June 25, 2004

Do It Yourself Brain Surgery

Having endured a number of complete home renovation jobs I am the first to say that a good general contractor is worth every penny he’s paid. The GC will establish the construction schedule, select reliable subcontractors and ensure that the work you are paying for is done properly and on time. But not every general contractor is good; some, in fact, are little more than crooks with a skillsaw and a soon-to-be-repossessed pickup truck. And not everyone can afford the extra ten to twenty percent a GC charges. Adventurous homeowners with a yen for flirting with disaster are often tempted to save that money and serve as their own general contractor. That group would include me during one of my renovation jobs when the contractor showed as little interest in my project as he might to a distant dairy farm.

So I was delighted to first read about and then meet Eric Tautel, the Old Greenwich resident and owner of a UBuildIt franchise, a company that offers to serve as advisor to the owner-builder. As I understand it, UBuildIt will, for a fee, hold the hand of the would be owner builder through the entire building process, from selecting an architect or plans, construction estimates (where you discover that those granite countertops in the kids’ bathrooms are going to cost you their college education), site preparation, permits, construction scheduling and on-site consultation as required. The company has a roster of recommended subs and building suppliers but, as with the rest of the project, the home owner is free to select whomever he or she wants. There is no mark-up on either the subcontractors’ fees or building supplies, so you should save an additional bundle here.

Can you serve as your own contractor? Sure, and UbuildIt would seem like a good way to minimize the trauma. Should you? That, like so much of life, depends. It’s a full time job, not something to attend to in the evening after detraining from New York. If you aren’t there to attend to details no one else is going to volunteer. But if you’re attracted to the challenge and have the time (say, you’re a female executive who has stopped working to care for your kids and are bored out of your mind) I think you’ll find that a construction project can be one of the most frustrating but ultimately the most satisfying experiences of your life. You can call Eric Tautel at 698-0030 or go to the company’s website, Ubuildit.com, for more information.

Sumer Is Icumin In
Thirty-one houses went to contract last week while forty-seven had their prices reduced. That’s a ratio that suggests that buyers are beginning to think more about vacation plans than where they want to live next year. I suspect that at least some of them were burned out by the spring bidding wars and have retreated to mull things over for awhile. If your house hasn’t sold I wouldn’t despair; there are still buyers out there who need homes and the burn-out victims will be back. If you’re a buyer, you might consider taking your vacation in July and returning to house hunt in August when the town has emptied. There will be less competition and less of a rush to commit, instantly, to a house you’ve just seen twenty minutes before.
Now at a Reduced Price
One price reduction I found notable was that for 9 Sabine Farm Road, dropping from an original asking price of $24,000,000 to a mere $14,500,000. In fact, the property is spectacular, a grand house set very impressively on nine acres. Because I have no idea what $24,000,000 feels like I thought the original price was as apt as any other number; if you can afford a house like this, do you really care how many millions it takes to acquire it? Apparently the two or three buyers at that end of the price range felt differently, and the sellers have done the intelligent thing. When you’re ready to concede on price, do so in substantial chunks. It gets the market’s attention and saves you from slowly twisting in the wind.
12 Guinea Road
William Steele (William Bainbridge Steel to his mother) has just listed this interesting house. When they were considering buying it, the current owners overlooked an exterior of “bilious taupe with an orange roof” and saw instead its potential as an ideal country residence. They brought in New York designer Juan Montoya and converted the house to a light, airy home with, among other assets, a master bedroom suite incorporating a bathroom done in highly polished wood. The designer is quoted in an Architectural Digest article on the place as having worked for “a yachtlike space”. I’d say he got it exactly right. Three acres, a pond and a heated pool, asking $2,350,000.

June 18, 2004

Far Again?
The market seems to be slipping into the summer doldrums, with price reductions just about outnumbering new listings, so I thought I’d devote yet more space to our beloved floor area regulations; how they got here and why they provoke such opposition. Here goes. The average American home, I’ve read, has doubled in size since 1950, from 750 square feet to 1,500 (remember Joan Cusack’s line in “Gross Pointe Blank” about attending her high school reunion? Her classmates looked the same, she said, “except they’d swelled”). Greenwich is hardly average, but its housing has swelled along with the rest of the country. As houses expanded at the expense of lawns many townspeople objected and demanded that the Planning and Zoning Commission do something to stop it. The Commission members went up the mountain and came down with, they announced, the ideal size for all houses in each of our zones. R-4 (four acres): 10, 890 square feet; R-2: 7,840; R-1: 5,880, R-20 (20,000 sq. ft. lot): 4,500; R-12: 3,780; and R-7: 2,520. These Platonic ideals were enacted into law and everyone lived happily ever after.

