Police ActivityU.S. Custom agents, acting in conjunction with the Greenwich Police and the U.S. Treasury, raided a broker open house last week when they learned that it was serving as a sales outlet for counterfeit Gucci purses. After bashing in the door with a mechanical battering ram the agents chased the broker from the house and down the long, ice-covered walkway. She almost made it to her Mercedes and escaped but one of her high heels caught in a snow bank and she fell to the ground, where she was seized, hog-tied and perp-walked off to jail. The owner’s house was forfeited as the locus of illegal sales activities.

All right, that didn’t actually happen—too bad, because the week was pretty dull—but it could have. My previous comments in this column about “Tupperware Sales” during open houses were incomplete, it seems: I have since learned that, not only are agents selling gift baskets and the like when they should be selling their listing, some are peddling counterfeit merchandise. Perhaps, as the owner of a few copyrights, I’m overly sensitive to this issue but I draw no distinction between selling stolen intellectual property and physical goods. The criminal code of the United States joins me in this position. If your agent proposes using your home as a distribution point for cheap knock-offs, I suggest you pull a Nancy, and just say no.
Bidding Wars
They’re still going on. A house on Mallard Drive recently came on the market at $888,000, a price that I, in my wisdom, thought a bit aggressive. Wrong. It went to sealed bids and sold for $906,888.88. Why the odd bid? To prevent a tie. Better to lose a bidding war than to tie, because you are then forced, if you still want the house, to engage in a second round of bidding at a still-higher price. So throw in an odd-dollar bid; win or lose, at least the odds are against a tie.
Gone to Contract
Sixteen houses sold in each of the past two weeks, all under four million. Some of those of note include : 15 Pilot Rock Lane, Riverside, $3,775,000 (asking); 36 Lismore Lane, Greenwich, $2,595,000; 50 Hidden Brook, Riverside, $1,585,000; 30 Jeffrey Road, Greenwich, $1,550,000; 9 Grimes Road, Old Greenwich (mentioned in this column) $1,250,000; 77, 81 and 85 Sherwood Place, Greenwich, for $1,250,000, $1,350,000 and $$1,290,000; respectively and, finally, 640 Lake Avenue, a wonderful house that obviously needed the right buyer, $2,995,000. It is a difficult time to represent buyers as there is so little left in most price ranges. There is nothing available in either Riverside or (south of the village) Old Greenwich for less than $1.5 million, very little in downtown Greenwich—condominium or single family—under a million, and so forth. We hold out hope for January. Until then, be assured that there’s plenty of inventory in the $6-20 million range, so if you’re preparing a Christmas wish list . . . .
In Town Luxury
Dianne Orlando of William Pitt has just placed the first of what will be ten condominium units located at 90 East Elm Street on the market, at prices starting around $2.3 million. While that kind of price would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago I predict that these will sell quickly. They are exceptionally well made, beautifully designed and, with an elevator in each unit and a location just two blocks from the Avenue, should appeal to those mid and back country folks seeking to downsize. I bet they’re sold out before construction is completed.
This Won’t Work
Saw a new listing the other day with a really stupidly price—about a third higher, in my opinion, than it will sell for. That’s not all that unusual, but I was impressed by all the other negatives the seller and broker tossed in just to make certain that no one will want the house. The place was just completely crammed with “stuff”—it looked as though the seller is engaged some kind of Ebay auction business and uses her house as a warehouse. Any spare space not filled with inventory was cluttered with clothes, dirty dishes, unmade beds and so forth. During the open house the broker sat in the kitchen and made aggressively hostile comments to those of us agents who took the trouble to find the house (no open house sign was posted) and braved the elements to come out and look the place over. So: dumb price, incredibly off-putting appearance and nasty broker. That’s a trifecta guaranteed to keep the house on the market for a long, long time.

Chimney Sweeps

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Now that winter has arrived so emphatically, it seems appropriate to caution readers about their chimneys—check them often, especially if you have a wood-burning stove. That kind of stove achieves its efficiency by means of a restricted air supply, which nearly smothers the fire and produces a slow, smoldering source of heat. That’s good for fuel conservation— properly banked, a stove-full should last all night—but it’s also good for the production of creosote which rises, cools in the chimney flue and collects there. Creosote is basically tar (I think) and burns fiercely when ignited. When I lived in Bangor, Maine, years ago, we lost more houses to chimney fires than everything else: faulty wiring, smoking in bed, insurance fraud, combined. If you have a wood stove, have your chimney cleaned at least once a year. Open fireplaces, because they burn hotter, produce far less creosote but should still be inspected occasionally to check for defective flue liners and soot build-up. And if you’ve switched from oil to gas heat, be especially certain to clean the furnace flue; the gas exhaust can loosen old oil residue and create an inflammable condition.

