I don’t know if there’s a name for this. Basically, there’s a home or homes in the middle of a block, and they’re accessed by a driveway which goes between houses which face the street. They are surrounded by other homes.
Here’s one. You can’t see it from street view, but you can by satellite view.
I’m house-hunting online, and every now and then I come across one of these. On the one hand, these houses must be shielded from street noise. On the other hand, you have no view and you have multiple neighbors in your face.
Does anyone have any experience in this kind of house? Is their situation an advantage or disadvantage, do you think?
The one big negative I see is that is a very unusual arrangement. Which means that it will be very hard to sell when the time comes. A huge percentage of potential buyers who otherwise like the size, price, zip code, etc., will not like that land arrangement.
The same thing happens when somebody does a teardown or extensive rehab to a house and puts something really weird or different in there. A cubist brutalist thing amidst a bunch of ranch houses. etc. Regardless of the merits of the house in isolation, darn few people want to own an oddball in a neighborhood. All the more so if it’s a badly done oddball which they often are.
As to your specific plot & building this doesn’t seem to be an oddball except in terms of the lot & driveway. But that might still be enough of a red flag to enough people.
An upside is that you can probably buy it cheaper than an equivalent neighboring house. Becasue the current owners are having a hard time selling it now. It might be useful for you to try visiting the neighbors to find out how long they’ve been trying to sell the place. “Off and on for the last 10 years” is not an implausible answer.
When I have seen these “landlocked” houses it’s often a matter that that was the original farm house plot, or even the original farmhouse. Then the farmer sold the rest of the surrounding farmland to a developer but didn’t want to move yet. So they left his house there and built the tract around him.
You are also extra dependent on the neighbors who adjoin your driveway(s) or access sidewalk(s). If any of those owners are jerks, it’ll hurt more than it would with a conventional lot. Note also that the current owners of those other plots need not be there permanently; they could sell before you do, bringing in gosh knows who.
Last comment: As discussed in other threads with you, I too am nearing retirement. But opposite to you, I just sold my owned residence and switched to renting. I intend to never own real estate again.
As a retiree I want nothing to do with chores or responsibilities. And buying a 30 year old house now that will be 50 years old when I’m headed for the nursing home or the graveyard sounds like a life-draining trap, not a cozy retired nirvana.
You do you, but I chose the “easy” button. Which is not without various downsides, but it is easy.
They’re often called ‘flag lots’ or similar because the long access driveway to squarish parcel of land resembles a flag. There’s such a property behind my house, property was cut out and sold from the original lot. There are no problems with the arrangement, they have the minimum required setbacks on the sides of the driveway, and plenty of trees separate our properties. Sidewalks aren’t an issue here. The main disadvantage for them is the long driveway to plow, but he’s a tractor guy with a big John Deere machine and he plows my driveway too when there’s a sizable snowfall.
There’s a couple near me, right in the heart of the city. Their’s was here first, everything else developed up around them . Whenever I go by the place I think it’s kinda cool. Like an oasis in the midst of the cityscape.
Getting anything delivered would be definitely challenging, I should think.
Plus, wouldn’t you feel a certain pressure to become, yknow, Batman? I think there would be!
I knew a group of guys that, over the course of a few years, all did huge remodels and/or additions to their houses. Two or three of them took down the wall between an existing full bathroom and the bedroom next to it and turned into one enormous bathroom. I don’t recall the answer, but my question to one of them was how they intend to sell a one bedroom, one bathroom house when that one bathroom takes up literally half of the second floor.
One of the people in that group remodeled his kitchen and did the two dishwashers thing (never put anything away, just work back and forth between them). At least when I asked him about selling the house, he thought ahead far enough to make sure the cabinets were spaced out properly so he could remove one of the dishwashers and slide another cabinet into the hole.
We have one of those on my street. I’m not sure if the house was there before the neighborhood arrived or if they had some extra space back there and decided to build a house as I cannot get a good look at the place for the street or from Google maps. And since there’s an unfriendly gate with a Confederate flag draped over it I’m not inclined walk up the driveway and take a look. Based on what little I can see on Google maps, there are two structures on the property and there’s more land than what’s allocated to the other houses. That part of the neighborhood was built in the late 70s or early 80s and the house are very different from the ones built in the late 1990s in my part of the neighborhood.
My sister lives in California and has one of those odd homes in the middle of the block. When you drive down her street you cannot see her house, but you take the long ass driveway up a hill and there she is right in the middle of a cluster of houses. It’s a big bizarre to me, but real estate in California is weird to me.
My backyard neighbors have this setup. It’s a flag-shaped property as already mentioned. And it’s an old farm house as also already mentioned.
My guess has always been that it was a huge turkey farm that sold off land in the 60s to a developer that built both the high school and my neighborhood. It’s not hard to imagine that the one family owned the plot of land nestled between three major streets and a swamp.
Anyway, their plot is well beyond the half acre that the rest of us have. I’d say it’s at least 2 acres. So they’re still nicely isolated from any neighbors - not smushed in like the example in the OP. Most other homes around here have backyard neighbors much closer.
I’d agree that the only drawback for them is the long driveway. Not just for plowing but for mail and trash as well. The family has lived there for 50 years so I guess they like it!
Retreat lot might be the term, but that is a generic term for any lot behind other houses from the road accessed by a narrow (usually “non-conforming” driveway.
Wow, I hope never to go back to renting. What a pain to try to get quality maintenance done. Now that I own my house, I can spend money on getting proper repairs or even enhancements done.
Decades ago when my husband and I were house-shopping, our agent took us to one of these. She called it a “flagpole lot”. It was brand-new and we liked it. The long driveway didn’t bother us much.
But in the backyard that was facing our house (because of the lot’s configuration) was a dog growling savagely at us. It was chained and fenced in, but I’ve never been more afraid of a dog in my life. We “noped” out of there.
The selling agent for that development saw us on the way out and demanded to know why we weren’t making an offer on that house. I told him. He was furious (at us, not the dog’s owner), but not as angry as our agent. As we drove away, she said she was going to talk to his boss and she would never bring anyone to that development again.
My sister lives in a lot like that. So does my backyard neighbor. Both are pleasant houses with a lot of privacy. The only downside is the long driveway. The upside is apparently less risk of crime, just from being less visible.
The long driveway did mean it was expensive when shrubs invaded the sewer line and it needed to be replaced. But every house has some issues.
But there’s the opposite side of this. While it may be difficult to sell an unusual house, that gives you an advantage when you’re buying (which is what the OP is doing). Assuming the unusual feature isn’t an issue for you, you can purchase a house for less than a comparable house without that feature.
These are all helpful observations, thanks. It’s a tradeoff: one way you might have a lot of privacy, at least from the street. Neighbors on all four sides might cut into that, depending on the neighbors. The other way at least cuts back on the amount of close neighbors, but you have street noise. There’s also the view to consider - I think I would want to see the street and trees and landscaping, as well as what’s going on in the neighborhood. Not too much of that, though. We’ve lived in a corner house for 23 years and it feels a bit like living in a fishbowl.
I have friends who used to live in one. It was located on a tiny street (barely one car wide) in downtown Philly, not far from Rittenhouse Square. There was no driveway; they parked in a commercial garage nearby. Their address was 2020 1/2 so it was obvious it had been added after the house numbers had been assigned. They lived there for nearly 50 years and didn’t seem to have any problems. I have no idea if selling it was hard. The house was peculiar in other respects, though. Four Storeys, one room on each. The ground floor did have a kitchen area sort of demarcated from the living/dining area. But that arrangement wasn’t even that unusual in downtown Philly; a cousin of mine had such a house in the Washington Square area of the city.