Trouble Behind, Trouble Ahead
Our Planning & Zoning Commission, having labored hard, has produced a spot-zoning scheme whereby a tiny lot on Orchard Street in Cos Cob can be built to 4,000 square feet while a home on Taconic Road, on over an acre and a half, is restricted to 3,500. Homes in subdivisions have no FAR restrictions, homes around the corner do. Homeowners who wish to add a ten-by-ten sun porch must now hire the services of a surveyor, an architect and a lawyer to obtain permission to build, thereby incurring thousands of dollars in professional fees and months of delay. Now, no doubt jealous of the opprobrium that the P&Z has earned for itself, town Conservation Director Denise Savageau proposes to create her own mischief: a regulation governing the removal of trees from private property. “It’s definitely a growing concern” says Savageau who apparently wouldn’t recognize a pun if it fell on her. It seems that people are chopping down trees on their property (and often replacing them with other trees, but never mind) based on “landscape design considerations” rather than “environmental benefit”. Savageau wants to put an end to that, and wants homeowners to come to her for permission before whacking down potential paper products. Whoo boy. Can you imagine the fun that a panel of Savagea’s like-minded “conservationists” will have with property owners? Project plans will be rejected by the tree board, redesigned and resubmitted and rejected again, all while the hapless homeowner tries to discern what “environmental benefits” are necessary to please the board. I’m all for trees—my house is made from them—but adding yet another regulatory burden to our citizens is exactly the wrong direction to take. Unless, of course, the P&Z is getting tired of defending the FAR and seeks a new instrument of oppression.

Old Greenwich
Paul Pugliese (New England Land Company) has a new listing at 26 Shore Acre Drive that is so nice and so well priced ($1.865) I expect it will have gone to contract by the time this article is printed. The house has five bedrooms including a great master bedroom suite, a screened porch with views of the water and is located on one of my favorite Old Greenwich streets. Walk to town, school, Tod’s Point or even, just down the street, your own association “beach” (well, a small craft launching spot, at any rate). Very, very nice.
Down the street and down the price scale, Joan Crossman’s listing at 9 Grimes Road in Shorelands is also very nice. Smaller, as the price reflects, but could be added onto if necessary. Shorelands is a great neighborhood of small dead end streets which permit kids to swarm safely from yard to yard.
Riverside Junk
Several new or renovated houses have come on the market recently priced at two million dollars and up. That seems like enough money to buy some level of quality but these projects don’t deliver it. One has plastic hollow doors (as well as a bizarre lay out), another lacks saddles on door thresholds, sports tiny, cramped bedrooms and has the feel, even though conventionally built, of being the sort of house that gives pre-fabs a bad name. There is a truism in this business that there is no premium for quality—these houses stretch that to the breaking point and, possibly, beyond.
Teaser
There is a house slated to be completed and placed on the market in January that is absolutely unique: beautifully designed, perfectly sited to maximize its incredible views and built with care and quality. I think it will be priced around six million dollars and it is very much not a house for young strivers who fear that no one will know how important they are if they don’t have a huge, gaudy splash of a house. This one is for down-sizers (if that term can be applied to sixty-five hundred square feet) or someone who knows what he or she has accomplished and has no need to shout that triumph from atop his stone wall. Great views, complete privacy and yet very close to town. Where is it? Watch this space.
You Want Fries With That House?
Among the holiday plagues that surface this time of year are “gift basket” sales (gift baskets, leather purses, jewelry, etc.) conducted by some agents at their client’s open houses. I assume that the proceeds from such sales are donated to the agent’s favorite charity but they are, in my opinion, unprofessional nonetheless. The purpose of an open house is to expose the listed property to other agents, explain its features and answer questions. None of which is accomplished if the listing agent is busy conducting a Tupperware party.

