Historic, Acreage, Character Home
1949 Architect-Designed Home Tied to Fallingwater's Builder — $130,000
7
out of 10
HousesUnder150K Score
Property Merit 50% · Condition 25% · Price/Sq Ft 15% · Market 10%
| Category | Wt. | Score | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Property Merit | 50% | 8 | Architect-designed 1949 home, 0.54 acres, built-ins, dead-end street, named heritage |
| Condition | 25% | 7 | Metal roof and vinyl windows updated; some original character retained; no HVAC date |
| Price / Sq Ft | 15% | 5 | Listing $107/sqft vs zip median $96/sqft — 11% above median; thin 6-comp data |
| Price vs. Market | 5% | 7 | $130K vs zip median $174,949 — approximately 26% below median |
| Market Conditions | 5% | 7 | DOM 89 days, sale-to-list 93.7%, price drops 14.8% — clear buyer's market |
The name is the thing here. Raymond Viner Hall designed this house in 1949. His father, Walter J. Hall, built Fallingwater. That lineage does not mean this is Fallingwater — it is a 1,214 square foot, three-bedroom house on a dead-end street in Port Allegany — but it means someone with real architectural training drew these plans, and you can feel it in the details that survived. Built-ins throughout. A living room that reads as considered rather than assembled. The kind of spatial decisions that come from someone who studied how people actually move through a house.
The lot is 0.54 acres, which is a meaningful amount of land for a borough property. The dead-end street keeps traffic off it. You could have a real yard here, garden seriously, park multiple vehicles, or just have the kind of breathing room that most in-town lots do not give you.
The practical maintenance question has been addressed. Metal roof, vinyl replacement windows. Those are the two things on a house this age that can quietly cost you if they have been left alone. They have not been left alone. No information on the HVAC, so that is worth asking about before you make any decisions.
The price lands about 26 percent below the zip code's median sale price, which is a real gap. The per-square-foot number comes in slightly above the zip median based on a thin set of comparable sales, so the discount is more about the absolute price than a straight apples-to-apples comp story. The house has been sitting for 89 days, and the market here is running at roughly 93 percent of list price with a fair number of price reductions in circulation. There is room to negotiate.
The condition is honest older-house condition. Some original character remains, which is the good version of that phrase. At $130,000 for a named architect's work on over half an acre with major systems already updated, you are buying something with a history attached to it, at a price that leaves budget for everything else.
