October 29, 2004

The Market Marches on
I see that Joan Epand’s listing at 59 Riverside Avenue, priced at $1,299,000, went to contract after just nine days on the market; given the lag time between an accepted offer, house inspection and attorneys’ wrangling, that’s just about instantaneous. This was a nice house, built in 1925 and renovated just last year but I’m still surprised, a little. Prices are lurching forward so quickly these days that I’m having trouble adjusting my expectations. I suspect that other agents and home buyers are, too.

I was less surprised, on the other hand, that Shelly Tretter’s listing at 94 Dingletown Road, asking $2,795,000, went to contract in eight days. This 1970’s builder’s special was unprepossessing on the outside but everything inside had been really nicely renovated and the house, with five bedrooms, was in absolute move-in condition. In addition, the owners had carved a beautiful, park-like yard out of the surrounding woods, an act of creation other homeowners might emulate. Robert Frost might have been inspired stopping by woods on a snowy evening but most buyers dislike the darkness cast by too many trees crowding too closely to the house. Deer ticks, by the way, don’t like lawns, so there’s another good reason to fire up that chainsaw. I’m not suggesting that your dwelling resemble the little house on the prairie but some judicious, selective grooming will add value and enjoyment to your property.

What a Difference a Price Makes
When I first saw Joe Barbieri’s listing at 286 Taconic last June, it was priced at $4,995,000 and I wasn’t awfully impressed. A nice enough house, well built, with a separate, renovated two bedroom guest cottage and four acres, but I felt there were nicer houses in that price range. I went back the other day because one of my fellow agents in the car pool hadn’t seen it. It’s been reduced to $4,150,000. At its new price, this house is a bargain (I’d call it a steal if I could wrap my mind around the concept that it’s possible to steal anything while paying four million dollars). I think it beats everything out there in its price range, hands down.

Broker Open Houses
The Taconic saga illustrates why owners should put up with the violation of their personal privacy and permit their agent to hold multiple open houses. Agents often can’t get to every house on a given day, either because they’re holding their own showing or because there are just too many houses to see in a given day. And, because buyer/clients come and go, we tend to view houses with different eyes when we have no customer in that price range and when we’re actively working to find a suitable house. You only need one buyer for your house, so show it early and often, to as many agents as possible. As an example, I missed Wanda Scheifele’s first open house for 98 River Road and only saw it last week. It’s a great house but I wouldn’t have known that without going inside. Built just three years ago, it has an enormous amount of space: dining room living room, family room, four bedrooms and a huge finished basement, all for $950,000. I liked it a lot; the consensus in our car pool was that it was the star of that day’s open house tour.

Election Prediction
Every legitimate poll seems to be producing different results so here’s my own, based on an entirely unscientific survey of bumper stickers: I’ve been traveling New York and Connecticut these past few weekends to hike in various localities and have noticed a blizzard of those yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbons on cars otherwise silent as to their presidential preference. Having nothing better to do as I drove, I pondered the phenomenon of missing political stickers. I concluded (and I recommend to readers the Monty Python skit where Ann Elk reveals the theory that is her own) that these drivers are not happy with the mess Bush has stirred up in Iraq, yet haven’t been convinced by Kerry that he’s got any better ideas. On election day, I suspect the yellow ribbon voters will reluctantly decide to stick with the guy what brought’em to the ball rather than entrust the troops to the man from Massachusetts. Or not – the fun thing about predictions is that anyone can make them. We’ll know on Tuesday, or whenever the last post-electoral law suit is resolved.

October 22, 2004

Homer Nods
My friend Nancy Fountain informs me that natural selection, not malice, is responsible for all those squirrels heading straight for our cars. Turns out the old model squirrel had a gene that caused it to zig-zag when fleeing, which was good for avoiding natural predators but caused a fatal indecision when dodging cars. Now that automobiles outnumber hawks and foxes, the Micheline Man’s been busy clearing out the zig zag gene pool, leaving the straight runners on our streets. Hmmm. Sounds reasonable, but if I spot any of them wearing tiny backpacks, I’m not braking.
My brother Gideon tells me that the house across the street from our alcoholic screen repairman belonged to the President of J.P. Morgan, not the Dime Savings Bank. Gideon’s my younger brother, so what does he know? But it’s possible he’s right – a stopped clock and all that.
And, finally, another reader informs me that the Arts & Crafts houses on Chapel Street were supplied by Monkey Ward, not Sears. I choose to adopt Dan Rather’s slogan as my own: “we report, you correct.”

