OLD HOUSE REVIVAL : Orange County’s Vintage Real Estate Fetches a Price to Match
The focus in Orange County’s residential real estate market has been on new houses for more than 30 years, but now a growing group of home buyers has begun rediscovering the county’s older neighborhoods and their vintage homes.
Ironically, the automobile--which propelled the area’s rapid development over the past four decades--is partly responsible for the old-home boom. With the freeway system jammed, more people are returning to the county’s center, where the aging neighborhoods are located.
As a result, the residential cores of several of the county’s oldest cities have been undergoing major transformations.
But as thousands of happy sellers and shellshocked buyers have been discovering, older no longer means cheaper in Orange County’s hyper-inflated housing market. In those pre-World War II neighborhoods that haven’t been redeveloped or rezoned into oblivion, vintage houses are fetching increasingly high prices from buyers seeking something special. Realtors recite, and buyers confirm, a litany of reasons for the increasing popularity of homes built before 1940: a search for a sense of neighborhood; a desire for larger lots; a longing for historical perspective in a society that is typically forward-looking, and a demand for homes that haven’t been stamped from developers’ cookie-cutter molds.
And creeping closer to the head of the list each year is the old neighborhoods’ central location. “Here, we are closer to where we work and it is easier to get around,” said Marilou Picartal, new owner of a 49-year-old home in Tustin.
Including initial refurbishing costs, Picartal and her husband, Noel, have put about $210,000 into the 1,500-square-foot house, which sits on a 9,000-square-foot lot on Tustin’s picturesque Main Street.
“We bought it for the lot and the price, because there isn’t much else around here you can buy for that price,” she said. “And we bought it for the closeness to work.”
Generally, real estate people say that those who buy Orange County’s vintage homes are of two basic types:
- The old-house enthusiast who sees nothing amiss with spending $220,000 for a 1,200-square-foot house and then refinishing the floors, gutting and replacing the antiquated bathroom and kitchen, redoing the plumbing and electrical systems, putting on a new roof and painting and plastering--a process than can add tens of thousands of dollars to the purchase price.
- Wealthier buyers, often business owners, professionals or high-level executives, who want the elegance and atmosphere that living in an old house brings and can afford the prices that completely restored, vintage homes command.
“A lot of these homes need work, and a lot of buyers are people who can afford to hire people to do it,” said Bob Clark, president of McGarvey Clark Realty in Fullerton. “But a lot do it themselves and make a five- or six-year project restoring a place to its original look.”
In Fullerton, homes in the city’s four vintage neighborhoods range from $120,000 to $1 million or more. “I’ve found that the people who buy these old homes are people who don’t want tract homes,” Clark said. “They are sort of rebelling against their upbringing. They also are people who love to dig back into the home’s history.”
Nostalgia is a big factor in many vintage home sales, said Tom Todak, a broker with Orange Tree Realty in Orange.
“A certain group of buyers just want a piece of the past, they want a house with a porch and all that jazz,” he said. “Ten years ago, old homes in Orange were going for $60,000 to $80,000 and sitting on the market for a long time because nobody wanted the headaches and the work. Now, people line up to buy them. They want something unique.”
Land Lures Them
Often, the buyers are also paying for land--most of the county’s vintage homes sit on old-fashioned “city lots” of 8,000 to 10,000 square feet--lots of a size that would qualify as sites for a small condo complex in Irvine.
In north Santa Ana--an enclave of large, well-kept vintage homes sandwiched between Flower and Main streets just north of 17th Street, lots typically run 15,000 to 18,000 square feet. One property now on the market for $1.5 million, a 72-year-old, two-story brick residence of 7,000 square feet, sits on three-quarters of an acre.
And on East Culver Avenue in Orange, the relatively small homes lining the south side of the street conceal back yards that, by Orange County standards, are huge: most of the lots are 310 feet deep by 66 feet wide, or just under one-half acre.
Peter and Patti Ricci bought their 1,150-square-foot home on East Culver for $170,000 in March, 1987. Its major selling points were the large lot and an existing swimming pool and spa. Now, they are in the midst of a $100,000 expansion. When they are finished, they will have $270,000 invested in a 2,100-square-foot home with a pool and spa on nearly half an acre of land in the center of Orange County.
Two Types of Buyers
In the not so distant past, two other types of buyers were prevalent in the county’s vintage neighborhoods--the first-timers, operating on a slim budget and looking for something inexpensive that could be fixed up, and the speculators seeking a fast profit from a minimal investment.
