House of the weird

8400 Kirkwood Drive, Los Angeles, Calif., 90046
Size: 1 bed, 1 bath
MLS: 07-159495
Current price: $599,000 (137 days on Redfin)
From Redfin listing (my emphasis in bold): BOM as of 2/20/07. Laurel Canyon's best priced fixer. Great flat backyard. This home awaits it all. Mid Kirkwood, 1936 hunting cabin offers the opportunity for re-design or re-development. Great upside potential. First time on the market in recent history.


I'm not a real estate agent, so I don't know for sure if there is or isn't a strategy involved with posting your most impressive picture of the house first, since that is what shows up on all the searches and gives potential buyers their first impression. The first photo on this listing is the one at the top of this post.

If there is a strategy, that just flew out a window and into a giant ravine.

The appeal here is, presumably, that someone would buy this for the land and knock it down to build a new house. At least the agent and/or sellers aren't being delusional and trying to sell this place as anything but a teardown. Then again, maybe the Dan Aykroyd and John Candy characters from "The Great Outdoors" are looking for some new digs.

Who needs sheets in their bedroom? And what's a mining cabin without a big-screen TV? Tin roof, washer and dryer outside, other random tents scattered on the property...but the TV is good to go.
This place, as it is now, reminds me of the Orange County Mining Co. restaurant at Orange. That's a nice restaurant and all, and I wouldn't want to live there.

For what it's worth, Zillow has this place pegged in the $551,588 - $703,124 range, with an estimate of $606,141.

One more fun fact: The 2006 property taxes were about $750.