Bah, Humbug!
Call me a Grinch, but I’m not at all moved into the Christmas spirit by the sight of these ten foot tall inflatable cartoon characters sprouting on lawns around town. Somehow, the sight of Homer Simpson, dressed as Santa and locked in a make-believe snowball just doesn’t scream out “Merry Christmas”. To me, anyway.
Christmas Pranks of Old
On the other hand, I was watching some friends place a Christmas tree on their dock the other day and was reminded of one of my father’s great pranks, played as a yearly ritual on our neighbor on Gilliam Lane, Joe Ryan. Each year, Joe would carefully dress a small tree entirely in blue lights and, just as carefully, as soon as Joe retired for the night, my father would sneak across the road and replace one of the bulbs with a single red one; gave it sort of a Rudolph look, I suppose. It drove Joe nuts. Because the statute of limitations may not quite have run yet I’ll spare you details of my own Christmas Eve tradition but it involved an inflatable Santa on my Scoutmaster Art Brown’s roof and, first, a pellet rifle and later, when the wise guy started stuffing it with newspaper, a quiver of arrows. Such fun.
Our Hartford Geniuses
As of October, drivers under 18 are forbidden to drive after midnight. Whatever the lame-brained thinking was behind this, its immediate effect has been to cripple Operation Safe Rides, the Red Cross-sponsored program that gave kids a ride home, no questions asked. The drivers are all high school kids and - surprise! - almost all of them are under 18 and thus unable to drive.
Pricing
Two houses that went to contract last week caught my eye: one, originally listed at $775,000 back in July of 2004, finally dropped its price to $699,000 and found a buyer. The other, listed at $959,000 in May of this year, dropped to $799,000 and enjoyed the same happy result. My point, as always, is that the wrong price repels buyers. If your house isn’t worth, say, $959,000, then buyers who can afford that much for a house will purchase one that is worth it and shun yours, while the $799,000 buyer won’t look at it, let alone make an offer, because he feels that he’s wasting his time. So you lose both ways, and your house sits. This applies to all houses in all price ranges and it always has. You just don’t believe it.
20 Sherwood Avenue
This was one of my favorite houses, set back from the road on wonderful grounds. It needed (a lot) of work but it seemed clear to me that it was well worth the effort. Yet it sat, unwanted, from September 10, 2001 – a bad day to list any house, obviously – until last week, when Jean Ruggiero found it a buyer. Someone got a great buy for under $4,000,000.
13 Suburban Avenue
This is a wonderful renovation by one of Sheila White’s (New England Land) clients. The house was a wreck when it sold this past March (for $755,000 in a bidding war that started at $715,000), but the new owner has added new windows, knocked down some walls to free up space, put in new wiring, plumbing, mechanicals, added a slate roof and copper gutters and so on. It’s vacant, so nag your agent and go see it, if only to discover for yourself what you can do to an old house other than knock it down. Or call me – I’m happy to take the time if it spares us one more dumpster. $1,495,000 which, in my opinion, is a great price. This house confirms my belief that the greatest values in town are fixer uppers. You could have bought this house, put in, say, $300,000 in improvements and enjoyed an instant appreciation of $440,000. Wall Street doesn’t return that kind of money. Yes, I could do the same thing but, unlike you, I don’t have any money.
Support Our Troops
Have you noticed that many of those yellow ribbon magnets on cars have faded to white? Unless there’s been a significant change of heart among those drivers and they’ve all become Howard Dean supporters, I think the wrong message is being sent. My suggestion for faded-ribbon displayers is, rather than further enrich Chinese magnet peddlers, check out the website, Soldiersangles.org, which offers a number of ways to help out soldiers, from adopting them as pen pals, to care packages etc. You don’t have to favor the doings in Iraq to care for the kids who are there.