Via Estately
Four years removed from the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, it’s still tough to buy a house in America these days. Credit-worthiness, down payments, tax abatements—there are numerous factors that go into the buying and selling of residential real estate.
Marketing is important too, but in the case of one listing in Southwest D.C., we think this one’s in the bag. Ryan Nickum, a blogger for Estately, a property listing website, submitted to DCist a very colorful list of reasons why we should write about a unit for sale at 600 Water Street SW.
The unit, we should point out, is not a house or a condominium. It’s a houseboat, the 75-foot-long Potomac Freedom built by Sumerset Houseboats of Somerset, Ky. With three bedrooms and two bathrooms—to say nothing of the 24-foot fiberglass deck covering—it’s currently going for $324,900. But put aside the nitty-gritty of bedrooms and bathrooms; Nickum has some even better reasons why this vessel is worth taking a look at:
1. I’m the blogger/marketing person for the Estately.com, which is the website where this houseboat is listed. My job is to beg people like you to write about it.
2. There’s a lot of talk about it right now on the forum for D.C. Urban Moms and nobody wants to have them beat you to a story.
3. Because there are still a couple out there who still excitedly shout the lyrics to the SNL Digital Short “I’m on a Boat” and I we need to identify these people so we
can beat them.4. Because it’s 75 feet long and it’s a house and a boat.
5. Because Seattlest was closed down many months ago and my friend lost her job as
editor there.
The listing is, in fact, the topic of a hot debate in the D.C. Urban Moms and Dads forums, under a thread titled “Would You Live on a Houseboat?” Here’s one response to that prompt:
Nope! My brother died when the one he was living on caught fire. The thing went up in flames so fast that he never had a chance.
But if you’re not interested in seeing the Potomac Freedom, Nickum might buy it for himself. Why? Because America, that’s why. Just look at his list of reasons for coveting this houseboat:
1. It has freedom in the name and I love freedom even if others hate me for it. By others I mean al Qaeda.
2. It has live-aboard status at Gangplank Marina and I like the word gangplank because I’m into pirates.
3. The upper deck is reinforced to hold the weight of a hot tub AND 100 guests
4. I could rent it out for political fundraisers and rap videos. If I double book, it would be hilarious if these two groups had to share the boat for an afternoon cruise.
5. Because canoeing is boring.
Nickum might find canoeing to be a snooze; then again, he might also not have noticed the $1,400 co-op fee that comes with owning the Potomac Freedom, to say nothing of the added costs of installing and operating a hot tub on the top deck.
And Nickum might not want to bash canoeing right now, anyway. It’s an Olympic sport, and while Team USA’s efforts so far have been less than stellar, our boating representatives in London are having a blast. “It’s been so much fun, just a really good relaxed atmosphere,” Scott Parsons, a canoer from Bethesda who just missed making the semifinal heat of the slalom, said in a press release after the first day of the Olympic Games. “The whole experience so far has been really, really good, and I’m actually looking forward to the next week or so of hopefully watching some other events and having some more good times.”
That doesn’t sound dull at all.
However, we are in complete agreement with Nickum on one thing: People who still run around quoting that “I’m on a Boat” video like it’s relevant should probably be thrown a beating.