Rental Blues
For landlords, it’s been a rough couple of years. Rents have fallen and then fallen some more so that units—apartments as well as single family homes—are now commanding perhaps seventy percent of what they did in 2000. Houses that routinely and easily rented for, say, $7,500 back then can now be found sitting vacant, begging for $5,000. I myself have a listing for a neat, clean, two bedroom house in Byram built in 1985. Great place, asking $2,000. No takers. I am not alone. The reason? Who knows, but the consensus among agents is that the big corporations aren’t moving executives around the country as they did a few years ago, thus drying up the high end of the market, and, at the lower end, low interest rates now permit almost anyone with a decent credit rating to go out and buy a condominium (which is exactly what happened in the case of my aforesaid listing). For renters, of course, all this is happy news, so if you’ve been contemplating renovating your house but have hesitated at living in the construction mess, perhaps you should take advantage of the low prices and (temporarily) move out.
Bad Construction
Toured a newly-completed home the other day and was struck by the poor attention to detail displayed by the builder. There is execrable stone work around the fireplaces, including patchy mortar and stone mantles that were apparently ordered too long, because they are rough finished on the front and one side and sawn smooth on the third, as though they were cut to size on site (measure twice, cut once, is the suggested approach here). Two different wiring systems, one on each floor, made me wonder whether the builder tired of the expense after installing state-of-the-art wiring on the first floor. And so forth. Topping off the builder’s short cuts is the architect’s inexplicable design for the master bedroom. Although the house site could provide an incredible view (if I told you what that view was, the builder or his agent would identify his house and then I’d have to deal with another spate of cranky letters) that view is blocked by a closet—the bedroom itself looks over a neighbor’s house. You could always stick windows in the closet and perch on a stool to enjoy the view but at this multi (multi) million dollar price range, do you really want to?
Market Conditions
Slow, in a word, mostly because of so little new inventory. Realtor open house days (Tuesdays and Thursdays, depending on which side of town the house is located) are brutal and short—instead of having too many new listings to see in one day, we’re presented with perhaps five or six new houses and a handful of retreads. Boring. But the buyers are still there, as is evidenced by a recent listing on North Ridge in Havemeyer. $639,000 and destined for the dumpster, it had attracted ten bids by the close of day. Nine Richmond Drive, in Old Greenwich, asked for $825,000 and got it, also on the first day. If you’re thinking of putting your house on the market in the spring, you might want to think about going ahead and doing it now: it will stand out like a beacon on a dark night.
The Return to Town
One area that has seen no let up is our downtown. New condos are showing up, and selling, at prices ranging from one to over two million dollars. Our firm’s single family home listing on 85 Sherwood Avenue, asking $1.290, went the day it appeared and the two adjacent buildings should be gone by the time this article is published. While I have some doubts about the long range duration of the market for ten thousand square foot monsters in the Back Country, I think the future for our in-town market is hugely promising. It is hot, and getting hotter, fueled by down sizing and new couples moving into town who want to be close to the train, shopping and restaurants. Buy it.
Ground Down
The Dunkin Donuts in Cos Cob has disappeared, temporarily. The original building crawled into a dumpster a few days back but I’m told that the enterprise will reappear as a Dunkin Donuts- Baskin Robbins Ice Cream store in the near future. Coffee and ice cream is not a culinary or business combination that makes much sense to this writer, but what do I know? Anyway, I’d still prefer to see a Starbucks in Cos Cob.

Parsonage Road
One of the nicest roads in town is the portion of Parsonage that stretches from the Nathaniel Witherall Home to Lake Avenue. With big, graceful houses, beautiful lawns and low stonewalls, this is classic Greenwich; it is also, sadly, one of the few such remaining streetscapes. Elsewhere in town owners are erecting six foot high walls or fences or evergreen hedges (or in the case of one house on Riversville Road, all three!) to block the view from the street and, presumably, create a sense of privacy for the new tenants. Fair enough; no one is obligated to provide a view for someone else, but we’re becoming a town of tunnels and alleyways and I, at least, find that unpleasant. Try this test; drive down Parsonage, then tour Riversville, Lake Avenue and North Street. Just like an SAT test, you can contrast and compare.
Run! It’s the Costimater!
The recent woes of southern California residents burned out by the brush fires prompted me to call Dave Beaty of Rand Insurance (637-1006) to get the low down on the right amount of insurance a homeowner needs. Here it is: you want, if you can get it, a “guaranteed dwelling replacement policy” so that your home will be rebuilt to the same quality as it existed before the calamity. Some firms don’t offer this and instead sell something called “Additional Replacement” or “Limited Replacement” policies which set a cap on the amount they’ll pay. For instance, if you have a $500,000 policy face amount and a “Limited Replacement” cap of, say, 20%, you’ll be paid up to but not more than $600,000. That’s not so good, particularly if the firm used a generic “Costimater” to calculate building costs. Just like those medical insurance policies that set their “customary and usual” repayment coverage to medical charges in Danbury and leave Greenwich residents with a whacking big hole in their coverage, some of these firms use building costs of $100 square foot for their estimates when Greenwich costs are closer to $225. In California, many residents are going to receive the full value of their policy and still be out of pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can avoid this by buying the right policy in the first place, making certain that you understand the exact amount of coverage and how replacement costs are estimated, paying the occasional policy increases that come along over the years and always notifying your carrier of any substantial additions to your home. As an aside, Rand Insurance has been around for at least three generations (Lindsey Rand appears to be about to contribute a fourth) and, in all my years in town, I’ve heard only good things about their expertise and service. I don’t get a cut of their fee and I’m not even one of their customers but readers with questions about their coverage could do worse than to call Dave Beaty.

Knotted Knickers
My disparaging comments a few weeks ago concerning the service home sellers can expect from some (note the word, “some”) of the big realty chains stirred up quite a ruckus. Several brokers called me to complain that, in trying to avoid naming specific chains, I had used too broad a brush. A fair comment, as I told the one general manager who called: Eric Bjork, of Prudential. Prudential was very much not one of the chains I was complaining about and I’m happy to make that clear. Another chain’s manager, one Nancy MacDonald, has written a letter to this paper accusing me of being lazy, stupid and ignorant as well as deliberately violating all sorts of ethical obligations; other than that, I guess she thought the column was okay. MacDonald closes her letter by expressing her hope that I’ll work hard and become a “spokesperson for the industry” but here’s a surprise for her: I am not a flack for the real estate industry nor do I aspire to be. This opinion column is intended to be a view from the trenches as seen by a single participant. As for writing “false and misleading” material, I plead innocent: a number of agents, including one who works for one the chains I had in mind, told me that they agreed with every word I wrote. And, finally, a bit of advice for letter writers everywhere: when corresponding with newspaper editors, eschew phrases like “I am shocked and dismayed”; someone may infer from your hackneyed writing style that you lack originality of thought. We wouldn’t want that.