, but it now has 3 full and 2 half bathrooms. That suggests a *big* home, one for a much larger "single family" than is common these days. Looks decently big in the photo, too, I imagine it could be carved up into at least four apartments, some of them possibly 2BRs. So some of the high price is going to be from sheer size; this isn't a starter house.

If it was paid for with a 30 year mortage, 20% down, monthly payments would be $8500, roughly as much as you might get from 4 apartments.

And it's two blocks from a subway station, an area that *should* be highly dense, to maximize the people who can benefit from the public transit. My urban planning quasi-socialist side isn't thinking "this house should be cheaper" but "this shouldn't be a house, it should be at least 4 stories of apartments, probably more."

[secretlyironic.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

A friend says Zillow has it listed as 3300 square feet (on a 3484 square foot lot). So yeah, big, and in theory good for 4-5 2BR apartments of the smaller variety, never mind what a taller building could hold.

[somerfriend.livejournal.com]

The property is rated RB, which for that size lot you can only build 2 units. If you have 4500 square feet in zone RB, you can build a whopping 3. Any builder would love to built 4 or more units on a property that close to transit, which would help with the supply problem, but Somerville zoning prohibits it. If you don't like it, you need to tell your alderman early and often, esp as they take up zoning reform again. All they are hearing is from people like Ron Newman who don't want old houses to be torn down and feel that is more important than affordability and setup false dichotomies between *their* version of what is attractive to look at versus density. Even if these old houses are often ugly vinyl sided boxes.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I'd agree, but I'm in Cambridge, so have no votes with the relevant aldermen. :)

[ron_newman]

Until quite recently this and two other nearby houses belonged to the Somerville Mental Health Association. In 2012, Somerville Mental Health merged with Riverside Community Care and began selling off its Somerville facilities. They just last week closed the last one, the "Red House" at 78 College Ave. (Another article here.)