Hardly. To achieve its goals, the P&Z decreed that each lot’s FAR would be calculated by a mathematical ratio of actual lot size multiplied by a specific formula that differed for each zone. Builders on a one acre lot, for instance, would multiply its area (43,560 sq. feet, for those non-farmers among you) by .135. R-20 owners would use .225, and so on. This would produce uniformity in house size if we lived in a planned development with each lot in a particular zone exactly the same size. We do not. Properties around town vary greatly in size, even within, say, the R-12 zones. The result is that FAR fails to stop some huge monstrosities from being erected while simultaneously preventing other houses from expanding by so much as a powder room. A tiny variation in lot size can produce huge gains or losses in FAR. Take two quarter acre lots, for example, one in the R-20 zone, the other in the R-12. A quarter acre lot (10,890 square feet) is undersized in the R-20 zone and applying the appropriate ratio produces a house limited to just 2,450 square feet. In the R-7 zone, on the other hand, that same lot is over-sized and FAR rewards it with permission to build a 3,920 sq.ft. house. If each of these odd-sized properties were located on a street of conforming lots the R-20 cottage would be flanked by houses of 4,500 feet and the R-7 castle would tower over homes just about half its size. The idea behind FAR (assuming it isn’t sheer jealousy at neighbors erecting houses bigger than our own) is that we can preserve the “streetscapes” of our neighborhoods by ensuring that the homes in a given neighborhood are roughly the same size. A 2,450 foot house does not achieve this in a neighborhood of homes twice as big and a neither does a 4,000 foot home in a neighborhood of 2,500 foot homes. By the way, it doesn’t take much additional land to turn an R-7 home into a quarter–acre whopper; the R-7’s 100X70 foot lot need only be 100X109 feet—not enough difference, in my opinion, to make such a large house blend in with its neighbors.

FAR isn’t stopping the over-building on some lots but does a fine job of whacking value from under-sized lots. Your 2,520 foot cottage may seem perfectly adequate for your needs and just as nice as that of your neighbor’s similarly-sized house, but if his is on a conforming lot and yours is on our hypothetical R-20 quarter-acre, the two houses aren’t even close in value. Buyers will reward him for the ability to add on and punish you for the lack of expansion room. To me, that seems unnecessary and unfair.

A Modest Proposal
David Ogilvy has just listed an eighty acre parcel in Conyer’s Farm. You probably won’t find its purchase price, $53,000,000, in your spare change box but if you like horses, and someone very, very rich likes you, you’re in luck. This place has everything the well heeled equestrian might need, including white-fence paddocks, a twenty-two stall stable, high, rolling meadows and, of course, houses; lots of houses. In addition to the renovated main house there are five cottages andcaretaker and staff apartments scattered about the grounds. If none of them suits you, you might consider bulldozing everything and building anew. The Conyer’s Farm architectural board might object but you won’t hear a peep from our P&Z enforcers; by my math, the maximum allowable FAR for the place is around 218,000 square feet, enough for almost any of our new generation.

June 11, 2004

Sell that House!
It was an active week with more than twenty houses going to contract (and many more notching accepted offers). Most notable, from a price perspective, was David Ogilvy’s listing at 34 Field Point Circle which languished unloved at $25,000,000 and almost immediately went to contract when the price was chopped to $19,000,000. Mr. Ogilvy is undisputedly the most successful Realtor in town so this daring, never-before-revealed technique might well be adopted by other sellers, even those whose houses prices don’t have as many zeros attached. Try this: your house isn’t selling at $2,500,000? Drop it to $1,900,000 and see what happens. Good things, I predict.
Tennis, Anyone?
Conventional wisdom says that adding a swimming pool or tennis court adds nothing to a home’s value because as many people don’t want such amenities as those who do. With absolutely no statistical evidence to back me up (I’m working on the laziest columnist of the year award) I’d still suggest that, at least so far as mid and back country properties are concerned, this conventional wisdom is half wrong: a beautifully landscaped pool adds value, while a tennis court adds nothing at best and detracts from the value at worst. I base that conclusion on the number of clients who specifically want a pool or at least a viable pool site (many) versus those who refuse to view properties with pools (none). A private pool provides a different experience from, say, a club pool, I think, while tennis is tennis except for the most fanatical players. My advice is that you not sacrifice a small yard to cram in a pool but if your property can accommodate a pool, and you want one, go ahead with the project with a certain confidence that you’ll be enhancing your home’s value. Of course, many former pool owners report that the happiest day of the year is the day they close their pool for the season but the same thing is said about boat owners when they sell their craft, and people still sail.
Unique
The discussion of tennis fanatics brings to mind another pitfall of house selling: making your home too personalized. It’s your house and your money but before spending too much on your passion, whether it’s a tennis court, an indoor hockey rink or a completely unique decorating scheme, you might want to consider the effect on the next buyer. If someone doesn’t share your taste or your particular enthusiasm for a life-sized chessboard in the backyard, say, they’ll compute the cost and nuisance of removing your creation and will either lower their offer or, worse, walk away. Something similar often occurs with custom contemporary houses: these are designed around the client’s own specific tastes; it can take awhile before a buyer who shares those tastes appears. Which accounts for all the bland, center hall Colonials put up by spec – builders. They want to sell what they build.
395 Stanwich Road
Sally O’Brien has listed this grand old house for $3,250,000 which I think is pretty good deal for a terrific property. The house was built in 1938 and still sits on two acres of lawn, with another two acres or so of conservation land serving as a buffer from Stanwich Road (the house is actually on the new road, Rock Maple). It needs updating, although I believe the furnace and other mechanicals are new, but the buyer who puts the work in will have a gracious, beautifully flowing home. The best room is the huge step-down living room with a high ceiling, a great fireplace and, if I remember correctly, French doors along both sides, bringing in lots of light and providing wonderful views of the lawns and gardens. Well worth seeing.
And For Less Than Half That
Barbara Stephens has just listed 21 Blind Brook Road, in the King Merritt area, for $1,300,000. This house needs a lot of work to bring it up to date but it has the land to justify that effort: over an acre and a half of very nice lawn and mature trees, sitting high over a pond. Highway noise is negligible and Blind Brook itself is a quiet dead end. I’ve been writing for some time now that the King Merritt development offers one of the few remaining land bargains in town. Each lot is at least an acre and, while many of the houses are dated, there is a lot of renovation going on. Prices have soared in the past two years and will, I predict, continue to appreciate.

