November 25, 2004

Lazy Kids
The morning after Halloween, still possessing exactly the same number of candy bars I’d started out with the night before, I drove through Riverside with a growing sense of despair for our next generation. Not a single smashed pumpkin on the streets, no egged cars or soaped windows and only a single, lonely strand of toilet paper lying on a leaf pile. Where are the children (okay, the vandals) of yesteryear? I’m grateful that my mailbox still stands, mind you, but are today’s kids so cowed by the police that they’re all acting like ladies and gentlemen? Too busy cramming for the SATs to cause mischief? Sated by video games or just lazy? Inquiring minds want to know. And no, this is not an open invitation for teenage punks to stop by my house and display some initiative.

In Town Condominium
Charles McConnel has dropped the price of his two bedroom condominium at 50 Church Street, #10 (the project is named “The Nantucket”, but don’t hold that against it) from $895,000 to $799,000. At its new price, I think the unit is an excellent deal. These condos were built around 1985 then sat empty for a long time as the recession caused by “TEFRA” hit. Do you remember TEFRA? It was a tax law that, among other bad ideas (still with us) eliminated tax deductions for “passive” income. I was in an advanced tax law class in the early 1980’s when TEFRA was first proposed and I recall my professor predicting that it would never be enacted because it would wipe out billions of dollars in real estate investments. He was wrong about the bill’s future and dead right about its effect.

But I digress. The 50 Church Street condos went into bankruptcy – twice, I think– and eventually were completed and sold. They’ve been a good investment since and I think they remain so. Church Street is a very convenient location and “The Nantucket” condos are well built, bright and comfortable. Number 10 is an end unit that encompasses 1,939 square feet, not including its attached garage. A nice buy, in my opinion.

House Inspections
Back when I practiced real estate law, purchase/sale contracts were usually contingent upon a satisfactory building inspection. This caused all sorts of trouble, because there probably isn’t a house in town that can score 100% on an inspection. So a deal that had been agreed and set in stone became subject to a whole new round of negotiations, lengthening the process and increasing the chances that the deal would fall apart. These days, after an offer is accepted, the buyer is often given a short period: five to ten days, say, in which to perform an inspection. Depending on what the inspection turns up, the parties either proceed to contract along the original terms or at a lower price. Either way, the fully executed contract that emerges is a more final document, which is good.

What should you look for in a building inspector? We agents, I suppose, have conflicting interests: we want the deal to go through (otherwise we have to go find you another house, and where’s the profit in that?) so we don’t want to recommend some alarmist Chicken Little, like the inspector who, finding absolutely nothing wrong in a house two years old, spent fifteen minutes warning the potential home buyer of the dangerous condition posed by a loose flagstone on the front walk. On the other hand, the buyer/agent relationship is, we hope a long term one; we don’t want to sell you a house that’s termite infested, has a radon reading that will make your children glow in the dark and a furnace that’s held together with spit and bubble gum. So with all that as a caveat, here are some inspectors who I think do a very thorough, professional job: Mike Powers, at Pro-Check (800-338-5050), and Tom Comella at Carnelli Engineers (in Stamford, 358-8741). Cost? $600 to $5,000, depending on the how much you want done. As in the rest of life, you get what you pay for. Inspectors from either of these companies will inspect the mechanical systems within reason, but also caution you that they are not HVAC experts, and so on. Another inspector here in town, Rick Hvolbeck 661-1218 will arrange for an army of experts to descend on a house at the same time and they’ll inspect it within an inch of its life. Your call. Another issue to consider, especially in today’s hot market, is whether your inspector will come out on a weekend on a moment’s notice because often there isn’t time to wait for the workweek. In my experience, all three of these inspectors I’ve mentioned will do that.

November 12, 2004

I’m away this week, so current real estate news is hard to come by. Here instead are some general observations and pet peeves.

Don’t Call Me, I’ll Call You
One of the biggest fears of people who call into real estate offices, it seems, is that whoever answers the phone there will never, ever leave him alone for the rest of his life. These fearful callers won’t give their names, their phone numbers or any means of contacting them but, what they don’t realize is that we don’t want to waste our time flogging an uninterested prospect. It is true I’ve seen a broker cling to a would-be buyer like a crazed Pekinese with loving on its mind but that’s rare. If you’re interested in a particular house we’ll be glad to tell you about it right there over the phone and even, if you’ll trust us with an email address, send you its particulars all without subjecting you to midnight phone calls and knocks on your door.
Civility
People in Greenwich tended to use manners in the old days. It made life more pleasant and enjoyable. We didn’t yell at salesclerks, demanding whether they knew who we were. We waited patiently for elderly drivers to fumble for their keys and back out of a parking space – now we honk at the old fool to encourage him to get on with it. All in all, I miss manners and wish they’d make a come back. Until they do, perhaps those of us involved in the great game of real estate could play by some ground rules. Showing agents, for instance, might call an owner if they are canceling an appointment rather than have them vacate the house for two hours for nothing. Those same agents might shut off lights they turn on, close doors they open and not let the cat out to be fed on by coyotes unless he absolutely deserves it (I’ve run into few that did, but have resisted the urge so far).

