174 Horse Shoe Bend Rd

An A-frame built in 1964 on a wooded third of an acre in Bullskin Township, priced at $109,900, forty listed photos of a vaulted great room, an open loft and a lot of empty carpeted rooms. It went on the market yesterday. It has already sold once before, in 2006, for $105,000, twenty years ago almost to the dollar, and the county’s own numbers for this house do not match the listing’s.

The land and setting

The lot is small, 0.38 acres, wooded and level, on a paved road called Horse Shoe Bend Road (the county’s own record spells it “Horseshoe Bend,” one word) in Bullskin Township, Fayette County. The listing’s location breadcrumb agrees with the county on the township and county both. This is not Westmoreland County, home to nearby Seven Springs and Laurel Highlands: Acme’s ZIP code straddles the line, and this particular parcel falls in Fayette.

Nothing in the listing or the county record places the parcel against state forest or game land, and nothing shows severed coal or gas rights, though western Pennsylvania parcels this old carry that history often enough that a buyer should ask a title company to check specifically rather than assume either way. The county lists utilities as well and septic, and the county calls the road paved, which the driveway photos confirm as gravel from the paved road to the house.

The house

The remarks describe 3 bedrooms and 3 baths in 1,440 square feet. The Fayette County Assessment Office’s own record for this parcel, filed under the same address, shows something different: 4 total rooms, 2 bedrooms, 1 full bath, no half bath, and 1,704 square feet of living area, one story, built in 1964. The photos show a vaulted, one-and-a-half-story A-frame with a loft, which fits the county’s building sketch of a one-story main structure with additions, not neatly with either bedroom count. Two full bathrooms are visible in the photos, an upstairs bath and a second, more dated bath near the laundry area. A third full bath is claimed in the listing but not clearly shown in any of the forty photos.

The listing also states the home is one story. Zillow’s own facts panel for this listing, a separate field from the marketing remarks, records the levels as “One and One Half” and the stories as 1.5, which matches what the loft photos show and contradicts the “ONE-STORY LAYOUT” highlight on the same page.

Heat is forced air on oil, matching both the listing and the county record, and the county confirms one masonry fireplace, visible in the great room photos with its brick surround and raised hearth.

The listing calls the garage attached. The county’s record lists a detached frame garage of 420 square feet as a separate structure, and the photos show a garage reached through an interior door but opening onto the exterior deck rather than directly into the living space through the great room, which is consistent with either description depending on how the addition connects. Worth confirming on a walkthrough rather than assuming from either source.

The listing’s remarks include a line that belongs in this section rather than buried in the fine print: “PHOTOS ARE AI EDITED TO DECLUTTER AND CLEAN.” Every photo in this set has been run through some kind of editing pass before publication. The rooms as shown may not be the rooms as they exist today.

The facts

What to know before you call

Start with the numbers that do not match. The listing claims 3 bedrooms and 3 full baths in 1,440 square feet. Fayette County’s own assessment record for this parcel records 2 bedrooms, 1 full bath and 1,704 square feet. County records lag renovations, particularly unpermitted ones, so either the seller added rooms since the card was last updated or the listing overstated the count. A buyer should count doors and fixtures in person, and get the square footage measured if it matters to the offer.

The sale price deserves scrutiny too. The county’s sales history shows this property sold for $1 on June 15, 2023, the kind of nominal-consideration deed used for a family transfer or an estate settlement, not a market transaction. The last real arms-length sale on record is March 2006, at $105,000, close to today’s $109,900 asking price twenty years later. Zillow’s own automated estimate, meanwhile, puts the property near $205,300, roughly double. That gap is not proof of anything wrong with the house, but it belongs on a pre-offer checklist.

The listing’s own remarks disclose that the photos were AI-edited to declutter and clean the rooms before publication, and the listing invites buyers to “bring your ideas and explore what this home could become,” language usually reserved for houses that need real work. Between the disclosed photo editing and the unresolved bed, bath and square footage gap against the county’s numbers, this is a property to see in person before forming an opinion of it from the listing alone.

Two smaller items worth a first-showing check: the county calls the garage detached while the listing calls it attached, and Zillow’s own facts panel calls the home one-and-a-half stories while the same listing’s headline calls it a one-story layout. Neither is likely to change a buying decision on its own, but both are easy to resolve by walking the property once.

At 0.38 acres the parcel is far too small to qualify for Pennsylvania’s Clean and Green (Act 319) preferential assessment, which requires a minimum of 10 contiguous acres or an enrolled agricultural use, so there is no rollback exposure to check here. Nothing in the listing or the county record suggests a coal or gas rights severance specific to this parcel, though a title search is the only way to confirm that for certain on any older western Pennsylvania property, and nothing here is marketed for short-term rental or connected to the Seven Springs or Laurel Highlands resort markets. This is a small, plain-road A-frame in Bullskin Township, not a ski property.

Buyers weighing other older Pennsylvania houses with unresolved questions can compare a furnished cabin above Pine Creek near Wellsboro with its own water-source discrepancy, or see everything currently listed.

Michael Pohlot at Janus Realty Advisors is the listing agent and handles showings, at 724-256-4039 or pghhardestworkingrealtor@gmail.com. More Pennsylvania properties land in the Monday email.