Jimmy Bradley’s party house was languishing a bit on the market. Then Zillow Gone Wild discovered it.
Now the fans of unusual houses on the market are trying to figure out what it reminds them of. The house at 1809 Carl St. in Fort Worth is listed on Zillow and went viral in social media posts from an account called Zillow Gone Wild late last week. The property is almost as unique and indescribable as the owner himself.
“I didn’t really know how big of a deal it was,” Bradley said. “I knew the house was special, but I never even thought about the world finding out about it.”
The highlight of the 7,000-square-foot, three-bedroom house with an attached studio is that more than 4,000 square feet of its space is devoted to an enclosed entertainment area. It has a heated pool with a slide and a diving board surrounded by an astroturfed area with an outdoor kitchen and pingpong, pool and air hockey tables.
“I’ve got a really lot of nice customers that have been very successful in life and have traveled all over the world, and their reaction to it is that they get this big old smile on their face, and they say, ‘Jimmy, I’ve been into lots of nice, fabulous, palacious homes, but I’ve never seen anything like this.’”
Zillow Gone Wild shares interesting real estate listings found on Zillow, such as a three-bedroom house in South Carolina that looks like a big teapot and a “butterfly house” in California.
As of Tuesday, the Fort Worth home has gotten 105,000 likes on Twitter and almost 31,000 likes on Instagram. On Facebook, the post has received 8,600 reactions and 4,300 comments.
“Part Dave and Buster’s, part 1980s drug lord. I LOVE IT,” said one Facebook user, Jamee Smith Gomez, in a Facebook comment. Another, Amber Dillon, tweeted “this is the party house you wish you had access to as a kid during winter.”
On Thursday, listing agent Lance Blann of Dave Perry Miller Real Estate got a screenshot of the house on Facebook while he was on vacation in Mexico.
“When I logged on there, there were already 3,500 comments,” Blann said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
He then started to get calls from friends, other agents and media outlets, followed by messages from investors and their agents. He even heard from a company that scouts out movie filming locations.
“Whoever runs that Zillow Gone Wild page, they don’t realize the power that they have,” Blann said.
The grand tour
The home is the creation of Bradley, 76, who owns Bradley Insurance Agency in Fort Worth and who Blann describes as “your quintessential eclectic Fort Worth cowboy.” Bradley bought the house about three years ago as a side project, the first time he had bought a home to remodel.
“Goodness gracious, I saw what that house could be,” he said. “It was just something that I thought would be a lot of fun.”
Bradley gave The Dallas Morning News a tour of the home on Monday. He has a systematic method of showing it to guests, leading into a big reveal. He starts with the bedrooms close to the front of the house, one of which has an access door that goes right onto the patio.
Then he takes guests to a dimly lit office that he converted from a bedroom, lined with antiques such as animal-print chairs, sculptures and a mother of pearl mirror. Much of the decor he bought from Habitat for Humanity.
“I wanted this thing to wow you, everywhere you look,” Bradley said. “I put my spirit into this deal.”
Once his guests get to the primary bedroom — complete with a couch, fireplace and bathtub — he keeps the drapes closed over the windows. At this point, guests may already be sold.
That’s when he quotes the late radio host Paul Harvey: “Now, are you ready for the rest of the story?” He opens the drapes to unveil the pool and the massive enclosed entertainment area.
The walls are decorated with giant beer advertisements he got from a liquor store in a building he owned, which he guesses are from the ‘40s.
The entire entertainment area and even the front yard are covered in artificial turf that he also bought from Habitat from Humanity. He was told it came from Texas Christian University’s football field. Many people online mistakenly thought the turf was carpet.
Bradley has held about 30 birthday parties at the house, three weddings, family reunions and Super Bowl parties.
“It doesn’t matter if they’re 3 years old or 83 years old, they go crazy,” Bradley said. “The kids just have a ball with it.
“I am aware, anybody that buys this, they’re gonna do whatever they want to do with it,” Bradley said. “But I had fun, and I wasn’t worried about staying in the box. I went outside of the box with this, pretty much.”
The struggle to sell
Blann, the real estate agent, was introduced to the house through his friend Clint, Bradley’s son. Blann imagines the house could go to a “Fort Worth playboy” type of buyer, someone who wants a house strictly for entertaining and hosting great parties.
“It kind of gives me the old-school Jack Ruby vibes from the Kennedy era,” Blann said. “When we first walked in there, I looked at Clint and I said, ‘Why the hell haven’t we had a party here?’”
It would also be a great fit for a large family, he said, as the attached studio could be ideal for a teenager or in-laws.
Blann first listed the home in July for $795,000, but interest from serious clients was scarce and it only got five or six showings. He lowered the price last week to $745,000.
Now that the house has gotten so much attention, will it sell faster?
“People just don’t know what to do with the house, honestly,” Blann said. “It’s a big house in a neighborhood of smaller homes, and not everybody needs 4,000 square feet of recreational area and an inside pool.”
The home was getting attention on social media even before Zillow Gone Wild. Some agents would visit the house just to promote themselves in TikTok videos, Blann said.
“Every young, media-savvy agent in the Metroplex was trying to go to that house to do their promotional videos,” he said. “It got to be too burdensome, trying to coordinate around getting the owner out, getting the house set up; it just became too much.”
Gone wild
The man behind the home’s going viral is Samir Mezrahi, 40, a New York-based social media director for Buzzfeed who started the Zillow Gone Wild Instagram account in December 2020 out of a personal interest in browsing home listings on listing site Zillow.
“I felt like a lot of people out there were doing the same, maybe they were working from home, maybe aspirationally wanting to move, maybe they were actually thinking about moving,” Mezrahi said. “I started the account, and it really just blew up from the start.”
He launched Zillow Gone Wild on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok as well as a newsletter with almost 100,000 subscribers. The Instagram account now has 1.7 million followers.
Mezrahi said the Fort Worth house has become one of the most popular homes he has ever posted.
“In a lot of homes, from the outside, you can’t tell what unique things are going on inside,” he said. “And that [house] had just the ultimate indoor-pool chill space. It’s really been a fun one.”
Bradley says the home reflects his personality, which is centered around welcoming everyone.
“I wanted to do it my way, kind of like old Frank Sinatra says,” he said. “Here’s what I want that house to say when they walk in there: ‘Come on in. Let’s have some fun.”