June 4, 2004

Vermont on John Street
Martha Jeffrey (Round Hill Partners) has just listed 117 John Street for sale at $3,500,000. It’s an incredible property. The original farm house, completely restored, dates to 1833 (a living room and master bedroom were added in the 1930s) and the huge barn on the property with hand-hewn chestnut beams was built in 1750 ish (half of it, anyway — the other half, just about as old, was dissembled in Massachusetts, I think, and seamlessly grated onto the original). As you’d expect, the chain of title shows all the usual suspects as owners through the years, including Meads, Lockwoods and Closes. Nice as the house is, though, it is the land it sits on that makes this property so spectacular. Just about six acres of rolling meadows flow around and sweep past the house before running into the Audubon preserve. There are gardens everywhere, including an herb garden close enough to stroll out and harvest as your cooking needs demand. The house was deliberately priced at a level to discourage the spec-builder set but is that ever possible? We’ll see.
If I Had a Million Dollars
It would probably be because I’de just sold my house to a builder. The Sunday New York Times Real Estate section recently recently ran an article describing what a buyer could expect to get for a million dollars in Greenwich. The answer, surprisingly accurate for “the paper of record’, was: a building site. John Cooke of Merritt Associates is quoted as saying that, at that price, “the only thing the buyer brings to the closing is his wrecking ball.” Sad but true. Right now, homebuyers in the under a million range are competing with and losing to builders. Anything on more than a third of an acre draws builders like wasps to a rotting fish and the price zooms instantly out of reach. That leaves end users to scratch and squabble among themselves for the lesser properties. 21 Roosevelt Avenue, for instance, came on the market last week at $810,000. Because it was a fixer-upper on an undersized lot I assume it was safe from builders (FAR limits building size on this property, including a garage, to just 2,327 feet, at least a thousand feet less than what builders prefer) but it drew multiple bids and went to highest and best offer within days. All of this is wonderful for homeowners ready to sell out, but makes it tough for buyers. My advice for buyers in this range is to abandon hope for that “large” yard in Old Greenwich and focus on the undersized lots. You’ll still have competition but at least you won’t be competing with well financed builders looking to turn the property into a three million dollar resale. Another thought: much as dislike how our floor area regulation is applied, I’m rethinking my opposition to them, at least in so far as they act to keep some lots safe from builders and available to homebuyers. Is it fair to force certain homeowners to in effect subsidize homebuyers with a limited budget? No. But then, how often is life fair?
For Sale By Owner
A homeowner’s decision to sell his house himself and avoid paying a real estate commission makes a certain economic sense but, if you’re tempted to do so, try not to over-price the product. If you do, and your house doesn’t sell (most don’t), don’t compound your error by then turning the property over to a real estate agent and demanding a still higher price. We agents do wonderful things, sometimes, but one thing we can’t do is sell a house that’s seriously over-priced compared to similar homes. An example of just this irrationality occurred last week. A house came on the multi-list market and I sent its particulars to one of my clients. He recognized it as a property he’d seen months ago when the owner was attempting to sell it himself for a price several hundred thousand dollars less than what he is now asking through an agent. If someone didn’t like your house at a lower price, the fact that you are now going to pay a commission will have no effect on the buyer’s opinion of the proper price. He is not going to feel sorry for you and dig deeper into his pocket just to help you out. Price it right and sell it yourself, if you can, but don’t expose it to the marketplace and, after failing, try to sell to the same potential buyers at a new marked up price. Buyers are not that stupid.