Ah, waterfront!
A house on Gilliam Lane in Riverside was just listed and is described as belonging to a “waterfront association”. Now I happen to have grown up in the house next door and while it’s true that a brook runs under the house in question, there’s a pedestrian easement down a driveway on Club Road to Cos Cob Harbor (a holdover from farming days when cattle were taken down there to munch on salt hay) and there is a brackish pond at the end of the street where Dorothy Hamill first learned to skate, I never considered any of these features to comprise a waterfront association. But who knows? If Al Gore’s right and the water level rises another 100 feet (it’s a long way down to that pond) maybe this listing will be accurate. Give it a hundred years.

And speaking of centuries
A house on Farwell Lane, in the Back Country, has now been marked down to $6,950,000, a long way from its original asking price of $12,650,000, many brokers and many years ago. It’s not an owner’s reluctance to drop his price that astonishes me but rather the fierce determination to resist such a drop for such a long time. Keeping a house in showing condition is a miserable experience. If the marketplace says that you (or your agent) have made a serious miscalculation on price, why not acknowledge that quickly and get on with life? This house sat unsold through one of the strongest real estate markets in history and is now chasing a falling one – bad move.

Oops!
299 Round Hill Road sold for $3.795 million way back in 2001. It was returned to the market in September 2005 for $5,700,000 and sold last week for $4,060,000 which, after commissions and conveyance taxes, must have yielded a nifty long-term capital loss. Does this say something about the 2001 market or today’s? Don’t know, but it’s not particularly encouraging, either way.

Watch out!
I walk my own clients through each and every paragraph of the standard Greenwich listing agreement, explaining what each term means. This leads to a longer meeting but eliminates any misunderstandings down the road, so it’s time well spent. Two other firms here in town, who shall remain nameless for now based on their promise to discontinue the practice, took another tack for years: they pre-printed a contract that departed from the standard listing agreement and, without alerting their clients, signed them up for what is in effect an automatic six month extension of the contract after its designated termination date. That would seem to be a direct violation of Conn. Gen. Statute Section 20-320 (6) (go Google it, if you wish) but the two firms’ principals deny it. Whatever, they say they’ve discontinued the practice. If that’s untrue, I promise that I’ll name them here. In the meantime, I suggest that you have your lawyer review any contract you’re signing if you have doubts about its provisions and obligations. All contracts are negotiable – just make certain that you know what you’re negotiating.

Oh, nuts!
Have you noticed the bumper crop of acorns this year? From what I can glean from the Internet, the phenomenon extends at least as far as Minneapolis but certainly here in Riverside the things are falling from every oak tree in record amounts. I don’t know why but if you’re raising pigs, now’s the time to release them into the neighborhood and let them feed on free mast.

Good Lord
Did you catch the story of the would-be physician, a Harvard student (naturally) who sued for, and received, extra time to take her medical boards because she’s breast-feeding her baby? This woman is already getting an extra day to take the exam to accommodate her dyslexia and ADD conditions, now this. Would you want someone like her treating you in an emergency? “Ah, sorry, I read your charts backwards and I’m nursing – come back tomorrow and let’s see if I remember you”.

Book Sighting
Perrott Library is now stocking copies of my book, “Greenwich Mean Time”. Just Books, for some reason, no longer carries it but you can buy your own copy at Amazon, an institution I shifted my allegiance to after my local bookstore shifted theirs.