Manageable--928 San Antonio Ave, Alameda, CA

928 San Antonio has been on the market and dropping its price in dribs and drabs for many months now. It has returned as MLS(r) #40423686 and a sad note in the listing--the seller is ill and presumably has to sell in the worst possible combination of circumstances.

Perhaps this should serve as a cautionary note for everyone else against buying hard-to-sell houses (this property looks like a "spite house" with no garage or driveway) at the top of the market. Illness and accidents don't discriminate and strike down without warning.

Here's a handy-dandy checklist of red flags that mean "do not buy":

• The market is trapped in a collective frenzy of overpaying.
• A property you're interested in has incurable defects:
• The lot is too small. If you catch yourself saying "Hrm, this lot really is a little on the small side" or "I wish the yard were larger", the lot is too small. Walk away.
  
• There's no garage and no reasonable way of building one on the lot. A tent doesn't count. A carport barely counts. A driveway isn't quite enough. No garage and no driveway means "run away." Building a garage is expensive and a pain in the rear. Best to get one already built that comes with the house.
  
• There's too much traffic. It's loud, it's dangerous if you have pets or children, and it makes it a pain to leave the house in the morning when you're already late for work.
• The house is too small. Unless you're single with no children and no possibility of living with someone else at any point (widowed and resigned, or pathologically misanthropic), or really nostalgic about your cramped quarters when you were attending NYU, less than 800 sqft just doesn't cut it.
  
• The house is too big. I like excessive, decadent white elephants as much as the next gal, but the great majority of people not only do not need 4,000+ sqft of living space, they don't want it. It's a pain to clean, maintain, re-roof, re-foundationize, heat, cool, and so forth. 
• You're in your 20s or 30s, recently married, and the house only has 1 or 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. I hate to generalize, but babies happen, and when babies happen, people lose their minds and want to buy a bigger house. The last thing you want to do with a new baby is go through the stress of selling, buying and moving, and tackle the extra expense of a bigger mortgage, and the extra extra extra expense of baby and mom/dad taking extra time off (babies are expensive), all at the same time. Rent for a while, or buy just a little too much house now (well, not now, wait another year or two, but you get the idea) so you can actually fit baby comfortably later.
  

Remember that what looks less-than-ideal to you very likely looks less-than-ideal to most people too. Those people are the ones you'll try to sell your house to. Don't compromise on stuff you can't change.

I'll close this sad listing with a pictorial summary of all that went wrong with this property even before she got sick. Good luck.