18 Pintail Lane
I wrote about this house in a recent column, saying that I liked it but wondering if it would fetch its asking price of $2,850,000. It did, immediately, and went to contract within nine days. So much for the old adage to be wary of buying the best house on the street – a good house, in this town, will sell almost regardless of location. I don’t mean to disparage Pintail, which is a very nice, quiet street, but all the other houses on that road are far more modest than this one. There was a time when it was possible to over-improve on certain streets; the value of your neighbor’s houses served as a constraint on yours. It is harder and harder to find such streets these days. For instance, Riverside Lane, until a few years ago a neighborhood of $350,000 homes, has seen at least two new houses sell for nearly $2,000,000, with more going up. Similar examples abound throughout town, particularly in Old Greenwich. As an aside, while Pintail’s selling price is by no means the record for a modular home, those readers who think that modulars bring down a neighborhood’s value should think again.

Great Old House
Nancy Healy (Shore & Country) has listed an 1899 beauty at 251 Palmer Hill Road for $2,275,000.00. It’s huge (so large, in fact, that the present owners are downsizing to a smaller version built by the same Mr. Sawyer) and absolutely perfect for a family with swarms of kids. Almost an acre and a half, with swimming pool and pool house (with fireplace), the house itself has nine or ten bedrooms, three fireplaces (a nifty double one in the hall), high, high ceilings and room enough to entertain all of Washington’s staff officers – the Continental Army camped at the top of Palmer Hill on its way to New York a century and more before this house was built. That particular adventure didn’t pan out but, as you may recall, things turned out okay in the end. This is not a house for gerontophobics – a few floors sag at alarming angles, some door frames tilt a bit crazily, and so on, but a house like this did its settling long ago and isn’t going anywhere. A buyer might want to modernize the huge kitchen and perhaps update the bathrooms - I’d leave things exactly the way they are.

The Market
It’s been a busy week. Twenty properties went to contract (Jan Milligan’s listing at 500 Round Hill Road, twenty acres and a fine old mansion led the way at $16,900,000) and seventy-nine new listings came on. Two one bedroom condos at the Common (1465 E. Putnam Avenue) went quickly in the $375,000 range, for those of you tracking prices at that location.

A Word to the Wise
Saw a house the other day, nearly seventeen thousand square feet, asking price of twenty million plus. A nice enough place, I suppose, for those who need that kind of room to swing a cat in but in all those square feet I didn’t see a single book. The moral here is, I think, that if you want to get rich you’d better pull your nose from that book you’re reading and get busy thinking about money. Just as soon as I finish my current novel, I’ll crack to it.

October 15, 2004

Le Grande Avenue

I wrote about these condominiums awhile back, predicting that they’d do well even though Le Grande is very much a street “in progress”. They have, selling almost as quickly as they are completed, at prices approaching $1.5 million. That’s impressive. Up on East Elm Street, just a block from Le Grande, the Rose Arbor condominiums, a bit more upscale with private elevators and the like, are also selling quickly, for $2.7 million and up. There is a lot of down-sizing going on, I suspect, by home owners who don’t want to give up their creature comforts.

Mediation

Back when I hunted wicked stock brokers for a living I mediated a number of cases to quick, efficient solutions. It’s not a difficult process: the parties sit down with a trained mediator and, after hearing both sides, the mediator separates the parties and conducts a sort of shuttle diplomacy going from room to room until he or she has hammered out an agreement. Other municipalities have set up mediation programs for everything from domestic matters to environmental disputes. It occurs to me that Greenwich might be well served trying to resolve some of its zoning squabbles in the same way. Mediation is non-binding; if no settlement is reached, nothing said in the mediation can be introduced as evidence in a later court proceeding. But, in my experience, mediation never failed. The parties get a result they can live with which is not often the case with a judge-imposed “solution. Mediation is far cheaper, too, so perhaps someone on one of the RTM’s land use committees might want to look into setting up a trial program.

Real Estate Signs

New comers to town may wonder why Greenwich, unlike most towns, has no “for sale” signs blighting the landscape. It’s a good story. Signs were never used in town until the late Eighties when the chain store Realtors swept into town and began sticking them everywhere. Betty Moger, of Cleveland Duble & Arnold, led the charge against them but the signs most colorful foe was the late Rene Anselmo. Rene (he was responsible for the thousands of daffodils you see each spring along North Street, the new playground at Hamilton Avenue School and literally dozens of town improvements, all erected at his expense and very much without the town government’s permission) thought the signs an abomination. His answer was to cruise the streets in his Bentley convertible, collecting the signs in his back seat, posts and all, then returning home to call the offending Realtors to tell them where they might retrieve them. For this he was arrested, again and again, until finally our local Assistant State’s Attorney, Steve Weiss, announced that he had better thiings to do than prosecute a multi-millionaire with good taste. The signs disappeared along with some of the chains that had sponsored them. When, for instance, was the last time you saw a mustard-blazered Century 21 Realtor darkening our streets? Best Rene story, perhaps apocryphal, was that he was confronted at his house by a Greenwich patrolman who’d been sent to arrest him. “I was just sitting down to lunch,” Rene is supposed to have said. “Why don’t you join me and we’ll go down together.” So they did.

