Foxtons folds
This discount brokerage, imported from England, has collapsed, firing its agents and filing for bankruptcy. It hired real estate agents, giving them a car and health benefits (incentive enough for me to be interested, certainly) but, according to comments on the web, Foxtons used them as telemarketers, calling “for sale by owner” sellers and trying to sign them up. No particular services were offered: the home seller paid extra to list the property on the MLS, extra if a commission was to be offered to a selling agent (and you can be sure we selling agents weren’t about to show a house that paid us nothing), advertising, etc. In fact, I never understood why anyone would pay these folks 3% for doing nothing when they could get an incredible range of services from real agents for just 2% more. We advertise the house, we show the house, pay selling agents half of that 5%, negotiate deals and hold your hand at all hours of the day, seven days a week. Seems cheap to me.

What’s with G Mail?
You know that it’s a slow real estate market when I have the space to complain about my email service, but my Gmail account, Google’s free email service, has apparently been hijacked by spammers. I now receive hundreds of messages a day in my junk mail account alerting me that my messages to any number of unknown persons have been rejected. Since I never sent a single one of those messages, it makes sense that some entity has captured my computer and is using it to send spam. But just try to find a human being at Google to report this security breach to. Gmail’s free: you get what you pay for.

And while we’re complaining
A long while back I noted that Greenwich’s radio station, WGCH, had abandoned all local content and had begun broadcasting canned business news originating out of Chicago, of all places. Now they are broadcasting Red Sox games which, as one of two Sox fans in this town, I appreciate, but could there be a more telling sign that this station has completely lost touch with its home base?

Real estate bargains
Yes, this column is really dedicated to real estate, and here are two listing descriptions to prove it. Shelly Tretter’s listing at 50 Richmond Hill Road has been reduced to $5,295,000 – I liked this place at its original price of $6,150,000 and it’s an absolute bargain now. Beautiful house with great architectural details, a great yard, plus pool, guest house etc. There’s nothing not to like about this house and I think it dwarfs its competition, which includes houses asking millions of dollars more.
But if the $5,000,000 market is a bit plebian for your taste, may I suggest Jenny Prottas’ ”Reservoir Farms” on Taconic Road? She’s co-listed it with Steve Archino for something like $19,000,000 and while I won’t vouch for that exact price, this is a wonderful property to use as a benchmark for all the $10,000,000, over-priced trash you’ve been looking at. Eleven acres, stables, riding rink, top-of-the-line house and so forth. If you are able and willing to spend an enormous amount of money for a house, this is the one to compare others against. Go see it.

Disconnect
The paragraph above notwithstanding, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a greater disparity between sellers’ expectations and marketplace values. It’s truly crazy out there: $6,000,000 houses asking $11,000,000, $950,000 values seeking $1,500,000 and so on, through all price ranges. It’s not that the market has collapsed but rather, sellers have wildly inflated ideas about their home’s value. Try going to your stockbroker and telling him, “ I need to get $95 a share for my GE stock – my kid’s starting college this year.” He’ll tell you that GE’s trading in the low $40s and that, regardless of your need, that’s the most you can get for it. And he’s right - why do you think that real estate is any different?

Taxes
Hillary Clinton is proposing at least one new give away a day and her ideas of how to finance her (your) largess ought to alarm you. No tax deduction on second homes (1/2 of Greenwich seems to be owned by New Yorkers using us as a weekend get-away) and a 4% surcharge on the “rich”: people earning $100,000 or more. Hang onto your wallet.

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.

