The “Ramsey house” in Boulder, Colo., is back on the market, again trying to overcome its dismal past and find a new buyer.
The house was a mainstay frequently showed by the media following the December 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey.
The 7,000-square-foot house has been sold a few times since, but is back on the market for $2.3 million.
Real estate pro Neil Kearney is trying to sell the home, after the sellers’ previous attempts with another practitioner in 2009 and 2010 were unsuccessful. The house has been off the market for a year.
Kearney isn’t denying the home’s dismal past. On Kearney’s Web site, NeilKearney.com, he’s marketing the home by including a recent TV news video that shows photos of the 6-year-old beauty pageant contestant who had died in the home and the infamous images of the house wrapped in yellow police tape.
In 1998, the Ramseys house sold to investors who intended to flip it and raise profits that would go to the JonBenet Ramsey Children’s Foundation. The home mostly was rented out during that time until in 2004, it was purchased for $1.05 million by Tim Milner and his wife Carol Schuller Milner, who is the daughter of famous television evangelist Robert Schuller.
The Milners invested a lot in remodeling the home, including sinking most of the work into the basement, in trying to make it “feel homey, rather than someplace that didn’t feel quite right,” Kearney says. JonBenet’s body was found in the basement in 1996.
As some real estate professionals have learned, stigmatized properties aren’t easy to sell. Properties can be stigmatized for a variety of reasons, including rumors that it’s haunted or the scene of a crime. In general, sellers can expect to shave 10 percent to up to 20 percent off the price if a homicide has occurred on the property, Randall Bell, a Laguna Beach, Calif., appraiser who specializes in valuing stigmatized properties, told Inman News.
Source: “Overcoming Real Estate Stigmas,” Inman News (March 21, 2011)
