March 26, 2004

School Break
The private schools in town are on vacation and but not the real estate market. About fifty new houses came on last week, ranging from $16,900,000 (twenty acres at 500 Round Hill Road) on down. Nothing of note, to me, but I may have missed some. Thirty-seven houses went to contract, many in bidding wars mere days after being listed. 32 Vineyard Lane ($9,250,000); Round Hill Partner’s listing at 92 Husted Lane ($6,350,000); 17 Khakum Wood ($4,395,000); 2 Palmer Terrace, in Riverside (mentioned in this column, bidding war, asking price $1,395,000); and 11 Plow Lane (bidding war, asking $1,295,000) are all representative of what’s happening: houses are selling.
In-Town
Houses close to town continue to sell. Mary Crist listed 7 Sheldrake Road this past Monday for $1,169,000 and had an accepted offer and several backups within hours. There is a very large demand for houses within walking distance of the Avenue, and very little supply. That’s a nice place to be, if you are a seller.

What a Broker’s Worth
A few months ago a property owner approached me and said that he wanted to sell his house for $1,250,000 net —“but I don’t want to pay a commission”. I reasoned with the gentleman, pointing out that, in order to be listed with the Greenwich Multi-list system, he would have to pay a commission, but that he could almost certainly net $1.250. The owner was adamant: no commission from his pocket. So I looked around, found a buyer who would pay the owner his price and me a full commission of five per cent. I reported this to the seller but again urged him to place the property on the multi-list. Perhaps because my advice was against my own interest—I would make four times as much on a direct sale than I would splitting the commission with another firm—the seller agreed to at least “think about it”.
When he reappeared a month later he had decided to multi-list it. I advised him that the market had gone up during his absence and recommended that we price it at $1.350 and hope for a bidding war. We signed a listing contract to take effect in two days. A fellow named Finlay, one of those William Pitt chain store Realtors ( I say this without in any way disparaging a number of agents at that firm: Steve Archino, Peter Janis and Joanne Gorka, for example) discovered that there was a two day window and presented a direct offer to my client: $1.450, with his buyer paying him a commission. I would get nothing. My client called to tell me that he was going to accept the offer. Acting purely from my own desire to get paid, I urged him to let me go ahead with the listing but at a price of $1,550,500. We would exclude Finlay’s client but, if we received a sufficiently higher offer (it would require a bid of $1,525,000 to match Finlay’s no commission bid) we’d go with that.
I didn’t really expect to, but within twelve hours we received a full price offer. My client did not accept this but instead, told Finlay of the offer and Finlay promptly offered to match it. Good for my client, bad for me. Other would-be buyers appeared and today the seller’s attorney conducted a sealed-bid auction. Finlay won. All of which is not necessarily to whine about the unfairness of the world (although I have an opinion on the subject) but rather to point out the value of fully exposing one’s house to the market. This seller would have been pleased to receive $1,250,000 for his property. Had he taken that first, private offer, I would certainly have been better off but at great expense to the owner. The owner will now receive at least $300,000 more than that and, possibly, quite a bit more. A five percent commission on a sale of $1,600,000, just to pick a number, is $80,000.00. That sounds like a lot; compared to the extra value generated from exposing your property to the full Greenwich real estate community, it’s a bargain. And of course, because my client decided that it “would be unfair” to pay me any portion of the extra value he received, this entire exercise was a real bargain for the seller, indeed. The other moral of this story, I suppose, is when money hits the floor and starts rolling, stand back.