There still are first-time buyers in the old-home market in Orange County, but they tend to clump together in central Fullerton and Santa Ana, so-called newly recovering old-home neighborhoods where many properties still are in disrepair and where crime rates and other social factors have kept prices well below $200,000.
And there are still speculators, although the day of the cheap fix-up is long gone.
One 67-year-old, Spanish-style home in north Santa Ana, for example, recently sold for $354,000 just six months after it was acquired from an estate agent for $184,000. The sellers, who asked not to be identified, put $75,000 into refurbishing the property, which includes a small guest house.
The gross profit was still a hefty $96,000 in six months, but that kind of story is rare regarding old homes because most buyers--even those who deliberately seek out homes that need a lot of refurbishing--tend to live in them for a while.
‘Old Fixers’ Popular
“A lot of people want old fixers,” said James Carr of Bird Realtors in Tustin.
“They know that the shell is solid, but they want a house that they can go into and make what they want out of it. And then they live there.”
They do so, secure in the knowledge that when the time comes to sell, they are likely to make a decent profit.
Anne Ennis and her husband paid about $130,000 in 1981 for a two-story Victorian home with a small rental unit in the back yard. The Orange residence is currently in escrow for more than $425,000. But the numbers don’t reveal that the Ennises have put almost $200,000, plus countless hours of their own labor, into restoring and landscaping the property.
“It’s really not a whole lot of profit for eight years,” Ennis said, “but it’s been fun, and fixing up an old home is something I always wanted to do. And we got to live in Old Towne Orange, which is a wonderful neighborhood.”
That sense of place attracts a lot of old-home buyers.
Back to the Porches
“I hear it all the time,” said Slater--who grew up in Orange. “You look around here and you find that there are all kinds of schools and churches, the downtown is all restored, people go out walking and sit on their front porches, and everybody knows everyone else.”
The county’s vintage neighborhoods are also popular because the old homes have a degree of character lacking in planned communities, where homogeneity in exterior design and decoration is prized and individual expression is frowned on.
Many of the old neighborhoods are treasure troves of shingled, craftsman-style bungalows, stuccoed Mediterranean revivals with tile roofs and arched windows, wood-sided and turreted Victorians and gingerbread-bedecked Queen Annes.
They are homes built when fine materials and painstaking craftsmanship--today found only in the most expensive of custom-built luxury residences--were commonplace.
Old-home buyers often face years of repairing and refurbishing, but they make up for it with amenities such as stained- and leaded-glass windows, hardwood floors, 10-foot coved ceilings, oak floors and built-in bookcases and China closets--and with larger lots that provide room for expansion.
So while the average new home in the county sells for about $160 a square foot, most vintage homes in decent shape sell for at least that much, and often more. Prices of $200 to $210 a square foot are not uncommon in the older sections of Orange and Tustin.
Neighborhood a Big Factor
“There is a lot of subjective analysis that goes into pricing an old home,” said Tony Rojas, an agent with Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate in Yorba Linda.
“What is critical is what the rest of the area looks like and what the neighbors are doing” to their places, Rojas explained.
An old home in a good neighborhood is just as valuable as a new home in a good neighborhood, he said, offering for comparison two homes he is handling: a 56-year-old Spanish-style in northeast Santa Ana near Orange, listed for $469,000, and a 7-year-old tract home in Yorba Linda listed for $439,000.
The Santa Ana residence has been extensively restored and upgraded, has 3,100 square feet of living space and sits on a 17,000-square-foot lot. It last sold for $200,000 in 1984. It has four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a family room, a library, formal dining and living rooms, and a breakfast nook with its own fireplace. It also boasts a large swimming pool.
The Yorba Linda home, which last sold for $200,000 in 1985, has 2,600 square feet of space and is on a 9,000-square-foot lot. It has four bedrooms, including a master bedroom with a fireplace; three bathrooms; formal dining and living rooms; a family room and a spa.
Identical Appreciation
While the Santa Ana home is larger, it is priced at $151 a square foot, compared with $169 per square foot for the Yorba Linda place.
But from the point of view of their value as investments, both homes have shown almost identical appreciation rates over the past five years.
To a great degree, the prices fetched by many of the county’s vintage homes are a matter of supply and demand, said Clark, the Fullerton real estate agent. Like oceanfront properties, he said, old homes are a finite commodity “and they aren’t making any more of them.”