Another one bites the dust
Rumors that the Antares project at Putnam Green was in deep trouble have swirled through the real estate community for months but publishing unsubstantiated rumors (as opposed to opinions that are just plain wrong) can cause nasty libel suits, so you didn't read them here. But now that the news has broken, I'll give my opinion that failure couldn't have happened to a more deserving entity. From the start, Antares has exhibited a brazen arrogance unusual even for Greenwich. As you may recall, Putnam Green and its sister development, Weaver Hill, were modestly- priced rental units on the western side of town. Antares bought them for $223,000,000 two years ago (at which time I did mention in this column that, when someone's eager to sell, you might want to ask why) and almost immediately set about evicting the tenants, many of whom had lived there for years. They set impossibly high "buy-in" prices and imposed a take-it-or-leave-it deadline that many tenants, if their letters to me were representative, found oppressive. So having antagonized the very people most likely to be interested in living in that side of town, Antares set about trying to peddle the units to strangers. Not many bit and now the financing's been yanked, workers pulled off the site and all sales cancelled. This is the same group that "accidentally" destroyed wetlands off of Langhorne Lane while building a cluster of high end houses and I suspect that neighbors of that bit of vandalism will lose no more sleep over the fate of this company than will the displaced tenants of Putnam Green. In my opinion, of course.

Is there any encouraging real estate news?
Not on the national level, that's for sure, but I wouldn't panic here in Greenwich, yet. Some houses are selling: sixteen went to contract in the past two weeks, at (asking) prices ranging from $8.5 million (waterfront land) to $760,000, so some buyers are out there. On the other hand, 106 new listings came on, which is normal for this time of year but we'd obviously like to see a better balance between those figures. I've laughed at buyers over the years who insist that they'll wait until prices come down and end up paying more, or never buying in town. For the first time in a long time, I'm not laughing; they just might be right.

But, just to prove I'm often wrong
A new listing on Lake Avenue came on last week priced at $6,200,000. Nice location set far back from the road and wonderful grounds but the house was built in 1965 and, to my eye, looked dated. I figured it would sit six months on the market before its price more accurately reflected my opinion – ha! Gone in just a few days via Ellen Mosher. It's hard, sometimes, to screen out personal opinions from objective judgment. In this instance, I knew the taste of my clients looking in that price range, knew they wouldn't like it and, since I didn't have any other buyers for the property, mentally discounted its price accordingly. That's a dumb way to price real estate and I try hard not to do it; sometimes I fail.

Making lemonade
The National Association of Realtors is running an ad proclaiming that it's a buyers' market because "there's more choice than ever". Uh, yeah – that might also be what we refer to as a glut of inventory, but whatever.

Making lemons
A bunch of us agents traveled to the far reaches of Greenwich's northern border to see a new house that was priced at, for that area, a pretty startling sum. No a bad house but nothing special, no "wow" factor so, considering that and its location, several of us independently concluded that the ultimate selling price would be half of what the builder is asking. We could be wrong – see above - but that's a pretty large discrepancy between what we see as reality and what the builder is dreaming. At least if we're wrong it will only cost us a foregone sale. If the builder has mis-guessed his project's drawing power, he'd better hope he has a more understanding lender than Antares did.

I’ve said this before
But perhaps you’d like to hear it again, this time from a real estate professor at Columbia, quoted in the New York Times. Professor Christopher Meyer, who studied loss aversion by (would-be) sellers in Boston when the market dropped 30% noticed that sellers refused to drop their price to match market conditions. They didn’t do well, naturally, and the professor says that he now counsels his own family, “If you want to sell your house then you list it at the market price and you sell it,” he said. “If you don’t really want to sell then don’t put it on the market. But don’t say you want to sell and then set the price so high that you spend the year cleaning up every morning, having people walk through your living room and look in your medicine cabinets and reject you. That’s just painful — and expensive.”
I’ve been saying this for the five years I’ve written this column but I don’t teach at Columbia – if you won’t listen to me, perhaps you’ll listen to Professor Meyer.