March 19,2004

Up, Up and Away!
Two houses that have sat on the market for awhile, unsold, have just raised their prices: 668 Lake Avenue from $4,500,000 to $4,800,000 and 10 Lighthouse Lane, from $5,700,000 to $6,200,000. There could be a number of explanations for this, I suppose, such as oil being discovered on the property, or diamonds, but I always find the phenomenon curious. I have never known a house to fail to sell because its price was too low; the opposite, alas, is all too common.
Riverside Waterfront
41 Miltiades Avenue, on the other hand, has taken the more conventional route and just lowered its price to $2,395,000 from its original price of, I think, $2,995,000. This is a terrific new house, right on the water, with a problem: it’s nestled right under the railroad bridge and has full exposure to the Mianus bridge of I-95—good for history buffs, but troublesome to many buyers. However, it really is a very nice house with wonderful views and it’s quiet inside. I thought it was aggressively priced when it first came to market; it’s approaching bargain status now.
10 Steep Hollow Road
After a full day of touring what were basically cookie cutter suburban homes it was a real pleasure to enter John Cooke’s listing at 10 Steep Hollow Road. It is a well designed, well built house with good living spaces, including what would be a perfect writer’s studio and a two acre yard with pool. Steep Hollow is off the lower end of Cognewaugh, so the job of chauffeuring children up and down that road ten times a day is not the daunting prospect it might be further up. At $1,495,000, I think this is one of the best-priced houses on the market.
One of the best, but not the only one. Bruce Barker’s new listing at 2 Palmer Terrace in Riverside is priced at $1,395,000 and will almost certainly sell via bidding war. Not at all the same yard as Steep Hollow, of course, since this is Riverside, but a decent sized lot for this end of town, with an easy walk to the train and Riverside School. And Russ Pruner’s listing at 42 Tomac Avenue in Old Greenwich, at $1,195,000, is also destined for quick sale. Tomac is a busy street, and the house could use another bathroom, but this house has a big fenced back yard, can be expanded by another thousand square feet and is a good value for a south of the Village location. I liked it.
To Market to Market
Fifty-seven new homes (including rentals) were listed just last week and thirty-one came off via sales contracts. It is a very busy time of year and an excellent time to find buyers. To repeat the adage of the late Betty Mosher, “if you wait for the dogwoods to bloom before listing your house, you’re too late.”
Exclusive Buyer’s Representation, Revisited
A while back I expressed my distaste for the “buyer’s rep” agreements foisted on would-be buyers and suggested that no one should sign such a document without performing some extensive editing. I received a fair bit of negative feedback from some agents; others told me that they agreed with me completely. I am in the process of drafting a less onerous agreement that will fit on one page, satisfy the legal requirements for buyer representation and contain none of the provisions someone in the real estate business stuck in the standard form to trap customers. I intend to pass it along to my fellow Realtors in town when it is completed. Until then, my warning against the standard form is the same: don’t sign the thing unless you strike out, basically, the entire second and third page, and limit the contract’s effectiveness to twenty-four hours. I hear stories of buyers who have called up a firm to ask the location and price of an advertised property and been told that they must come into the office and sign a buyer’s rep agreement before that information can be disclosed. Not only is this not an accurate representation of the law, it can produce the unfortunate result of a buyer being trapped into a relationship with an agent for as long as six months (or even a year, depending on the firm’s persuasiveness and the buyer’s naivete). Don’t like the agent? Too bad; while the contract is almost certainly not binding on you, it may very well bar another agent from working with you and earning a commission. Since few of us like working for nothing, we won’t represent you. That’s unfortunate, and unfair.

March 12, 2004

The Spring Market Arrives
Sales activity has actually been heated since the fall, with just a brief respite over the Christmas holiday, but it switched into hyper-drive the past two weeks. During the past ten days forty-two houses went to contract, including some at the upper end of the price range: 36 Husted Lane, $8,950,000; 70 Midwood Drive, $7,750,000; 94 Doubling Road, $6,995,000; 22 Dewart Road, $6,890,000; and 18 Pinecroft, $6,500,000. Wall Street obviously had a good year. There were also forty-four price reductions, which I think is a good sign of sellers’ good sense. One hundred and nineteen new listings came on, in all price ranges, with many of them already included in the “gone to contract” category. Some of this activity was caused by the release of admissions decisions by private schools, both here and in New York City. Those families in the city whose child’s genius was overlooked by Miss Smithington’s School for Young Rulers want better schools than are offered by the City of New York and so they flow out from there into the suburbs. A similar relocation also occurs here in town each spring, as parents either shift closer, say, to Greenwich Academy, or move their rejected offspring nearer to what they perceive to be the “better” public schools. I am told that, notwithstanding nearly identical test scores for all our schools, many such parents are drawn to Old Greenwich and Riverside. As a resident of Riverside I am tempted to say that we don’t want your losers but that’s not true; welcome to the eastern side of town.
Speaking of Riverside
Michael Dinneen has a good house for sale at 70 Winthrop Drive, a quiet neighborhood that’s an excellent place to raise a family. This house was built in 1976 with a new kitchen finished just this year. Five bedrooms, a huge, walk-out basement and great views of Binney Park. A year ago, I’d have considered this house well priced at $1,350,000. This year, its asking price of $1,699,000 seems entirely justified and I expect it to be gone within a week.
Other Activity
Bidding wars continue. Jeff Bell’s listing at 107 Overlook Drive in Milbrook came on the market at $1,299,000 and received, I hear, five sealed bids all for more (probably much more) than the asking price. This was a classic Milbrook Tudor, with nicely proportioned rooms, plenty of light and a good yard. As its price reflected, it will require a lot of work to bring it up to date, starting with some jack work to restore it to level, then new wiring, baths, a kitchen and on and on. But when finished, its new owners will have a beautiful house worth a lot more than whatever they’ve put into it. I am a little surprised that there is such demand for a project house, even one in Milbrook; I suppose it is a reflection of how few good houses are out there on the market.
Gold Star
Reader Frank Farricker has ably answered my question as to whether the $500,000 capital gains exemption granted married homeowners is also available to LLCs. It is not. Mr. Farricker points out, however, that LLCs are ideally suited for employing 1031 exchanges—if you have to ask what those are, then it’s probably not a tax strategy you want to employ. The process involves meticulous record keeping and lots of paperwork—not my strong points, so I’ll leave this option to others.
High Society
A generous friend recently gave me the opportunity to attend one of the dinner dance fund raising events that seem to dominate our town’s social calendar. It is telling sign of my own prominence in that world that this was the first such event I have ever attended, and I traipsed off to the ballroom in my scuffed shoes and best Greenwich Hospital Thrift Store blazer with hopes of an entertaining evening of brilliant conversation around the dinner table. Those hopes were dashed as soon as the band struck up, drowning all but the loudest shouts under a cacophonous wave of sound. My brother Gideon, who does this sort of thing frequently (why?), informs me that all these dinners employ the same noisy strategy. He had no explanation for the phenomenon, and I certainly don’t: are the sponsors really that worried that people will have nothing to say to each other? Is a false sense of excitement created when guests must shout at each other when they’re out together dancing cheek to cheek? Inquiring minds want to know.

