From The Evening Standard:
The house - the former the home of author Honor Ruth Aspinall who died in 2012 - is being seen as more evidence of the seemingly unstoppable boom in prime London property.
And with its well-kept neighbours in Abingdon Street attracting prices upwards of £5 million, the run-down property whose interior resembles a building site with crumbling plasterwork and filthy walls was also described as an “epic opportunity”.
Emailed in by Derek R via Garth Turner's blog:
When the appointed hour came and went, 145 Galley Ave., in the emerging but dodgy west-end Toronto hood had sold for $803,000, a far cry from the $649,000 being asked by the old woman who was allowed to live there with no furnace, missing windows, leaky roof, knob-and-tube wiring and walls caked in soot from years of burning kerosene heaters.
Saturday 8 February 2014
Poor Widows In Mansions
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9 comments:
The first one looks "solid" if nothing else.
There was much excitement amoungst PWIM hunters when news spread across the internet that blogger Mark Wadsworth had found two of the fabled creatures. Disillusionment set in when it was realised that not only was one of the PWIMs dead, but she had never been a widow in the first place, dying unmarried and there were doubts that she was even poor, Meanwhile the second PWIM had refused to remain in her mansion and act as a mascot to millions of anti-LVT campaigners who desperately needed her, but had sold up and become a rich widow in a small house. The hunt goes on!
Kj, it is solid but uninhabitable.
B, nice one.
What kind of building site looks like that
The kind I'm used to working on.
Fair enough, Bayard. But I hope we can get credit for a couple of near misses! As you say, the hunt goes on on. We'll find one yet.
B, D, there are some PWIMs in the UK in real life, there are 4 million single pensioner households, so statistically there must be 100,000 or so. There is of course a fairly high correlation between pensioner cash income and rental value of house.
But so what? A sensible LVT system has the deferment and roll-up option, so it's irrelevant.
Insanity is probably not an inappropriate word here.
Mark, the problem is that they have to be poor, a widow and be living in a large house. The problem these days is that everyone is keenly aware of the value of property in the way that they weren't so much before HOism, so potential PWIMs get hustled into luxury old-peopleries by their impatient heirs. Also, many houses that look as if they might contain a PWIM actually contain a RMIM (Rich Miser In a Mansion). My mother used to help out a local PWIM, but when she died, it turned out she had been a RMIM all along (and, no, she didn't leave my mother anything).
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