Assuming you don’t care to crawl around your rooftop this winter, who should you call? There are a number of good, reliable firms locally but unfortunately, there are also some fly-by-night gypsy types who will show up, sell homeowners unnecessary repairs and then disappear. One man who’s going nowhere (as his mother used to scold, no doubt) is Billy Ingraham, of Bill’s Chimney and Fireplace — 869-5242. Billy’s a life-long Greenwich resident, a professional fireman here in Cos Cob, and has been inspecting, cleaning and repairing chimneys since at least the mid-70’s. If he says a repair is needed you can be sure that it is. If he says that he’s cleaned the flue, you can be sure that he has. Good guy.
Heroes
While on the subject of firemen, I note with sorrow that two of them, Kennard Little and Mike Puterbaugh, were grievously injured the night of the blizzard when they re-entered a burning home to search for two children. I’m sure any parent would rush into danger to save her own child; we are blessed to have individuals in town with the courage to perform that same act for complete strangers.
Buy That House!
The flip side of a seller’s lament, “no one’s going to steal my house” is the George Foreman declaration that “I’m not going to over-pay for this muffler!” I’ve previously addressed the fearful seller in this column, pointing out that a low bidder is offering to buy the house, not steal it, and often at a more realistic price than that of which the seller is dreaming. On the other hand, buyers can lose a good deal on a good house by analyzing it to death and balking at a price that they have decided is too high. I am not advocating over-paying for houses; I am suggesting that it is pretty much impossible to determine to the penny what a house is worth and, at least in this town, two to five percent either way is not fatal. Buyers can fret, worry and lose sleep over paying a small percentage more that they “know” a house is worth, only to discover a year or so later that their house’s value has increased twenty percent or more. The real losers here are not the buyers but the non-buyers, the ones who miss out on deal after deal and then discover that they’ve been priced out of town. Regular readers of this column know that I enjoy skewering ridiculously-priced houses and so will recognize, I hope, that I’m not being Pollyannaish. Never grossly over-pay, but don’t lose a house you want over a matter of a few percentage points.
Well, isn’t Greenwich Part of New England?
In a previous column I mentioned a house on 26 Shore Acre Drive in Old Greenwich that “New England Land Company’s” Paul Pugliese had brought to market for $1.865. That house is still available as of this writing, a phenomenon I attribute to the Thanksgiving holiday rather than its location, condition or price, all of which are excellent. Mr. Pugliese has gently reminded me that he and his partner, Peter Lauridsen, are part of Greenwich Land Company, an enterprise entirely distinct from that other fine firm. True enough, but given Paul’s uncanny resemblance to Paul Simon, I think he should be grateful I didn’t refer to his company as “Greenwich & Garfunkle”.

Legal Terrorismristopher Fountain
The Greenwich Time reports that, even though Pathways, Inc. has won its fight to install a group home for the mentally ill on Brookridge Drive, the group is continuing a separate discrimination law suit against the individual homeowners who dared oppose it. One can support the creation of housing for the sick without approving this kind of bullying. Pathway’s tactics are not original: it’s an approach pioneered by rich, powerful real estate developers who wanted to send a message to environmentalists: oppose us at your peril. And it’s often effective; once you’ve seen your neighbor reduced to beggary, you may well decide to let the developer have his way with you, too. Of course, what is effective and what is just are not necessarily the same thing, and this type of law suit has been widely condemned as an infringement on individual rights and an abuse of legal process. But that doesn’t bother Pathways or its lawyer, Daniel Moger (my friend, alas). I had originally thought that Pathway’s selection of a location for their group home in an area of multi-million-dollar, single-family residences was just an “in-your-face” slap at Greenwich and that, having proved their point that they could put these homes anywhere they wanted to, would select less controversial spots for their future projects. As this law suit makes clear, Pathways has far more ambitious plans in store and is preparing the ground for its campaign by making an example of Brookside Drive residents. Pathways, by the way, is a Greenwich United Way agency. I stopped contributing to that organization when it cut off all financial support to the Greenwich Boy Scouts; that they are providing the wherewithal to maintain this vicious act of legal bullying only reinforces my decision.
To Market to Market
Very little that is new is showing up these days as the market slips into the Thanksgiving- to-Christmas slumber. It’s easy to understand a homeowner’s reluctance to mix holiday entertaining, family obligations and keeping a house in perfect order, but there are still buyers out there and, as I have suggested here before, anything new gets the undivided attention of all of them. Twenty-nine houses, some new listings, others old, went to contract in the week and a half leading to Thanksgiving, including Old Round Hill Lane at $6,995,000, 70 Zaccheus Mead Lane at $4,800,000, and on down the price range to the low sixes. While you never know what will trigger a sale (or at least, I don’t – better agents than I probably do), the reduced inventory seems to be working its magic by making buyers less choosy. I know of several houses that sat on the market since mid- summer and finally sold in the past few weeks. Their prices dropped during that period, but I suspect part of the explanation for the happy result was that certain features which were viewed as objectionable by buyers became less off-putting as buyers’ choices diminished. Those choices will increase significantly in January, if past is prologue.
Byram
Jane Basham has a very nice listing at 114 Mead Avenue with an asking price of $599,000. Built in 1919, it was completely renovated in 2000. It has three bedrooms, one bath and is in the R-6 zone, which means you could convert it to multi-family (I wouldn’t) or add on to your heart’s content (I’d add a mud room and powder room on the first floor and call it quits). A very nice starter home, with hardwood floors, crown moldings and lots of sunlight. Taxes are $2,298. By far the nicest house available in this price range. And if the P&Z ever lets Byram flourish by approving the Whabba’s waterfront project, this area is going to take off. Mary Crist, a fellow Realtor whose opinions I respect greatly, thinks Byram is “the next Cos Cob”. For you snobs out there who haven’t been paying attention to real estate prices, that’s meant as a compliment.
Soooeee!
At the opposite end of the price range I saw a new house this past week that I, at least, think has some problems. As a matter of personal taste, I don’t like master bedrooms with twenty-five foot high ceilings— reminds me of waiting out snow storm delays at Kennedy—but that’s a quibble. Of more concern is the lack of land. This house’s approach is flanked by other driveways, the front yard is graced by the neighbor’s kid’s trampoline and the back yard is practically non-existent. I could easily be all wrong on this; buyers might be willing to trade land and privacy for a huge mansion, so I’ll be watching with curiosity. As the Back Country and two-acre zones continue to be developed we’ll see more and more homes built on what would have once been considered sub-standard lots. We’ll see if these sell and if so, for how much.