Archive for October, 2008

There’s still plenty of mortgage funds available. Kenneth Harney provides all the details in this Los Angeles Times article.

One of our new favorite blogs is LovelyListing — an incredibly entertaining compendium of some of the strangest and most unappealing real estate listing photography you’ll ever see. While you, as a seller, might briefly agonize over whether to include photos of the walk-in closet or the recently-remodeled powder room, others apparently have no misgivings whatsoever about including photos featuring mold spots, mounds of clutter, weird collections, the owners themselves, their kids, or their pets.

From the tacky to the bizarre to the completely inexplicable, from bad Photoshop jobs to subject matter so hideous that no amount of retouching could help, the homes featured here will provide enough entertainment (both comedy and horror) to keep you occupied for hours.

Think your house needs remodeling? Vote for the “Ugliest House in America”

We all have improvements we’d like to make to our homes — replace the countertops, refinish the floors, put in new landscaping — but few of our lists include “remove twenty-years’ worth of piled-up junk” or “repair the roof so that it actually covers the entire building.” HomeVestors, a company that specializes in buying and selling “problem homes” and properties with serious structural issues, is currently running its second annual “Ugliest Home in America” contest.

The finalists are eight homes from around the country that go far beyond just “ugly” — these properties are in need of a little more than cosmetic improvements. They boast such delightful features as collapsing floors, gaping holes, and decades of detritus. The property located in Atlanta, Georgia, for example, displays the following notable features:

Though not on the county’s register of Historic Places or listed as a local Natural Wonder, this house boasts two incredible features: The first is the MASSIVE sinkhole (5-6 feet in depth) right in the living room where the floor joists collapsed. We called it “A Natu ral Sunken Living Room” and thought it brought a lot of charm and depth to the living space. The second feature was the “Natural Skylight” in Bedroom #2 where the roof rotted away, thus enabling the room to bask in natural sunlight and accumulate dead leaves on the floor. It really brings the “outside into the house.”

Go to http://www.homevestors.com/ugliest_house/ to pick your…uhh…favorite. Afterwards, you can even enter a sweepstakes to win $10,000 — perhaps you could use your winnings to spiff up your own home! We just hope that doesn’t involve pulling a tree down through the living room wall and boarding up the windows…

After a $20-million overhaul, the Hollywood Palladium shines again.

“We ripped the roof off the joint, literally,” said Rick Mueller, president of California operations for Live Nation, the concert promotion company that signed a 20-year lease and is handling the lion’s share of renovation costs. “Our entire goal is to bring the building back to what it was like that first night but also to make it modern.”

For anyone who’s been paying attention during the past few years, Hollywood is happenin’ again. You’ve got state-of-the-art theaters and concert venues, world class shopping, fabulous restaurants, and hip places to live.

I recently posted about a fun event at The Hollywood that involved a graffiti covered parking garage and wedding gowns….only in Hollywood.

I urge you to consider being a tourist in your own town, and see how different and exciting Hollywood has become. The development of Hollywood and Vine was the kick-off about 6-years ago and things have been booming ever since.