Fish Tales

It’s October, so millions of tiny bunkers are swarming into our tidal creeks and being pursued by bluefish and striped bass . If there’s anything more fun than fighting a bluefish on light tackle I haven’t found it yet and am not inclined to look. I’ve been using a two inch lure these past few years that more or less resembles the live bunkers, but your best bet is to visit Mike Noyes at the Sportsman’s Den at 33 River Road (just before the I-95 underpass) in Cos Cob. 869-3234. Mike has been separating fishermen from their money for as long as I can remember but, in exchange, he and his crew dispense the very best, most accurate information on where the fish are and how to catch them. They also run great courses on, say, saltwater flyfishing, and have charter services available if you’d like to go that route. Grab a pole, check for high tide and hit the docks. Don’t own a house on a tidal creek? Call me – we’ll talk (Sean, you can borrow my canoe). Alternatively, you’ll find public access at Tomac Landing in Old Greenwich. The end of Steamboat Road will also work but tends to be crowded; Tomac’s yours alone, usually. And did you know that you can get a (free, I think) fishing pass from Parks & Rec that will permit you to stay in Tod’s after sunset? Good spot for flyfishing is just to the east of the guard booth, around the rocks and eel grass. But hurry; the next cold front will push the fish south, and you’ll be left waiting for ice fishing season to begin.

October 8, 2004

Market Conditions
Buyers have been active this week. Twenty-three houses went to contract, representing all price ranges. 15 Field Point Circle asking $15,000,000 (no saying what the owners accepted, but surely it wasn’t chump change), Anne Simpson’s listing at 152 Indian Head, $11,500,000, 45 North Stanwich, $7,995,000, and so on, all the way to 4 Janet Court in Riverside, asking $784,500 (went to contract instantly). Margriet Finnegan’s (Round Hill Partners) listing on Stony Wylde, a contemporary that will almost certainly be torn down and replaced, came on the market on a Thursday for $2.1 million and went to sealed bids Monday. Same story for Pat Giovinco’s (Country Living Associates) listing at 5 Nedley Lane in Glenville: asked $659,000, went to sealed bids within days. Builders and end users, in other words, are all still out there and buying what is available, if the price is right. To repeat: if the price is reasonable, houses are selling briskly, often drawing multiple bids. If your house is not selling, then you should be able to figure out the problem.

18 Pintail Lane
This house just came on asking $2,850,000. I don’t know whether that’s the right price or not, honestly, but it will certainly set a price record for Pintail no matter what it sells for. And it is a very nice house; good looking, well built, with a terrific waterfall and koi pond in the backyard. It’s large: 6,568 feet in fact and was slipped in (literally, as it’s a modular) during the FAR hiatus. Its neighbors may disagree but I think it fits nicely on its lot, super-sized or not. Drive by and decide for yourself.[update - it sold, for full asking price, in 8 days. Ed.]

Changing Times
My father once told me that one of the reasons he liked living in Riverside was that the Chairman of the Dime Savings Bank lived across the street from the local alcoholic who repaired screens and storm windows in his rare moments of near-sobriety. And this was true. Growing up in the 1960s, the fathers (mothers rarely worked outside the house then) of my friends had jobs that ranged from Chairman of the American Tobacco Company to senior partnerships at Wall Street law firms to collecting parking meter nickels for the town and inspecting septic systems. And, as kids, we all lived within a few streets of each other. I was reminded of all that recently because the alcoholic’s house is back on the market, basically exactly as it was in the 1960s, for an asking price of $1.45 million. Try affording that on screen door repair earnings. The parking meter collector’s house, if it were offered for sale today, would probably fetch at least $1.2 million. In the Back Country, the small cottages on Richmond Hill Drive are almost all gone, replaced by mansions. And so on. All this is not necessarily bad, I suppose, and the owners of those small houses, if they’re still alive, are probably happily laughing at those of us stuck here in Greenwich while they enjoy their Florida retirement (well, they were until the four hurricanes showed up). But I miss the variety that the town used to have, the artists and the kooks and just odd folks who were scattered about in all areas of town. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but when I was younger, I considered New Canaan to be a pure, boring, homogenized town, while Greenwich had character (and characters). Now that the average price for a home here is approaching $2,000,000, I fear that we’re looking more like New Canaan every day. It’s nice that our town attracts such highly successful, driven people, I just wish there were still room for screen door repairmen.

