Home Front: Sacramento church finally lands a buyer

Land Park's Second Church of Christ, Scientist, has the happy ending it has been seeking.

At last, the church has been sold.

Happy, too, is the Natomas congregation that met for a dozen years in a Northgate Plaza storefront. The Door Christian Fellowship finally has a permanent home.

"It's a great building in a great area," says the Rev. Herbert Rubi, pastor of the church.

The Second Church of Christ, Scientist, building on Freeport Boulevard, just a couple of blocks south of C.K. McClatchy High School, had been on the market for 15 months. Selling a church property is difficult, especially in an urban area where parking isn't in abundance. A wobbly economy doesn't help much, either.

Confronted with selling their church, which opened in 1949, in a troubled real estate market, members were forced to cut the price of the 15,000-square-foot New England-style property as if it were just another home for sale.

Rubi and his 150-member congregation paid $862,000, according to listing agent Leigh Nurre of TRI Commercial Real Estate Services.

The asking price was $1.4 million in February 2007, when The Bee published a front-page story about the difficulties that old, mainline churches face in selling their expensive, single-use city properties.

Experts cited various reasons for a church deciding to sell its building, among them declining membership, a move to the suburbs or a shift to a lifestyle center, which needs more room than an old city church usually offers.

They explained how neighbors accustomed to traditional Sunday services often resist new uses, and that many new congregations simply can't afford the million-dollar price tags of older urban churches.

In Placerville, two churches profiled in that story are still on the market after almost two years, though one is expected to close escrow this month.

That is the 61-year-old Church of the Nazarene on Coloma Street. It's destined now to become the corporate offices of Placerville-based nonprofit Progress House and the operation's counseling centers for domestic violence and alcohol and drugs.

Progress House paid $810,000 for a property listed in 2006 at $1.2 million, said Executive Director Tom Avey.

Nearby, Westside International Church, built on Bee Street in 1940, is on the market for a little under $800,000 after originally listing at almost $1 million. Real estate agent and congregation member Michael Proctor says the going is slow. One group considered the church for a wedding center, another viewed it as a place to hold seances. Neither found the money.

In Sacramento, meanwhile, the Rev. Rubi held his first 11 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. services on Sunday in the church, which seats 212. Rubi recalls the strangeness of holding the opening Sunday services in a church occupied by others for nearly six decades.

"I told the church: 'It's like you're in somebody else's house,' " he says.

The purchase was made possible with a $250,000 gift by a founding member of The Door, a loan from Sacramento's River City Bank – and the lower price.

Now, as a second Sunday of services approaches, Rubi sounds like most first-time buyers, talking about the bugs that need to be worked out in the sound system, about ideas for renovation and expansion, about a first wedding planned at the end of May.

He is still a little giddy.

"It's our house now," he says.

'Rough patches' ahead

Might it be that as Sacramento helped lead the nation into the housing crisis, it is among the first to help lead it back out?

Not so fast, said Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist of the California Association of Realtors.

"We still have rough patches we're going through this year," he told the Sacramento Association of Realtors during a housing outlook forum earlier this week. "But I do see some hopeful signs on what we've gone through the past few months."

Kleinhenz, like many who prognosticate about the real estate market by reading conventional economic indicators, has proved to be overly optimistic in the past. But with rules for home loans getting tighter, he now sounds leery of too much sunshine.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Jim Wasserman, (916) 321-1102. Read his Home Front blog at www.sacbee.com/blogs.