On Vacation
The public schools (those are those large brick buildings you pass along the way to Greenwich Country Day) were closed last week and so was much of the real estate market. Much, but not all. Don Imus’s Westport home (106 Beachside Avenue, if you’re curious) appeared, asking $25,000,000. In Greenwich, nineteen new single family residences came on the market while twenty came off via accepted offers, demonstrating that not all the buyers were at Disney World. It’s of interest, perhaps, to match the asking prices of those houses with their days on market. Seven Wyckham Lane, asking $6,450,000, spent three hundred and three days waiting for a buyer. Forty-four Grahampton, $5,250,000, shows as having lingered only seven days but that does not reflect the nearly two years it was on with a much higher asking price. Nearly everything else sold almost immediately: Ninety-eight Round Hill Road, $4,500,000, took nineteen days (which reflects the time lag of drawing up contracts; in fact, it had an accepted offer in days), Six Wyckam Hill Lane, $4,395,000, eight days, Thirty-one Stonehedge, $950,000, twenty-nine days, and so on. The point is that the market is quite active and, if you price your house right, you can expect to receive an acceptable offer almost immediately. In many instances, a bidding war will break out; bad for buyers, good for sellers.
13 Martin Dale Road
I don’t know whether this home enjoyed a bidding war but it certainly did ten months ago when it came on the market asking $2,295,000 and sold for $2,433,000. Martin Dale is a great street close to town and this was a nice house on nearly three-quarters of an acre, but it needed a lot of work. The winning bidders changed their mind about doing that work and put the house back on the market at $2,750,000. It sold instantly. It is often hard to calculate a house’s appreciation when the building has been renovated or expanded. This one was untouched, so we can compare apples to apples. Assuming that it went for its asking price (and it may well have gone higher), that’s a thirteen percent increase in ten months or an annualized rate of fifteen per cent plus. Transaction costs (otherwise known as commissions and taxes) will reduce that gain, of course, but homeowners on Martin Dale, at least, should be pleased with how the year went.
Enlightened Self-Interest
While this has nothing to do with real estate, it’s been a slow week so I’ll mention it. Petsmart, a huge supermarket type of pet store in Norwalk (on the Post Road, across from Old Navy) has given almost a third of its space to the Connecticut Humane Society to showcase their cat collection. Usually, these adoption agencies are located in low-rent, hard-to-find places but not so here. The store is bright and cheerful, the cats get lots of attention and the staff is great. Fifty bucks gets you the pet of your choice (as long as your choice is a cat), a free veterinarian check-up for the beast and the satisfaction of doing something nice about the cat surplus. And of course, if you’re adopting a cat you may want supplies for the animal, all of which Petsmart conveniently offers for sale, right there. I’m more of a large dog person myself, but we found a two-year-old cat there that is as affectionate as a Labrador and almost the same size. Great deal.
Price Reductions
My advice is to take them early and often and in chunks large enough to make a difference. What usually happens, however, is that the owner takes grudging, tiny slices off the price, long after they’re due. The current market is hot. Inventory is slim, and anything decently priced is selling quickly. So if yours is the last house available at three million dollars, for instance, and you’ve been out there for six months, here’s what the market is telling you: you aren’t a three million dollar house. And knocking ten thousand dollars off the price isn’t going to help matters. Take a meat-axe to that price, mister, and move your house.
And Speaking of Moving Houses
Saw a house last week that, the last time it was for sale, had a beautiful water view. My client bid on the house back then but was worried about the lot next door which, if developed, would destroy the view. Her lawyer and I examined the plot plan and all the applicable zoning regulations and satisfied ourselves that there was no way anyone could build on that lot. Fortunately for my client, she was gazumped and someone else got the house because, notwithstanding our opinion, the lot was indeed developed and now it, and not the neighboring house, has the view. Lesson being, (aside from finding out the name of the brilliant lawyer who crammed this building in) that if your potential home’s value depends in part on its view and there is even the possibility that that view might be built upon, be wary.

Hey there, sailor!
Years ago, sixty-five foot MacGregor yachts sold for less than half the price of, say, a Hinkley. They were flimsily built and I wouldn’t have dared sail one more than a few feet from the dock but that wasn’t the point. The MacGregor owner could park his behemoth safely in its slip and party on it all day, looking exactly like a genuine wealthy yachter. Cool; they sold a lot of them in California. A land-based equivalent of a MacGregor showed up for sale last week. Nine thousand feet of cheap construction with expensive bits of trim tacked on, fogged windows, doorways tilting every which way and a big gate at the head of the driveway so that there could be no doubt that someone very important lived beyond. Every agent at the open house seemed to have just the right customer for this one—insecure, desperate for status and unable to afford a real mansion—(no Sean, not you) and the cellphones were humming. It was gone in two days, flooded with offers. The winning bid, I hear, “astoundingly high.” So what does this tell us about our town and the people coming to live here? “Nothing,” he muttered, “nothing at all.”