We Get Results
Just kidding – the town P&Z goes its own way without any need for input from me. But a week after this column complained, for the second time, that Cos Cob lacked a Starbucks, I was delighted to see that it’s finally getting one. The town has settled the litigation brought against it by the would-be renters to Starbucks (have I mentioned that zoning by law suit is an expensive way to govern property use?) and we’ll soon be able to sip grossly expensive coffee drinks while sitting at outside tables overlooking Cos Cob’s Mill Pond. I think that’s a huge boon for Cos Cob; now, if someone would provide a decent cup of coffee in Glenville, I’ll be safe to travel throughout Greenwich without worrying about finding my next caffeine fix.

October 1, 2004

Ah, Technology

Round Hill Partners just switched to a new web server in order to create a more perfect web site. That was the hope, anyway. The only thing accomplished so far is to block access to our old page which held (still holds, for all I know) our email. So if you sent a message to me at roundhillpartners.com in the past two weeks and received no reply, please try again at my temporary address, crfount@hotmail.com.

New Listings
Diane Dutcher has listed a new house at 67 Tomac Avenue that’s really very nice. Great quality throughout, with five bedrooms and a detached two car garage. The lot is smallish, but what Old Greenwich lot isn’t? $2,725,000.00. Compared to many of the other new houses currently on the market, I think this one is better made and better priced. Interesting, though, that new construction in most parts of town now commands such high prices. As the entire housing stock is slowly replaced, we’ll also get a new population to afford it. We will, that is, if Wall Street can continue to generate enough twenty-something multi-millionaires. Stay tuned.
Max Weisen’s listing at 97 East Elm is older (1927) but was renovated last year and is in excellent condition. The condominiums across the street are selling for prices well above $2,000,000, so this free standing house for $1,769,000 seems like a good deal, to me. Nice house.

For the same price, you could have bought Mie Glenn’s listing at 140 Park Avenue in Greenwich, but you’re probably too late. Although the house itself was in very good condition, an agent I know tried to show it over the weekend and reports that there were at least ten builders circling. It will be heading for the landfill soon, I suspect. Park Avenue is one of my favorite close-to-town streets in Greenwich, and it will certainly support a multi-million dollar house, but if a building lot on Park is worth close to two million dollars, Max’s East Elm street offering looks positively cheap.

Streetscape Ambience
I hold nothing but admiration for those citizens who pound their knees into scar tissue on our hard asphalt streets in an attempt to work off a few pounds but may I suggest, for those of you who are grossly over-weight, that cramming your adipose tissue into form-fitting spandex creates a sight that is perhaps best left unseen? I am not proposing the donning of chadors (although perhaps in cooler weather …) but really -you look like jiggling collections of Jimmy Dean sausages. None of my business, I know.

Suicide Squirrels
It seems as though more of these rodents than ever are darting across the road and under our car wheels. It could be part of some al Qaeda training mission, I suppose, but it’s more likely that the phenomenon can be attributed to the lack of free roaming dogs; everyone seems to keep poor Fido behind an invisible fence or on the end of a leash, leaving the squirrels free to be fruitful and multiply. Our hawk population provides an exciting remedy but there aren’t enough of them. We need more coyotes.

Car Talk
Of course, if those squirrels are aligned with Bin Laden, you’ll want your car ready to gun them down. One of the best mechanics I’ve found in this area is Tony Corrente, Corrente Auto Service, Inc. in Stamford. (327-1403). Tony won’t serve you $200 a pound green tea while you wait, and the waiting room itself is a bit spartan, but he can fix anything, at a much better price than some of the dealerships. He’s also a very nice man.

They’re Stealing the Election!
The Registrar of Voters recently sent postcards out to town residents notifying them of where to vote. A nice gesture but, it turns out, the cards give the wrong poll locations. New cards are in the works but at least one ardent Democrat I know is convinced that it’s all part of some nefarious plot by the Republicans. Considering that there are (far) more Republicans in town than there are Democrats, it seems unlikely that the former would profit by misdirecting their voters. A more likely suspect, I think, is Dan Rather and CBS - they got burned on documents that were “fake but accurate” so they’re trying “authentic but inaccurate”. I don’t think this will help their credibility, but then, I’m not part of the main stream media.

Christopher Fountain is a non-practicing lawyer and glad of it. Although he works with Round Hill Partners, Ltd. the opinions expressed in this column are very much his own and rarely shared by the Round Hill principals or, for that matter, this newspaper. Comments, questions and complaints may be sent to crfount@hotmail.com. Depending on their tenor, they will (eventually) receive a response.