I know less than fuckall about the SF housing market but having saddled myself with a project in which

- Plumbing

- Electrical

- HVAC

- Structural

- Architectural

- and Landscaping

have all cried "uncle" at one point or another, I can share a few insights:

1) If it needs a roof, most people looking at it will assume it needs a fuckton more. Changing out the roof is maintenance everyone does with stunning regularity because if you don't you can't insure your house and if you can't ensure your house and also can't afford a cash bond, your city can foreclose on you. My house needed about $400k in plumbing, electrical and HVAC and it had a new roof three months before I bought it.

2) If it has a new foundation but doesn't have a new roof, most people looking at it will assume that there's something deep dark and deadly that the sales agent is hiding.

3) If it has a new foundation but doesn't have a bunch of other new shit, the assumption is that the foundation was necessary to avoid the house being red-tagged and all the stuff that isn't a literal life-safety issue is left to do.

None of these are certain. Think like a flipper, though: money is dumbly expensive and you may be seeing something that another flipper is trying to get out from under. Everyone I talk to assumes I'm flipping my house; the median home price in town is now like $1.8m, why on earth would you buy something that ridiculous to live in when clearly there's money to be made?

Disclosure has also gotten ridiculously stupid in the past 24 months. Used to be you'd have your inspection period and you'd come up with a laundry list of items to knock the price down. You'd throw all the broken shit at them and they'd haggle over what it was worth. Then someone decided to sue a seller for not disclosing something they knew about from a prior inspection and lost so now you get your inspection period, you add up your costs, and you say "we're reducing our offer $25k; you don't wanna know why and we don't want to tell you."

And hey you know what? Maybe they don't want to reduce their price $25k. They tell you to pound sand, they take it off the market for 30 days, and then they relist it. It doesn't show as a reduction. It doesn't show history. It's a brand new house for a brand new set of yokels to come look at. You can literally play this game until someone stupid enough comes along to pay your ask. I have a friend who's been shopping in Reno for 18 months. They made an offer on a place that looked pristine and as soon as they said "we need to do another inspection to see if this is going to cost $50k or $550k to fix" the seller's agent stopped answering the phone and the earnest money reverted.

I'm rather proud of breaking Redfin. I came back with "we will offer you $300k under ask, no reason" and they came back with "ZOMFG so outrageous" (her) "my f'n ex-wife" (him). I came back with "if you take the offer I'll show you why" which was enough for her to go "okay fucking fine" and enough for him to go "see here how this bitch managed to do $350k worth of damage to this house? We're petitioning to have the divorce settlement opened back up so the reduction comes out of her half." Redfin responded by saying that I had gained $450k in equity the very next day, and then 30 days later decided I'd lost $150k in equity in the past 30 days because of the giant crater I put in the housing market. The Seattle Times ran a graph of county sales over the past year and shit was thin enough on the ground that I can literally see where I dragged down the housing market for the whole goddamn county. So I know a thing or two about bargain hunting.

And what I will tell you is that every single person you will find, you will talk to, you will work with? From your realtor to your inspector to the first contractor you call? They're all assclowns. They are nebbishes, they are dipshits, they are morons, they are fucktards, they are woefully out of their depth and the simple fact that they're available to you means that they can only drive you deeper.

I just fired my third architect. She fucking sistered rafters onto rafters she drew at the wrong angle, despite having a picture in the prints showing the correct angle, and then said "well you said yourself this was a complicated project." When I told her that it would have been cheaper to put in a new roof she said "I thought you were."

Then why the fuck are we sistering to rafters we're demoing bitch

And, of course, she submitted prints that show sistered rafters to demo'd rafters. Because she's an incompetent floozy. But they all are.

I had a lot of contempt for the building trades back when I was an architectural consultant. I tempered it somewhat for a while because I've had good luck with some contractors. But I realized a couple months ago that I had five buildings in the national AIA top ten in 2004 and almost nobody gets to work at that level in architecture. The architects who pissed me off back then were the ones with Wikipedia pages, not the ones operating out of the spare bedroom.

It's been alternatively terrifying and edifying that one contractor after another has come back with "oh, I see it now." Or "man this house is going to be cool." Or "yeah, I get it. This just works." Because I've been trying to renovate a great house owned and built by a unique guy who got taken advantage of by parasites. And it's been inches from majesty for thirty goddamn years but there have been too many bloodsuckers and not enough genuine practitioners to even fucking attempt what I'm doing. It's a soul-scouring amount of work and I'm on the verge of tears many times weekly.

And if you're looking at something in the Bay Area that needs a roof?