Weird Thoughts
The Local Puppy Trainer had this short piece: Fire destroys $500,000 RV. My initial reaction was – where were the servants?
Over at Digby’s there’s an ad on the left sidebar for Bag News Notes that features a picture of Netanyahu and his graphic at the UN. The first thing I thought was that it was Jimmy Durante playing an Acme salesman making a call on Wile E. Coyote. If you think you have to be ancient to know who Jimmy Durante was, you have no idea how long it has been since anybody used a metal ball bomb.
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$500,000 is pretty much what the average 3 bedroom home costs in the built-up metropolitan areas. My guess is that the motor home belonged to a guy who retired from one of those built-up metropolitan areas who sold his old house and bought that motor home to travel the country in his house instead. ‘Cept it seems he got tired of travelling, given that it was sitting in a storage lot… or maybe it got repo’ed? Hrm.
It must have been something like the tour buses that some of the wealthier bands used, but it must have custom features because the top price for a Winnebago ‘Tour” model is $365K.
Actually, if you don’t have it in the RV area of the State Beach, there is no legal place to park anything that big in the City of Destin except on commercial property.
I get a feeling that the insurance company will be sending its own investigators to check out this incident.
The sky is the limit for custom features on one of those things. I was in one a few years back that’s owned by a wealthy restauranteur. It has dual slideouts to basically make it 14 feet wide at rest, Italian marble flooring, a gourmet kitchen, satellite TV and satellite Internet, and pretty much all the other luxury you can fit into a bus-sized vehicle with sides that slide out. It isn’t a tour bus because with the slideouts in, you can’t really put people in the back, it’s more like a one bedroom apartment on wheels — but a *nice* one bedroom apartment on wheels, one of the luxury ones that costs thousands of dollars per month if you rent the non-wheeled versions.
Yah, parking’s the beach on those things. They’re longer than 20 feet so you can’t park’em on the street here either. The Santa Clara PD appears to be outfitted with canes and blindfolds when they hit the streets, as befits a PD in probably the safest small city in the area where the one and only violent crime last year was when the liquor store got knocked over, which led to the entire PD plus their chopper turning out in an Alices Restaurant overkill fiasco that had me almost laughing at the roadblock, but hey, they got all this cop gear and never get to use it since their usual job is hassling street vendors, issuing speeding tickets, and shuttling homeless people to various agencies when someone complains about someone camping in their doorway, so…. anyhow, even *they* can’t manage to overlook a 40 foot tour bus sized RV parked on the street, heh.
In Destin things are controlled by home-owners associations, and they don’t want RVs, boats, or trailers parked on residential property. They ‘prefer’ if you have a regular pick-up that it be hidden in the garage. The streets in the residential areas are too narrow for on-street parking. This was originally a fishing village and until the bridges were built everyone moved by boat. The addition of all of the condos only made the street system more inadequate, because the town codes were extremely ‘loose’ on parking and street requirements.
I avoid the place because the traffic is so screwed up that you can’t get anywhere in less than an hour and it is only 7 miles away by car.
Yeah, if you start with the top of line and start adding marble and real leather seating it won’t take long to add a couple of hundred thousand to the cost while destroying the resale value with your poor taste in style.
People talk about Mitt’s car elevator, but I had a client in that area of La Jolla who had a ceramic tile mosaic in his driveway and parking area.
The general rule with add-ons is that they add nothing to the resale value. That is, if the resale value of a five year old MegaChaletOnWheels with 50,000 miles is $100K, it doesn’t matter whether you have the stock vinyl flooring and seating or fine Italian marble and leather, you’re gonna get $100K for the thing. It might sell *faster* with the gourmet kitchen etc., but you ain’t gonna get back anything on the $100K in extras you put into it.
Works like that for homes too. If you think you’re going to put in a $50K kitchen with marble counter tops stainless range yada yada and increase the resale value of your home by $50K, you’re deluding yourself. Unless your kitchen was entirely ghetto beforehand, it ain’t happenin’.
The buyers will save any extra money they have to change whatever they buy to suit themselves, not to reward you for the changes you made.
Remodeling changes the rental value, not the retail value of property or RVs.