How could the "Brady Bunch" home be such a flop on the real estate market?
Maybe the real estate agent had an unlucky tiki from Hawaii? Maybe Buddy Hinton mocked potential buyers? Maybe people were afraid they could only eat pork chops and applesauce if they moved in?
Whatever the reason, the "Brady Bunch" house in Studio City–or the house that stood as the exterior model for the iconic TV show 50 years ago and was recently remade to match the interior shots (filmed at a studio)–recently sold for a fraction of its asking price.
That house, presumably paid for by Mike Brady's income as an architect (don't lose those plans at the theme park, or you might lose your job, Mike!), recently sold for $3.2 million. Now, that's surely enough for Mike and Carol to pay for counseling for six adults whose their childhood home lacked a bathroom and whose beloved pets (Tiger and Fluffy) both disappeared without comment after Season 1. However, the sales price was just a fraction of the $5.5 million asking price.
Surely a home visited by Davy Jones, Joe Namath, Don Drysdale and Johnny Bravo should be worth at least $4 million. (My view may be obscured by the fact that no famous person ever visited my childhood house, unless one of my sisters' boyfriends became a famous serial killer or something. Which is a definite possibility.)
The home has an interesting history. It was built in 1959, which was when Greg was 3, Peter was a newborn and the Brady men were living there with Mike and their soon-to-be deceased mom, whom they pretended never existed (one theory: the first Mrs. Brady was a Russian spy who didn't die, but "disappeared" and the family was told to never talk about it).
After the show ended, the interior of the home (never actually shown on TV) continued to evolve to modern styles (like when Mike switched to a perm hairstyle). In 2018, HGTV purchased the house and used it as the site of "A Very Brady Remodel," in which the home was remade to look like the interior shots from the TV show. That entailed adding a second floor, which was lacking (and necessary for Peter to fool around and break Carol's beloved vase).
When the home again went on the market, the owners and real estate agents obviously thought it would bring a large offer. They probably also thought "George Glass" was really Jan's boyfriend and that Peter and Bobby really saw a UFO in the backyard.
Heck, Bobby and Cindy had a better chance at breaking the world record on the seesaw than the owners had of getting the full asking price.
Still, the owners presumed that in a world where Marilyn Monroe's "subway dress" sold for more than $5 million and Michael Jackson's jacket from the "Thriller" video went for nearly $2 million, there would be some rich baby boomer who wanted to own a famous house with orange Formica counters and a brick wall with appliances (some of which were decorative only) in the kitchen.
They should have known better: As Mike Brady once told Bobby after the youngest son bragged about knowing Joe Namath, "When you bluff, someone may call you on it."
Of course, there's possibly another reason the home sold for so far below the asking price: Maybe there were significant problems and tattle-tale Cindy couldn't keep her mouth shut. If that's the case, even someone with eyes as bad as Jan's could have seen a price drop coming.
In the end, HGTV got $3.2 million, not $5.5 million. It turns out the high price wasn't much more than a hunch.
Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.
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