On the other hand
There’s still an active market here for houses priced right. B.K. Bates listed 144 Riverside Avenue, a wonderful 1860 Federalist on 1.4 acres, for $3.7 million last Thursday and it was gone in a bidding war by Friday. This house, one of the few landmarks we have in Riverside needed, to put it gently, a good bit of work - I’d estimate $1 million, minimum – to bring it into the 21st Century, but there’s nothing like it around here, and certainly no comparable land. I think that we’ve reached a new stage in land sales here in eastern Greenwich, where sellers can now get a premium for over-sized lots. If you own an acre or more in Old Greenwich or Riverside, you may want to eschew sub-dividing it and instead offer it as a whole. Or hold onto it, and pay those college tuitions down the road. Or, better yet, call me!

Hurricane deductibles
Interesting article, again in the New York Times, concerning the increasing use of “standard” deductibles of 2% or 3% in home insurance policies for storm damage. As the article points out, many homeowners gloss over this amount, thinking it doesn’t amount to much, but a $1,000,000 loss could mean a $30,000 out-of-pocket expense. Not the end of the world for you hedge fund folks, assuming your bonus comes through this year, but for older people on fixed income living near the water, that’s a chunk of change. As always, it pays to review your policy and see what’s in there. If you can’t understand the language, that’s probably a bad sign.

Stone and clapboard multimillion houses
About three years ago I suggested that the shingle-style house was probably reaching a saturation point. No one who counts listened, and we’re still seeing new ones, some of which are selling. With that record of prognistication failure, here’s my latest prediction: there are too many houses being built, all alike, with stone facing in the middle and clapboard wings to either side. They look identical and, other than price, there’s very little to differentiate one from the other. And, if price is the only factor, won’t the cheaper ones sell faster than their more expensive sisters?

Even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn
(Thanks to my brother Gideon for that bit of wisdom). I rarely read New York Times editorials (and never agree with those I do) so I was astonished to read their editors denouncing the entire corn-to-ethanol project as the national boondoggle that it is. It consumes more energy than it produces, drives up the cost of food, encourages the destruction of farmland and, in short, profits no one but the farmers who grow corn and vote in the Iowa primary. If ethanol is to make economic sense, it will be because we import sugarcane ethanol from Brazil but of course, we’re presently taxing it 50 cents per gallon and adding a 50 cent subsidy to American-grown corn ethanol – duh. It’s discouraging, putting it mildly, that a program so flawed that even the New York Times editorial board can see its disadvantages is praised by every politician, of both national parties, running for president. Just wait till they fix medical care and Social Security.

Where are the offers?

Most sellers with overpriced houses don’t understand why no one extends an offer, at any price on their property. Having spent many weeks recently with a very nice couple who are ready to buy but haven’t extended an offer on anything we’ve seen, here’s my conclusion: unlike, say, corporate take-over targets, houses are personal. The same hard-bitten business man or business woman who’d think nothing of extracting the lowest possible price from another corporation’s shareholders seems to balk at tossing a lowball, but realistic price at the owners of a house. “Call me if they lower the price” is the almost universal response to these situations, even though I argue that the time to present an offer is before the price is lowered and more buyers flood in. I think buyers don’t want to insult people personally, so they won’t go there. Too bad, because we’ve been looking at a huge range of houses recently, ranging in price from $6,000,000 to over $12,000,000, and so many of them are asking literally millions of dollars more than they’re worth. My folks are ready to buy, but they aren’t going to over-pay. So your house sits.

More on overpricing

A builder client of mine just walked from a deal when the seller (actually, his agent) of a building lot told us that they already had an offer roughly $500,000 more we offered, far than it could possibly be worth. I told the agent to sign the deal up before the alleged buyer was recaptured and returned to the loony bin but we, at least weren’t interested. Was there such a buyer? I suspect not, which makes this an even dumber tactic than it seems – nothing worse than making such a claim and then having to return, hat in hand, begging for the original offer but if there was, God bless both buyer and seller – they’ll need such blessings. Builders have to make money on a deal. While it’s true that both builder and land seller have conflicting interests as both want to maximize their profit, a successful transaction has to make sense for both parties or it’s never going to work. At the height of the market in 2005 sellers got away with some astonishing coups but the buyers ended up in a very poor position. A house off lower Lake Avenue, for instance, sold for an insane price in that year and the developer (doing his very first project, I’ll bet) dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into its renovation. It sold last week for, after commissions, $25,000 less than he paid for it, not even including the money spent on improvements, carrying costs, conveyance taxes and so forth. In short, the buyer lost his shirt. There may still be innocent naifs out there, convinced that they can’t lose money on Greenwich real estate but the professionals I know have stayed in business for decades by refusing to overpay for projects. If you want to sell to them, adjust your expectations.

