Houses With a Murderous Past
There are realtors that specialize in certain type of properties. These are houses with a history of murder and bloodshed.
They know there's buyers out there, which notoriety is exactly what they're in the market for.
What is Stigmatized Property?
“A house or apartment where there has been a murder, suicide, cult activity, notable adulteries, AIDS, or other disasters and crimes is considered stigmatized property.”
In California, sellers are obligated to disclose information that may stigmatize a property for three years, unless the buyer asks directly about it. For example if there is a death in the house, and the prospective owner asks about that subject, then a full disclosure must be made of what is the known history of the property. In other states, sellers are only obligated to dislcose about 1 year of history for the property.
If a high-profile murder took place, it can have a negative impact on a home value, as the notoriety associated with the property can last for years.
Left untouched since a double murder-suicide in the 1960s, Los Feliz murder mansion remains a neighborhood mystery.
The open house showing at 2475 Glendower Place in Los Feliz, California, in 2016 was in a word: “wild.”
Built in 1925, the 5,050-square-foot Spanish revival with a third-story ballroom was once beautiful in its own right, but people turned up to see it for another reason entirely: It was home to Harold Perelson and his family in 1959, when he murdered his wife, attacked his 18-year-old daughter as she slept, and then committed suicide.
“It was huge. People were all over the place. You’d think they’d never been to a housebefore,” said Nancy Sanborn, a real estate broker who specializes in probate sales of real estate for over 25 years.
Months after the murder-suicide the house was sold at probate auction to a family that would never live in it. It remained empty of people for over 50 years, much to the befuddlement of neighbors and superstitious Los Angelenos. However these owners kept all of the Perelson’s belongings, such as it was when the murder occurred.
In December 2020, lawyer Lisa Bloom sold the property for $2.35 million, after buying it in 2016 for $2.29 million. The reason for the sale is supposedly the difficulty in acquiring permits to complete any renovation on this 1920s-era home.
“It just had its own history and became a local haunted house,” Ms. Sanborn says. “We were also selling the house where Truman Capote died around that time and nobody cared [about the house’s history].” Capote lived there from 1955 to 1965 and wrote two of his most famous novels, Breakfast at Tiffanys and In Cold Blood.
Randall Bell who specializes in appraising such properties, became a pioneer in the field when he wrote a book called Real Estate Damages.
He has helped sell a number of notorious homes, including the hilltop mansion at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles rented by Roman Polanski, where Sharon Tate was slain by the Manson Family in 1969. The owner moved in shortly after the investigation finished, lived there for 20 years, and sold it for $1.6 million in 1989.
The property was razed in 1994, rebuilt and given a new address, 10066 Cielo Drive, which Hollywood producer Jeff Franklin bought. It has been used as a rental property for many years. As of 2023, the 9 bedroom house is on the market for $55 million.
When Nicole Brown Simpson’s father wanted to sell the townhouse where his daughter was murdered in Brentwood, California, Mr. Bell advised him to get the property occupied by a renter immediately. It sold two years later for $525,000, a full $100,000 below the price she paid for it in 1994.
Current owners changed it from 875 S Bundy Drive, Los Angeles, to 879. It sold for $1.7 million in 2016. Tropical plants and trees were added as a disguise around the home. Just past the back gate, at the base of the stairs to her home, is where Nicole’s body was found. O.J. Simpson’s home was razed.
Randall Bell estimated that on average, murders reduce between 15% and 25% of the sale price off of a house. According to a Realtor.com study in 2016, murder houses sell about 9% below list price, 21% below the last sale price, and spend twice as long on the market.
But for buyers on a budget, or those who are not superstitious, a house’s dark history does not act as a deterrent.
In some cases, notoriety acts like an incentive. Such was the case of Jeffrey Dahmer’s childhood home in Ohio, where he claimed his first victim. It sold in 2005, for $295,000 to a musician who wanted it because it was tied to Dahmer. However when he tried to rent it for $8,000 (during the Republican National Convention) he prudently omitted details of the house’s past when he increased the rental price to $10,000. It’s unknown if anyone rented the property or not.
Dahmer killed hitchhiker Steven Hicks in 1978, with a 10-pound dumbbell in the living room of the house. He strangled him, and once dead, according to the FBI he had sex with the corpse and cut him up. He spread the body parts over the 1 acre land the house sits on. Hick’s family did not now what happened to him for many years.
“The worst thing you can do is leave a property unoccupied,” says Mr. Bell, “Satan worshipers target and break into these properties to perform rituals.”
For example, while the sprawling home in Rancho Santa Fe where the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide in 1997 lay fallow looking for a buyer, the break-ins became so frequent 24/7 security had to be hired.
DiedInHouse is the brainchild of Roy Condrey, a software developer based in South Carolina. It sources data on a property. He said thousands of reports are requested by potential home buyers interested in a property’s history.
The Dutch Colonial house on Ocean Avenue is where Ronald DeFeo Jr. killed his family in 1974. The Amityville Horror is based on the experiences of a family who moved there after the crime.
When it went up for sale in 2010, the real estate agent was diluged with requests to see it, including news crews, paranormal researchers and persons impersonating brokers.
It sold for $950,000, and the agent claimed never to have seen or experienced anything negative. She did admit that there are potential buyers who cannot get beyond what happened inside a home.
Today, 76% of Americans believe in the supernatural, a number that’s up from 70% in 2020 and 44% in 2019, according to the latest annual survey released in October by Clever, a real estate data company.
Nearly half, 44%, of the 1,000 respondents to the poll said they’ve lived in a haunted house, a sizable jump from 2020, when 24% of Americans said they had experienced a haunting at home.
A real estate agent described where you walk into a property and you feel it in your gut. She said, “I was showing one time, and everything was wrong from the moment you pulled into the driveway. I was going up the stairs and I swear something grabbed my ankle.”
The ingredient that exorcises doubts about buying a stigmatized property is a discount.
It’s not death that is the real deterrent but the nature of the circumstances. Notoriety and violence though can drive down the asking price of a property.
In 2021, the 2-bedroom home where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered by the Manson Family in 1969 sold for $1.87 million, down from the $2.2 million being asked for. It’s a 2-bedroom, 2-bath house located in Los Feliz.
Zak Bagans bought it in 2019, for $1.89 million for a project that didn’t materialize.
The LaBiancas were stabbed more than 50 times. Leno’s body was eviscerated, and their blood was used to write the misspelled “Healter Skelter” on the refrigerator.