Dapper Home: When Childhood Homes Come Up for Sale A Lesson in the Ups and Downs of the Real Estate Market

Captain Dapper has spent the morning revisiting home. And in the process learned an important lesson in the ups and downs of real estate values.

In 1987, just as I was finishing up 7th grade, my family moved to this house in Pleasant Hill, Ohio. The house hadn't been updated in decades and, with the housing market in the 1980's being similar to today's, my parents were able to buy it for somewhere in the mid-$20,000's.

To say the house was in rough shape when we moved in would be an understatement. My parents started renovations with the upstairs bedrooms (one for me and one for my brother) because they were the most urgent. When we first moved in, there was no heat upstairs, one electrical outlet in each room and just a bare bulb with a string hanging from the ceiling. The floorboards were patched with tin can lids and the windows rattled with the wind.

I remember really wanting the room with the little door to the attic but my brother beat me to it.  Instead, I got the big room with three windows. The small room with the tiny door was the first inhabitable bedroom so we shared it briefly while my parents finished mine. I was actually a little nervous about moving into my own room. My brother and I had been sharing a bedroom for as long as I could remember. Prior to moving into this house, we slept in bunk beds in a shared room in a tiny two-bedroom apartment. Then, when I moved into my own room, I got over my reticence quickly. Having a space to call my own, away from my parents and brother and the world at large, meant total freedom. I spent my teen years in absolute hermitage, writing poetry and short stories, watching the town pass by from my corner-view windows.

It took about a decade but eventually my parents transformed the inside of that house from a ramshackle hodge podge of rooms that seemed to have all been added on as afterthoughts into a nice, comfortable vintage home. They tore down walls and put up doors, rerouted stairs and put in a new kitchen and bath. By the time I moved out in 1993, they had finished all the major projects but were still tinkering with little cosmetic changes.

A few years after I had moved to Chicago - sometime in the early 2000's - my mom called to say that they had bought a new house and sold this one - all within a matter of days. After she blurted it out, she said, "Oh, are you OK with that?" I think she might have been expecting a how-could-you-sell-my-childhood-home diatribe but, actually, I was totally fine with it. There were a lot of memories in that house, of course, but I was never planning to move back and it was really too much for just the two of them.

This little, oddly shaped house that they had bought for less than $30,000 in the late 1980's sold for almost $100,000 twenty years later. Even with all of the updates and changes they had made over the years, they came out on top in the end. They saved money by doing all the rehabbing themselves and, since the original mortgage was so low, they owned it outright by the time they sold it. It had been a great investment but they were ready for a lower maintenance, new construction home so they were happy to walk away with the profit to invest in a new house.

This morning my mom texted me to say that the house is on the market again. That, of course, sent me scrambling to Google the address and, lo and behold, it is for sale. For $38,000. Apparently the house went into foreclosure at some point over the past few years and has been sitting empty since. Now it's back on the market for just $10k more than my parents paid for it 25 years ago. It's like watching the real estate bubble bursting in real time. I'm sitting on an underwater condo right now so seeing the wild price fluctuation, even in a small town in rural Ohio, is somewhat comforting to me. It's a great lesson in the real estate value life cycle. And perhaps a lesson in patience as well. The value on my Chicago condo may be low right now but it'll rise again. If I'm lucky, we'll sell at its peak and recoup all of our expenses as well.

If you happen to be in the market for a house in Miami County, Ohio, check out the listing at HER Realtors. You could own a piece of Captain Dapper history!

Images: HER Realtors