Merit pay for teachers?

The head of our local teachers’ union claims that it would be degrading for her members to have to compete for wages, to which I say, welcome to the real world, honey. I know of no other industry where three years of indifferent performance guarantees you life-long employment with pay raises each year based solely on your waking up to breath each day. I remember the (very few) excellent teachers I encountered in my passage through the Greenwich school system and they were of all ages; the very worst were usually old frauds, going through the motions, who should have been fired years before they were inflicted on me and my classmates.
And now, “magnet schools”

The committee to examine diversity in our grammar schools was headed by our Superintendent of Schools and supposedly included a number of parents for their feedback. From what I hear from those parents, they were never intended to have a voice and that the Superintendent simply held meetings without inviting their presence and then announcing a ‘consensus” that magnet schools were the solution, a pre-ordained conclusion. I still don’t get it: if better schools are the answer, why not improve all of them, rather than a select few? One way to do so might be to improve the quality of our teachers by, for instance, eliminating tenure and instituting merit pay.

Market Activity
August is usually a pretty slow month in the Greenwich real estate market and this year was no exception. Still, I was impressed how much activity there was. Forty-three houses went to contract during the month (compared to 41 in August ’06) ten of which at prices of $5,000,000 and up ($12,750,000 was tops, on Cedar Cliff Road in Riverside). That’s a substantial volume and you might find it reassuring to know that, even in this “national housing crisis”, there are still buyers out there and they’re doing more than just kicking tires.

“Green” houses
A number of my builder friends are either building or considering building “green” houses: super efficient, energy saving structures. They cost a bit more to build but produce a draft-free, comfortable house and offer much lower heating and cooling bills. The general sense the builders and I have is that consumers aren’t willing to pay more upfront even with the promise of paying less during ownership; my friend and builder, Peter Thalheim, says he builds them out of personal pride and a commitment to the environment, which is pretty cool. But 26 Bramble Lane, a house I wrote about before because of its innovative, super-insulated construction, sold in August for $3,725,000 and, without meaning to offend the buyer by suggesting that they over-paid for the house – they didn’t – I think that price may reflect a slight premium for its energy saving features. I hope so, because that will encourage builders to do more of these projects and buyers will end up with better houses. I am one of those “global warming deniers” and consider Al Gore and his ilk to be leading a new religious campaign based on fear and ignorance, rather than science, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t conserve resources – my father singly-handedly kept the 15 watt light bulb industry alive and raised his kids to abhor waste. I learned well, and I’d like to see more new construction pay attention to conservation.

White Houses
As one of the last subscribers to the printed book version of our MLS, I like to get my money’s worth by prowling through the whole thing, cover to cover. Did that recently, as was struck by the number of listing photographs that showed bucolic snowy scenes, reminiscent of Pieter Bruegel. Nothing screams “over-priced loser going nowhere” than a photograph, in September, of a bedraggled yard with a melting Frosty the Snowman in front. Any competent agent has a digital camera or can borrow one. If your listing is still depicting the snows of yesteryear, demand a new photo. Or, of course, you can wait a few months and you’ll be seasonally correct once again – but maybe you’d like to sell your house before February.

Chubby Wubbies
I’m delighted to have moved to Raveis’s Old Greenwich office because I’m now back in my “hood’ and get to encounter friends and neighbors regularly. The location also affords an opportunity to survey the street scene, and I’ve seen some amusing sights, including a porcine 4 year old, clutching both a bagel (with cream cheese, presumably) and a soda while being wheeled through town in a stroller. Far be it from me to offer parenting advice but this kid looked (a) old enough to walk on his own and (b) desperately in need of a little exercise. Just one man’s opinion, of course.