New Listings
There’s been quite a bit of activity the past two weeks. Forty-one new single family homes came on the market, ranging in price from $589,000 (Nicholas Avenue) to $23,900,000 (109 Byram Shore Road, back for another try). Twenty-four houses went to contract during that same period, from $729,000 to $14,950,000. One that I particularly liked was 38 Quaker Lane, way in the Back Country, set on four acres (six additional acres are available) and asking $2,875,000. It’s a very comfortable, unpretentious house with beautiful grounds. My brother Gideon brought on 8 Dialstone Lane for $849,000 and received multiple offers over $900,000, I believe (he’s tight lipped, but I’ve been reading the kid for a long time). It was basically a tear-down on two tenths of an acre. Just four years ago he and I worked very hard to find a buyer for our late Aunt’s house; same street, dated but much better built and on a half acre. The best we could get was $580,000. Today, that same house would probably generate a bidding war at $1,299,000.
A Dearth of Inventory
There are officially thirty-five homes currently listed for sale between $1,100,000 and $1,750,000. Of those, many already have accepted, if unreported offers and the rest are wildly overpriced. Demand for good houses in this range is so strong that when a plain vanilla home in Cos Cob came on the market Thursday and priced at $1,650,000, it attracted seven bids by Monday morning.
Wagons Ho!
Do you remember the old tax rules regarding capital gains on your home? Sit in it as long as you like then sell and roll the gains over into your next home, and the next, all without the tax man dipping his beak. The protection from taxation ended only when you made your final exchange for a smaller (six-by-three, traditionally) plot. That’s no longer the case and, to my surprise, many people don’t know it. The rules have changed. Inspired no doubt by the real estate and moving van industries, our lawmakers now permit a married couple to pocket $500,000 in capital gains every two years. Stay in your house forever, if you wish, but once it has appreciated$500,000 (not at all an uncommon occurrence in this town) if you don’t move, you’re wasting a tax break. Don’t want to leave your neighborhood? Perhaps you and your neighbor should buy each other’s house. Not as entertaining as swapping wives, but then, tax matters rarely are.
Beach CaféReal estate attorney Tom Ward’s new restaurant in Old Greenwich is a smashing success and rapidly driving out the bad memories some of us had of the food served by the previous tenant (yes, I know that you LOVED the Colonial Diner; no need to write me about it. We disagree.) Good food, great prices, big crowds. Success in any field other than law, Tom, may be God’s way of hinting that we have too many lawyers. Just a thought.
Lights! Camera! Action?
My first screenplay has been accepted for representation by ICM. “Greenwich Mean Time” tells the story of a band of faux-Siwanoy Indians who invade Greenwich, claim Tod’s Point and attempt to build a casino. The mastermind behind the plot is a certain Stamford lawyer still smarting at our refusal to give him a beach card. ICM’s flogging it on the west coast but why doesn’t one of the movie types here in town have his people call my people (that would be Richard Abate or Kris Dahl in New York)? We’ll do lunch.

You’re in the Army Now

A little noticed (by me, anyway) law was enacted by our Legislature last summer, making homeowners responsible for collecting taxes due from non-resident contractors. If you do work with such people, you must deduct five percent of the total bill and send that amount to the tax collector. You must do this for each contractor —a separate deposit for each one—and make additional deposits with each change order. If you don’t, you will be liable for the taxes that your contractor doesn’t pay. I don’t know what it would cost to convince our state legislators to stay home from now on and refrain from enacting further mischief, but it would be worth every penny.
Trusteeships and LLCs
Big ticket houses are often sold by and to trustees to preserve the privacy of the actual owners by keeping their names out of the public record. A new twist in this game is the use of limited liability corporations, or LLCs. These were originally used when investors and builders combine to build a new home and seek to limit their liability in case the project goes south. Recently, however, I’ve noticed that some already existing homes are being sold to such corporations. Does this use of an LLC still preserve the $500,000 tax shelter provided to married couples? I don’t know, and neither did a top lawyer I consulted. Any reader who knows more than I (that would be anyone with a Sixth-grade education) should feel free to enlighten me; you’ll get a credit here and a gold star.
The Circus is Coming!
The owners of 85 Club Road in Riverside have just received approval to raze their existing house and build a 10,700 square foot bungalow. How, you will ask, can these poor folks possibly dream of entertaining in such a modest hovel? Well, they could borrow one of Malcolm Pray’s party tents (Governor Rowland once quipped that, in his next life, he’d like to come back as the guy who rented Mr. Pray his tents; it occurs to me that he may not have to wait that long). Another alternative would be the Riverside Yacht Club, just a stone’s throw away—while it is only a teensy bit larger than this one, it does have a ballroom for five hundred, two dining rooms, two bars and a kitchen with five ovens and four industrial ranges. When our happy home-builders feel cramped, they can load their wheelbarrows with party fixings and toddle down the road to more spacious quarters.
Inventory
There are currently one hundred fifteen homes for sale with asking prices of four million dollars or more (sixty-two of them exceed six million). Seventy homes in that price range sold last year and, even though this past January was quite active, it appears that we have more than enough multi-million dollar homes to meet demand. For a long time.