Home buyers, on the other hand, might try respecting an agent’s time. It’s rude to show up an hour late for an appointment and ruder still to simply not show up at all. Phone calls to an agent’s home at eleven at night are considered by some of us (me, anyway) to be bad form. When, in what was the worst part of my professional career I was forced by my bosses to practice matrimonial law, I had a nice means of retaliating for anyone calling me Sunday night to complain about child visitation gone bad: I’d fire off a bill for an “emergency consultation”, $500 minimum and that ended that. We can’t do anything so creative as real estate agents but that doesn’t mean you should take advantage of the situation.

House sellers might want to return to the days when one’s word was one’s bond. If you agree to sell your house for a certain price, if you gave your word on it, it’s not nice to renege or shop that price around town. Again, just because there’s no law against it doesn’t mean you have to act like a boor. Really, try it: you’ll feel much better about yourself.

None of which is to say that most agents or home buyers act badly (we’ll leave house sellers who go back on their word out of the rest of this discussion). I’ve been blessed with great clients and I think, although we’ve all had clients from Hell, most agents would agree that we meet some very nice people. Similarly, most of the agents I work with in town are polite and fun to deal with. But some of them, sometimes ….

Home Warranties
I attended the annual Greenwich Association of Realtors broker/lawyer meeting not long ago. I tend to flee as fast as I can when faced with spending time with lawyers but the trio at this meeting: Jeremy Kaye, Tom Ward and Lorraine Slavin are three of the top real estate attorneys in town and, as such, always have something useful to say. I found it interesting, and reassuring, to hear from all three of them that they had experienced no problems in the past five years with home builders failing to stand behind their product. New homes carry, by law, a one year warranty, but a decade or so ago my experience was that the builders often disappeared or went bankrupt just about the time the first complaints came in. Those times may reappear when the next down-turn arrives but for now, it seems that the builders are more concerned with establishing and maintaining their reputation than in avoiding responsibility. At the prices they charge, they ought to be.

November 4, 2004

What Gives with these Prices?
A number of us Realtors wandered around the open house circuit last week with the same sense of sticker shock usually experienced by Greenwich newcomers. Has the market really advanced so dramatically in the past few months or have homeowners gone out of their friggin’ gourds? Time will tell, but I am reasonably confidant that, come January, we’re going to see some substantial price reductions on a number of houses. In fact, we probably won’t have to wait that long: I see that a new construction project in Old Greenwich clipped $50,000 from its asking price the other day. It’s still no bargain, but I like the trend.

Two Well Priced Houses
Not everyone’s nuts. Brooke Widen (Shore & Country) brought 4 Lockwood Avenue in Old Greenwich on at $1,395,000. The house was rented out for the past years, and shows it, but a young family could move into this house tomorrow, live quite well in it as is and renovate or expand it as their schedule and financial situation dictates. They could – the more likely scenario, because this house sits on an over-sized lot, is that it will disappear under a builder’s bulldozer. As an aside, both Brooke and my brother Gideon have commented on a delightful (for Realtors) change in circumstances. In the bad old days, a homeowner would despair at selling his house and decide to rent it instead. That’s bad for commissions, naturally, so we did our best to discourage it. Now, the rental market is so bad that homeowners who can’t rent are deciding to sell rather than have their houses sit empty. Good on you!
Jane Basham (David Ogilvy & Associates) just listed 26 Lake Drive South, in Riverside, for $2,195,000. That’s a great location, across from the station pond. The four-bedroom house has been completely renovated, and the money you’ll save on station parking will pay your mortgage. Well, maybe not, but this is a very nice house.
Fix It!
Another house in the $2,000,000 range was also on the open house circuit last week. It was okay, I suppose, although I thought the upstairs a bit claustrophobic, but a rotting doorframe I saw in the garage put me off. Even if there’s nothing else wrong with a house, a sight like that raises the specter of deferred maintenance and you wonder what else has been neglected. Once the wondering starts, bad things happen. So my advice is, if you want to ask $2,000,000 for your house, reach for your wallet have someone repair the most glaring deficiencies. Or, heck, at least paint over the rot.
And Speaking of Prices
The Greenwich Library’s café used to have a very reasonably priced menu where you could get a bowl of soup and a sandwich for less than five dollars. Between the quiet solitude provided by Jewel Room and the cheap eats at the café, the library was an impoverished writer’s paradise (other than the fact that the Jewel Room’s unheated in winter and you need fingerless gloves to type in it). Not so now. Everything in the café seems to have been marked up substantially so that the old three-fifty sandwich now commands six bucks. I’d like to think that they’re using a better quality tuna fish and hand crafting those soups but, more likely, the operators have decided they want to buy a house in Greenwich. Darn.

Buyers Are Still Here
All the above grousing about astronomical prices notwithstanding, well-priced houses are still selling, often almost as soon as they’re listed. 59 Club Road, in Riverside, asked $3,150,000 and had a contract in ten days (this had to have been an intra-Riverside move, as the house commanded a premium, I think, because of its walk-to-the-Club location. I suspect that an out-of-towner wouldn’t pay for that advantage). 36 Dawn Harbor a nice, older house asking $2,395,000 went in sixteen days and the great old house I mentioned in a previous column at 251 Palmer Hill is also gone. Higher up in the food chain, 435 Round Hill Road, $4,495,000 went to contract in nineteen days. There is a moral here: if your house isn’t selling at one price, try a different price. A lower one, that is – I continue to be amused at angry homeowners who punish the market by raising their price when their house doesn’t sell. It’s not an effective sales tactic, but it does provide everyone with some good yucks.

Final Question
Why is it that, the smaller and blonder the woman, the larger her SUV? Just wondering.