Don’t stage that house!
Saw some new construction the other day. The builder, seeking to recoup the expense of renting furniture for another, larger project, crammed everything into this much smaller house, thereby ensuring that prospective buyers will see exactly how tiny the living room, dining room and kitchen are. Bad move.

Speaking of melting snowmen
The new ethic, at least as preached by Leonard Decapprio and his new movie, “The 11th Hour”, is that we should all use less wood and curtail logging. Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace and presumably no enemy of the earth, points out that trees suck up carbon better than anything else on earth and that carbon remains stored in the wood, even as it’s converted to furniture and houses. Young trees absorb carbon at far greater rates than mature ones so we should be doing more logging, not less. And shooting more methane-belching moose, of course.

Mortgage Meltdown

The so-called sub-prime mortgage market has been taking a beating and dragging down a number of very good companies. But I'm not convinced that recent "solutions" proposed by politicians will do anything to alleviate the situation; in fact, I believe they will only make things worse. One suggestion floating around is to ban variable interest rate loans. That's not going to help anyone who already has one and it ignores recent history, when rates went down, not up. Variable rates were a good deal for a long time, now they aren't. Such is life. The late Harvard libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, author of "Anarchy, State and Utopia" liked to commend "acts of capitalism between consenting adults" and that's what variable rate loans were; they allowed folks to buy houses who otherwise couldn't. Same with the "no-documentation" loans. I recall when, 20 years back, we wanted to add onto our house to accommodate the arrival of our third child. While my income as a lowly lawyer didn't meet the precise standards of a conventional 30-year mortgage, I was confident I could handle the payments and Green Point Mortgage, looking at a requested $100,000 loan on a $1,000,000 property, took the chance. We got the house rebuilt, Green Pont got repaid and everyone was happy. But last week, Green Point was shut down, not because its loans were going bad but because the panic infecting Wall Street spread to it.

I suppose that my point here is that flexible terms and rates – even interest-only loans - weren't and aren't all bad. I'm reading now about poor homeowners who swear that they didn't know their rates could go up and about mortgage brokers playing fast and loose with income statements but all in all, I think it would be a mistake to switch the whole system back to the standard 20% down, 30 year mortgage model. It will only deprive a lot of people the opportunity to own their own house. And if some of those people dive in over their head and lose what they tried to buy? Well, that's a shame, but depriving the 80-90% of their peers who can handle it the chance to buy a house seems like overkill.

Mortgage Contingencies
They're back! Not so long ago, sellers were refusing to allow mortgage contingencies into their contracts and buyers were forced to go without this protection. The shoe's on the other foot now and buyers who need a mortgage (not every Greenwich resident does, naturally) can usually insist that their deposit be returned if they can't obtain financing. But be warned: the days of overnight mortgage approvals are over, at least for now, because there are fewer lenders making loans and those that are are insisting on far more documentation than before. Two weeks is probably the minimum contingency date you should ask for and if you can get the seller to agree to three weeks, all the better. Sellers, cheer up: these things all go in cycles, and you'll be back in the catbird seat, one of these days.

Yet another apples to apples comparison
16 Stanwich Lane listed at $2,250,000 back in November of 2005 sold that month in a bidding war for $2,466,000. It was returned to the market this year and my brother Gideon (Cleveland, Duble & Arnold), representing the new buyer, got it for $2,350,000 last week. On average, Greenwich prices are holding firm but, as I pointed out last week, we're seeing more of these losing propositions. As always, the advice is to hope that you don't buy in a heated market and have to sell in a soft one. No one's ever done badly in Greenwich real estate in the long run but if you can't hold out for the long run, hang onto your wallet and cry.

