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.
As if you can’t get enough Bachelor content, now get it straight to your inbox! Subscribe here for our episode recaps, The Betchelor podcast, and all the ~most dramatic~ Bachelor news ever. Subscribe to our Betchelor Breakdown weekly newsletter here!
Images: Zillow (4)
It’s been a year since we were forced to watch Arie and Lauren hang out together in silence on The Bachelor, and I’ve mostly stopped being annoyed by them. For all of Arie’s bullsh*t about breaking up with Becca on national television, it genuinely seems like he made the right choice. Arie and Lauren are now married with a baby on the way, and it feels like they are happy together and committed to one another.
But just because we don’t have to suffer through watching their dates anymore doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. In fact, it looks like they’re now forcing Planet Earth to suffer through their dates instead. A couple days ago, Lauren posted this photo of her and Arie at Antelope Canyon, which is in Arizona. The canyon is famous for its smooth, wavy walls and narrow pathways, and it’s really beautiful. Lauren’s caption about not carrying herself/Arie not carrying her/idk is very confusing to me, but whatever, it’s a cute pic.
Okay the caption is really still driving me crazy (like, is she implying that by carrying her, Arie is also carrying the baby? Because if that’s the case, I have an anatomy class I need her to sign up for), but other than that I wasn’t mad about the picture. But little did I know that Lauren’s cute pic was actually a photo of her disrespecting Mother Nature. People quickly pointed out in the comments that, because the canyon walls are so fragile, you’re not supposed to touch them. There’s actually a strict limit on how many people are allowed in Antelope Canyon each day, and you have to apply for a ticket months in advance. As you can clearly see, Lauren is standing on the wall, so she missed the “no touching” memo.
People quickly started dragging her in the comments, and to her credit, she actually did respond to one of them:
Okay, so I believe that Arie and Lauren didn’t realize she wasn’t supposed to touch the walls. They’re not the sharpest tools in the shed, and we all do dumb sh*t sometimes. What I do have a problem with, however, is that she turned off the comments on the photo, and (according to Reddit) deleted many of the negative ones that were already there. Oh Lauren, sweet Lauren. The apology seems just a little less sincere when you follow it up by blocking out all other criticism. The guys behind Fyre Festival learned this the hard way! I get that people can be brutal in the comments, but just turn off your notifications and let it happen this one time. Turning off comments on Instagram is never a good look.
Also, in case you were wondering, Lauren is 29 weeks pregnant, which means we probably have less than three months to go before baby Luyendyk is here. Buckle up, because that baby’s Instagram account is only going to get more annoying from here on out.
Images: Shutterstock; @laureneburnham / Instagram (2); @babyluyendyk / Instagram