And Yet
The under two million dollar market is sizzling. Everything and anything in that price range is going, often in bidding wars, at prices that seem, or would have seemed a few months ago, absurd. A half/acre back lot at 222 Riverside Avenue came on the market priced at $1,295,000 and went to sealed bids just a few days later. I’m told that six builders were chasing it. A prefab that was just awful sold for nearly two million dollars within a few weeks of being listed. This one was so bad that several of us took note of the builder’s name so we could be sure never to recommend him to our clients. Didn’t matter. All of this activity is freezing the lower end inventory because people with perfectly nice $850,000 homes are properly appalled at what they can buy for $1,200,000 and are staying put.
Byram
John Bates has a new listing at 59 Nicholas Avenue that I think is a really good value at $589,000. It’s set high on a hill and has a nice yard, full basement, greenhouse, three bedrooms, two baths and even a two car garage, so long as you don’t drive a Ford Excursion. I liked this one very much.
Basking
Herbie Salomon, our traffic cop who has been holding down the Havemeyer Place/Greenwich Avenue intersection practically forever, is down in Aruba for the next three weeks, No one deserves a good thawing more, but I am enjoying the image of him barking at tourists who enter the water without his permission. Go for it, Herb.
Mr. Mustard
Cendant, the owner of Century 21, has just bought Sotheby’s. While Julie Church and Martha Kelly would look good in anything, I wonder how they’ll feel about mustard yellow blazers?

Deer Park
There are still a few classic houses in Greenwich that haven’t been torn down and replaced by builders’ specials or “renovated” beyond recognition. Sharon Fogarty’s new listing at 70 Midwood Road, in Deer Park, is one of them. Deer Park was one of the first Rockefeller subdivision projects, and the houses that date back to that period (1930’s) reflect the charm and grace of you would expect from homes built for people untouched by the Depression. 70 Midwood has been modernized with a new kitchen and baths, but in a manner in keeping with the original excellence. My favorite feature: a reading nook in one of the children’s bedrooms. I don’t know how many kids still read but if you have one, this would be better than Disneyland. Two acres with a heated pool and a beautiful lawn. It is priced at $7,750,000 which, compared to recent sales in Deer Park of houses that will need a lot of work before they approach this one, is a very fair price.
Vinyl Shingles
Okay, I wouldn’t necessarily use this particular product on a Deer Park home, but I was attending open houses the other day and noticed a crew working on the house next door nailing up the best-looking vinyl siding I’ve ever seen. I realize that that doesn’t sound like too high a bar but I abandoned the open house (an over-priced, under-maintained junker) and introduced myself to the crew’s boss, a very nice, competent fellow named Eddy Olson, of Olson Contracting (914) 235-7316. It turns out that the product I was admiring is a vinyl shingle made by Nailite Industries. Although made up in short panels, this “Rough Sawn Cedar” looked very much like the real thing. This isn’t the thin, brittle stuff that looks so bad; these are solid shakes and they aren’t cheap. Mr. Olson tells me they cost about $220 per square (100 square ft.) versus $160-$175 for natural cedar shingles. But if you have priced paint jobs recently or, like me, spent your summer weekends staining your house yourself, you might consider these a bargain. The multi-million dollar house shouldn’t use these; it confounds buyers’ expectations, but if you have a more modest house, or, for you do-it-yourselfers, an area of your house that’s high off the ground and hard to reach with a bucket of stain, I think these are an attractive alternative to cedar. What’s the price threshold where you can feel comfortable using this material? I don’t know, but I just saw a house in Riverside asking $2.1 million with plastic, hollow-core doors—if you can get away with those, these shingles should be no problem.
What Are They Smoking?
There are some new listings on the market with what I think are just plain crazy prices. My philosophy in this column is to avoid mentioning specific addresses of over-priced houses, both to avoid embarrassing the owner and to protect my own pride when the house sells in a bidding war. With that caveat, someone around here is nuts. For instance, a well built home on Winthrop Drive, new construction, just had an accepted offer somewhere near its asking price of $2.5 million. I have no problem with that. Winthrop is a great street, this looks like a good house and several other homes nearby are also asking or have sold in that range. But not far away, on a far less desirable, busy road, a butt-ugly builder’s project is asking $3,000,000 plus. Only in his dreams. On the other side of town, a house asking more than $900,000 was, in the general consensus of a number of us “experts”, over-priced by at least $150,000. These examples may not sound all that far off in total dollars but if your house is actually worth, say, $750,000 and you price it at $950,000, you scare off the $750 buyers while going head-to head with houses that are really worth their asking price (like 31 Stonehedge , at $995,000). The point is this: Greenwich real estate is not, yet, the equivalent of internet popcorn dot.com, and sellers who price their product as if it were are in for disappointment. I hope.
And What the Heck is This?
One house currently for sale and asking perhaps six million more than it’s worth just reduced its price by fifty thousand dollars, two weeks after it was first listed. I don’t think that’s going to do the trick, but if the owner keeps it up at the same pace, fifty thousand off every second week, its price ought to be just about right after one hundred and twenty such reductions, or July 1, 2008. Stay tuned.