Nice while it lasted
Schools are back open, traffic's back. But that means the buyers are, too, I hope. Next year, I think I'll spend August in Montana.

Dog Days
Contrary to rumor, Leona Helmsly's last will and testament did not demand that her little dog, Trouble, be sent off to be trained by Michael Vick. Amazing the mean things people say about the dead

The sky is lowering, not falling

There are a lot of buyers out there who think that, if they only wait long enough, Greenwich housing prices will fall to affordable levels. So far as I know, these people have been waiting since, oh, maybe 1935. But it is true that waiting for a particular house to drop can be an effective strategy. One Ashton Drive came on the market 1/23/04 for $7.5 million and sold last week 3 ½ years later, for $5.125. One Indian Spring, the great old Rockefeller estate, was listed for $26,000,000 on 5/17/05 and also sold last week (via Barbara Zaccagnini) for $13,410,000. Now that's a price reduction. I don't mean to embarrass the sellers of these two houses but write this to make the point that, if you and your agent both think a house is over-priced, other agents may, too, and the house will linger, offering you plenty of time to work down the price. But beware: I've known buyers who rejected their agent's opinion that a house was priced fairly and then lost the house they wanted to someone else. So listen to your agent; if you don't trust her advice, get another agent – there are tons of us out here.

"Yacht" Club leases
Certain RTM members have complained that Greenwich leases waterfront property to four non-profit clubs, including the Old Greenwich Yacht Club and the Mianus River Boat Club. I think they're wrong to complain. As I understand the situation, these are not private clubs: any town resident can join. Dues are paid, the buildings are maintained at no cost to the town and any "earnings" (a term mistakenly employed by Budget Overview Committee head Don Conway) are plowed back into operations. No one's getting rich here, and the town itself collects all the revenue from slip and boat rack rentals. Even Mr. Conway admits the value of these clubs saying, "it'd great for kids who folks can't afford to join private clubs" but he misses the point: there are a lot of residents who, while passionate about boating, wouldn't join a private club at gunpoint. These four organizations provide a terrific, low-cost opportunity for Greenwich boaters to enjoy the water without enduring ten year waiting lists and the annual Commodore's Ball. Leave 'em alone, says I. As an aside, if the RTM wants to look at boat fees, perhaps it should eliminate the charge on windsurfers which are brought to the beach and depart the same day with their sailors. What services are provided by Greenwich that justify charging any fee at all?

Energy for Connecticut
Connecticut Attorney General and Greenwich resident Richard Blumenthal exulted over last week's judicial ruling stopping, at least for now, a cross-sound natural gas pipeline, "thus preventing an ecological disaster". Turns out, some clams were going to be temporarily displaced. I like clams, especially fried, but I also like having enough energy in this region to keep the economy going. I recently heard Blumenthal defend his opposition to the liquefied natural gas plant, which would sit six miles offshore, by claiming that there were other, safer ways to import energy, "like pipelines". But if he and his environmental friends won't permit pipelines to be built, or LNG complexes, or high voltage power lines, or nuclear reactors or conventional power plants - and they won't - how do they expect to supply the region with our future energy needs? The best I can determine, this advocacy group's solution is low energy lightbulbs and enforced use of scooters for commuting. If it weren't so serious, the lunacy of these people, including Mr. Blumenthal, would be pretty funny.



Save this Date

The Women's Club of Greenwich is sponsoring a cruise around the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor on Thursday, September 20. Hors d'oeuvres, buffet dinner, taxes and gratuities included, all for $95, regardless of club membership. Why am I mentioning this in a real estate column? Well, the head of the Club is my adored former Third Grade teacher, Maria Krumeich and she asked me to. I would never deny a (great) former teacher anything. Besides, thanks to the generosity of Riverside's own Tom Peterson, I did something similar once on Malcolm Forbe's Highlander and it was a blast. Questions? Call Carla at the Women's Club @ 869-2046.

