The main difference I see between the two is not that one was updated more than the other but the staging and the photos. Plus the first house had double the square footage. Had house two been better staged with better photos, it too might have sold more quickly. House two actually sold for more per square foot than 1 so that might be part of it too. House 1 was $97 a square foot and house 2 was $125 a square foot.

The thing that differentiates this house from the other, for me, is that there are less fixed elements I would need to change in this house. There is only one bathroom I would want to redo, all the floors are fine, and I could live with most of the rest of the tile although it's not something I would pick for myself. It wouldn't be cheap to remove all the paper and repaint in this house, I can't see it costing less than almost $60,000, but there is not a lot of demolition involved. In the all brown house, there would be lots of demolition because I don't like most of the flooring, the kitchen or the bathrooms. That's why I would pass on the other house automatically but maybe not on this one.

Wonder what a place like that would go for? Thousands I'm sure. One of my good friends was a nurse who lived in London. I visited her. Kinda seedy neighborhood, one shared large bathroom for every apt. on the floor, and the heaters and hot water tank all had coin slots on them where you had to keep feeding them pound coins. After they got married they later moved to a house in the suburbs, and it was about that size for them and the baby. It was a houseparent flat at a small college. They sent me a picture of them bathing the baby in the sink. They finally moved to hubs native Scotland and got a big house and yard near Perth . . . I do remember the apt. as having high ceilings though, very Victorian . . . but it was winter and freezing cold. Big feather bed comforters is what we sat around in. We had to save our coins for doing the dishes!

Nancy, that house looks pretty nice from the inside, and it appears to sit on top of the garage, The back yard is quite large also. The house where I lived in Venice is estimated to be $1.6 million and is on trendy Abbot Kinney Blvd. It has a similarly large back yard with fruit trees that I planted, and the lot goes all the way back to Marr Street. It is also 900 square feet, which is significantly larger than the house on Windward Ave. Lot size has a lot to do with the value of houses in Venice. Vacant lots in nearby Westchester start at about $800K, although there are hardly any left. One vacant lot is valued at $2M. Real estate prices are going up faster now in other parts of the country, and that includes Cathedral City. The annual increase in value in our house in Westchester is about 5% a year, whereas it is 25% in Cathedral City. I'm sure this will slow down, however. When I skimmed through the photos of the house in Philadelphia, I was shocked at how brown the interior looked. That is my lease favorite color. Otherwise the house looks extremely nice, and the interior colors could be changed. I like the exterior a lot more than the interior - mainly because of the excessive use of brown, which has a nauseating effect on me. I know that most people like it, however, but it depresses me - the way gray depresses other people, while I find gray to be cheerful, but then I'm not used to seeing gray skies.