It’s been two years since Arie Luyendyk graced our TV screens as the most boring Bachelor in history, and I have to say, I don’t really miss him. Watching Arie and Lauren fall in love (sorry, Becca) was arguably less exciting than watching paint dry, but hey, it seems like things are really working out for them. I love that. Two years after meeting on the show, they’re married, they have a daughter together, and now, the first house that they’re flipping together is officially on the market. Luckily, someone posted the Zillow listing in a Facebook group I’m in, and boy is it something.
I’m no real estate expert, and after perusing the listing, I have several questions. First, let’s go over some of the details. Arie and Lauren bought the old house in February of last year, and did a complete tear-down and new build. The new house has four bedrooms/three bathrooms, and is almost 3,000 square feet, which by my calculations is *looks around* definitely bigger than my apartment. Great, sounds like a normal suburban house. Arie is listed right there on Zillow as the listing agent, so it’s good to see he hasn’t let his Bachelor fame get in the way of his actual career.
The thing that immediately caught my attention is the asking price: $915,000. For those of us that are numerically challenged, that’s almost a million dollars! It sounded high to me, so I did a little digging. Arie and Lauren bought the old house on the lot for $298,500 in early 2019. Then, the new house was listed yesterday for $950,000. According to Zillow’s calculations, that’s a price increase of over 200%. Damn, do I need to get into flipping houses? Probably. Do I have the skills? Definitely not. Strangely, in less than a full day of being on the market, the price on the house has already been lowered by $35k, which seems like an odd strategy? Maybe this is a common tactic that I’m unaware of, but I’m gonna choose to think that Arie just made a typo when putting in the price.
Zillow also has a feature called the “Zestimate,” where it tells you the estimated actual value of a house. When I first saw the listing last night, the Zestimate on this house was a whopping $600k lower than the list price, but now it’s been updated to just over $900k, so I’m guessing that was just a lag on the new listing. In fact, the Zestimate has continued to go up in the last hour or so, which is interesting. But what’s really interesting is that the average value of a home in this neighborhood of Phoenix is around $360k. That’s a huuuuuge difference from Arie and Lauren’s just-shy-of-a-million asking price, and it makes me wonder why they built such a nice house in this neighborhood? My mom always told me that you never want to have the most expensive house in the neighborhood because it hurts your property value, and it looks like that’s exactly what these two have done. Oh well, not my problem.
Now that I’ve done enough research to earn my real estate license, let’s talk sh*t about the house itself, because I know that’s why we’re all here. From a first glance at the outside, it looks like Arie and Lauren stuck to the Vanderpump Rules architectural style of “off-white house with big black garage door,” and is anyone surprised? I’m not sure about those unpainted wooden beams surrounding the front door, but I guess the rustic wood offsets the feeling that your house looks like you saw it in a catalog and said “I love that” (sorry, I’ll stop).
Moving inside the front door, you’re immediately greeted by an open-concept kitchen. And by immediately, I mean that the stove is literally no more than six feet from the front door. Is this a thing? I will say, the kitchen looks beautiful. But all the photos are taken with that weird wide lens that’s supposed to make everything look bigger, and it leads to some sketchy Kylie Jenner Facetune issues. Like, the kitchen island looks like it’s straight out of an MC Escher drawing, and I can’t tell how big anything is.
In the initial post I saw about the house, one thing that many people called out is the lack of staging in these photos. And I have to agree, some furniture would have helped. In photo after photo, we just see these big, empty rooms, but due to the weird fish-eye perspective, it’s really hard to get a handle on how big anything is. I’m sure staging takes a lot of time and money, but still, it would be helpful to know what size bed I could fit in each room, for instance.
But all of these complaints about the layout and the lack of staging absolutely pale in comparison to what I’m about to show you. Brace yourself, because this is really upsetting.
Behold, the hall bathroom:
WHAT. THE. F*CK. Oh my god, I’m gonna be sick. And I say that because the tile looks like some kind of bacterial infection that’s rapidly spreading into the hallway. I’m gonna keep checking the Zillow listing, because by this time tomorrow, it might take over the whole house! Who can stop the tile???
But actually, who made this design decision? Joanna Gaines would never. Like, did they get 90% of the way through laying the floors in the hallway and run out of wood? Honestly, that’s the only explanation I can think of, because this is gonna look so weird when the bathroom door is closed. Also, the edge of the wall where it meets the floor looks… kind of sloppy? For that asking price, I would expect all details to be flawless. I’m sure whoever buys this house will love it, but it’s not the one for me, and not just because I will never have $900,000.
If you’re in the Phoenix area, there’s an open house tomorrow, and I’m literally begging you to go inspect and report back. Does the house actually look nice? Can you figure out why this tile situation happened? Is Arie going to follow you around the house while you cry in every room? I have never needed answers more. Good luck to Arie and Lauren, and maybe if they’re lucky, they’ll get an HGTV show out of this.
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Images: Zillow (4)