The sky is lowering, not falling
There are a lot of buyers out there who think that, if they only wait long enough, Greenwich housing prices will fall to affordable levels. So far as I know, these people have been waiting since, oh, maybe 1935. But it is true that waiting for a particular house to drop can be an effective strategy. One Ashton Drive came on the market 1/23/04 for $7.5 million and sold last week 3 ½ years later, for $5.125. One Indian Spring, the great old Rockefeller estate, was listed for $26,000,000 on 5/17/05 and also sold last week (via Barbara Zaccagnini) for $13,410,000. Now that’s a price reduction. I don’t mean to embarrass the sellers of these two houses but write this to make the point that, if you and your agent both think a house is over-priced, other agents may, too, and the house will linger, offering you plenty of time to work down the price. But beware: I’ve known buyers who rejected their agent’s opinion that a house was priced fairly and then lost the house they wanted to someone else. So listen to your agent; if you don’t trust her advice, get another agent – there are tons of us out here.

“Yacht” Club leases
Certain RTM members have complained that Greenwich leases waterfront property to four non-profit clubs, including the Old Greenwich Yacht Club and the Mianus River Boat Club. I think they’re wrong to complain. As I understand the situation, these are not private clubs: any town resident can join. Dues are paid, the buildings are maintained at no cost to the town and any “earnings” (a term mistakenly employed by Budget Overview Committee head Don Conway) are plowed back into operations. No one’s getting rich here, and the town itself collects all the revenue from slip and boat rack rentals. Even Mr. Conway admits the value of these clubs saying, “it’d great for kids who folks can’t afford to join private clubs” but he misses the point: there are a lot of residents who, while passionate about boating, wouldn’t join a private club at gunpoint. These four organizations provide a terrific, low-cost opportunity for Greenwich boaters to enjoy the water without enduring ten year waiting lists and the annual Commodore’s Ball. Leave ‘em alone, says I. As an aside, if the RTM wants to look at boat fees, perhaps it should eliminate the charge on windsurfers which are brought to the beach and depart the same day with their sailors. What services are provided by Greenwich that justify charging any fee at all?

Energy for Connecticut
Connecticut Attorney General and Greenwich resident Richard Blumenthal exulted over last week’s judicial ruling stopping, at least for now, a cross-sound natural gas pipeline, “thus preventing an ecological disaster”. Turns out, some clams were going to be temporarily displaced. I like clams, especially fried, but I also like having enough energy in this region to keep the economy going. I recently heard Blumenthal defend his opposition to the liquefied natural gas plant, which would sit six miles offshore, by claiming that there were other, safer ways to import energy, “like pipelines”. But if he and his environmental friends won’t permit pipelines to be built, or LNG complexes, or high voltage power lines, or nuclear reactors or conventional power plants - and they won’t - how do they expect to supply the region with our future energy needs? The best I can determine, this advocacy group’s solution is low energy lightbulbs and enforced use of scooters for commuting. If it weren’t so serious, the lunacy of these people, including Mr. Blumenthal, would be pretty funny.

Save this Date
The Women’s Club of Greenwich is sponsoring a cruise around the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor on Thursday, September 20. Hors d’oeuvres, buffet dinner, taxes and gratuities included, all for $95, regardless of club membership. Why am I mentioning this in a real estate column? Well, the head of the Club is my adored former Third Grade teacher, Maria Krumeich and she asked me to. I would never deny a (great) former teacher anything. Besides, thanks to the generosity of Riverside’s own Tom Peterson, I did something similar once on Malcolm Forbe’s Highlander and it was a blast. Questions? Call Carla at the Women’s Club @ 869-2046.

