A great house fronting Farview Park was recently listed for sale - 2951 Lyndale Avenue North. I'm not linking directly to the listing because those links will go dead over time. The house has an offer pending, so any day now it could be offline. Look for it yourself on sites like Remax (even Edina Realty has the listing posted this time around).
What's so bad about selling a desirable property in one of the more attractive areas of Hawthorne, you ask? Well, for one thing, the place has a sale price of $24,900. That may have been a low bid to attract offers, and the final price could be considerably higher since the home is not on the VBR list. But an interesting little tidbit is buried in the listing: "leaded glass window on front porch excluded from listing."
I'd copy the photo from the MLS, but those are copyrighted and I'm loathe to break that rule unless it becomes absolutely necessary to report on something. But on the listing photos, the third one in specifically shows the leaded glass window.
So here's their thinking, as far as I can tell: list the property at an insanely low start price. It will sell for less than what you might get for it if you started at $80,000, but hey, it was picked up on the cheap and the seller just wants a quick buck. So far, nothing is inherently wrong with the picture. Until Svetlana Lang decides that she'll just take the leaded glass window for herself - a window that probably has a value of several hundred dollars or more at Bauer Brothers, and lessens the financial pain of selling at a steep discount. By all accounts, the property appears to be owned without any liens/mortgage on it, so there isn't a way to get the mortgage company involved over the owner removing parts of the property.
The prospective buyer might not care, especially if they're either a) a slumlord or b) someone who has been fooled into thinking they need to replace all their windows. Once a leaded glass window like this one is torn out of the home, it is rarely replaced, and certainly not with the actual original fixture. Since Svetlana Lang or Seth K. Stephens of Solutions Realty apparently have little to no consideration for the home or community post-sale, they get the honor of "jerk du jour."
NOTE: An initial source I consider credible listed the value of the window in question at $3,000-5,000. Since then other readers have provided evidence that the value of such items is considerably less. It's possible that this particular feature was worth more for some reason, but the post has been changed to reflect what I consider to be a better figure at this time. What's the phrase at the bottom of real estate listings? "Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed?" Seems apropos here. In some ways, the removal of the window seems all the more egregious when one finds out that there is only a nominal monetary gain.