Whinger’s Mail Call
Noted Greenwich architect Aristotle (OnassisPlatoSocratesOedipusRex) Crist has complained that I misspelled his name in a previous column. In fact, I was referring to Eris Krist, the Shelton-based designer of solar powered pig styes and outhouses. We regret the confusion. Attorney Tom Ward points outthat, while I praised his new Old Greenwich restaurant, the Beach House Café, I neglected to mention his excellent lawyering skills. We’ll do that soon, Tom. In the meantime, that Rhode Island calamari is a winner. At least one irate reader has ignored my plea not to write and has accused me of mangling the name and the merits of the late-but-not-lamented Angie Viscardi’s Colonial Inn. We don’t reply to rude correspondents, ma’am. Mr. and Mrs. Biff Castron III have identified themselves as the new owners of the pile of builder’s dreck I mentioned recently and have invited me to their first dinner party so that I can reconsider my criticisms. Because they directed me to wear a tuxedo, bring a large tray and use the service entrance, I think I’ll pass.
Houses of Note
Three houses are on the market in the higher end of the spectrum, each as different from the other as they are to most of what else is being offered today. 521 Field Point Road is a beautifully built new (2001) home that resembles a fine ship, brought to shore and perched on a elegant yard. Designed by the owner, it was built by Hobbs, which means it has absolutely top quality everything. Five bedrooms, three fireplaces, a pool, beautiful wainscoting and trim all in a very manageable 5,200 square feet. $5,950,000 which, given its address, seems about right. 297 Shore Road in the Belle Haven area is a 1929 classic set way up on a hill. Once owned by Dr. Bill Langdon (I happen to remember the exact two days I met the man—by coincidence, they fall on my daughters’ birthdays) the new owners have done a complete renovation, upgrading the mechanicals, adding a new master bedroom suite and library, etc. There are plans prepared for an additional thousand square foot addition for a new, larger kitchen and additional bedrooms but, while the almost acre-and-a-half lot could certainly accommodate it, I like this house just the way it is. Leonide Prince has listed it at $4,495,000. 314 Stanwich Road, designed by Jay Haverson and built with his partner, Mark Spector, is simply an astonishingly beautiful house set right on Frye Lake with fantastic water views from every room. Everything in the house: its design; construction; cabinet work and trim is of superb quality. It has its own dock and even its own (very small) private island. $6,300,000.
25 Butler Street
Not every new listing is priced in the mega-million range. This one is a nifty little house with a great back yard, new kitchen and seems to be in excellent condition. It’s priced at $835,000 which seems just right or even a tad under-priced. I anticipate a bidding war.
Market Conditions
Extremely active. As of this writing, there are twenty-seven homes in Old Greenwich under contract, twenty-four in Riverside and eighty in total around town. Those numbers do not include houses which have accepted offers but have not yet gone to contract. Even the six million dollar plus range, nearly dormant for the past two years, has come to life, with several accepted offers.
Out of Town
I wanted to show 25 Butler Street to some clients of mine but they have decided instead to leave their own small house in Greenwich and move to Trumbull, where they have bought a huge, brand-new house with all the bells and whistles, including a great big yard, for $800,000. The town will be poorer to lose these very nice people, and I wonder how many other families we’re losing. Greenwich, of course, has always been more expensive than other towns but there were once pockets where people with ordinary incomes could find affordable houses. Those are disappearing very, very quickly. How big a disparity is there between our town and others? Using Fairfield as an example, I know of a brand new house on the water there asking $1,750,000. This is direct waterfront, with great sweeping views across Long Island Sound and down to the Manhattan skyline. In Greenwich, a building lot—forget the house—with that kind of waterfront would sell for far more than $2,000,000. I am not predicting a collapse of the Greenwich real estate market; more likely, prices in neighboring towns will rise closer to ours, but I do wonder where we expect folks to live.