The sky is lowering, not falling
There are a lot of buyers out there who think that, if they only wait long enough, Greenwich housing prices will fall to affordable levels. So far as I know, these people have been waiting since, oh, maybe 1935. But it is true that waiting for a particular house to drop can be an effective strategy. One Ashton Drive came on the market 1/23/04 for $7.5 million and sold last week 3 ½ years later, for $5.125. One Indian Spring, the great old Rockefeller estate, was listed for $26,000,000 on 5/17/05 and also sold last week (via Barbara Zaccagnini) for $13,410,000. Now that’s a price reduction. I don’t mean to embarrass the sellers of these two houses but write this to make the point that, if you and your agent both think a house is over-priced, other agents may, too, and the house will linger, offering you plenty of time to work down the price. But beware: I’ve known buyers who rejected their agent’s opinion that a house was priced fairly and then lost the house they wanted to someone else. So listen to your agent; if you don’t trust her advice, get another agent – there are tons of us out here.

“Yacht” Club leases
Certain RTM members have complained that Greenwich leases waterfront property to four non-profit clubs, including the Old Greenwich Yacht Club and the Mianus River Boat Club. I think they’re wrong to complain. As I understand the situation, these are not private clubs: any town resident can join. Dues are paid, the buildings are maintained at no cost to the town and any “earnings” (a term mistakenly employed by Budget Overview Committee head Don Conway) are plowed back into operations. No one’s getting rich here, and the town itself collects all the revenue from slip and boat rack rentals. Even Mr. Conway admits the value of these clubs saying, “it’d great for kids who folks can’t afford to join private clubs” but he misses the point: there are a lot of residents who, while passionate about boating, wouldn’t join a private club at gunpoint. These four organizations provide a terrific, low-cost opportunity for Greenwich boaters to enjoy the water without enduring ten year waiting lists and the annual Commodore’s Ball. Leave ‘em alone, says I. As an aside, if the RTM wants to look at boat fees, perhaps it should eliminate the charge on windsurfers which are brought to the beach and depart the same day with their sailors. What services are provided by Greenwich that justify charging any fee at all?

Energy for Connecticut
Connecticut Attorney General and Greenwich resident Richard Blumenthal exulted over last week’s judicial ruling stopping, at least for now, a cross-sound natural gas pipeline, “thus preventing an ecological disaster”. Turns out, some clams were going to be temporarily displaced. I like clams, especially fried, but I also like having enough energy in this region to keep the economy going. I recently heard Blumenthal defend his opposition to the liquefied natural gas plant, which would sit six miles offshore, by claiming that there were other, safer ways to import energy, “like pipelines”. But if he and his environmental friends won’t permit pipelines to be built, or LNG complexes, or high voltage power lines, or nuclear reactors or conventional power plants - and they won’t - how do they expect to supply the region with our future energy needs? The best I can determine, this advocacy group’s solution is low energy lightbulbs and enforced use of scooters for commuting. If it weren’t so serious, the lunacy of these people, including Mr. Blumenthal, would be pretty funny.

Save this Date
The Women’s Club of Greenwich is sponsoring a cruise around the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor on Thursday, September 20. Hors d’oeuvres, buffet dinner, taxes and gratuities included, all for $95, regardless of club membership. Why am I mentioning this in a real estate column? Well, the head of the Club is my adored former Third Grade teacher, Maria Krumeich and she asked me to. I would never deny a (great) former teacher anything. Besides, thanks to the generosity of Riverside’s own Tom Peterson, I did something similar once on Malcolm Forbe’s Highlander and it was a blast. Questions? Call Carla at the Women’s Club @ 869-2046.

The newest “Must-Have” fashion accessory
According to NPR, and who argues with NPR, fashionable families now count at least four children as necessary accessories, to go along with the yellow Labrador and the Mercedes. That many children, apparently, sends a message that you can afford four private school (and college) tuitions, a very large house and nannies to care for the brood. One young mommy interviewed for the article said, “I’m highly educated, ambitious and no longer employed in the workplace so of course I want to excel at something; in this case, raising the perfect family”. Let’s see: well educated, ambitious, rich young women – where do we find those? Instead of mulling over closing Parkway School, the Board of Ed should start planning new schools (I realize that all these perfect children are slated for private school but, as that young mommy may soon discover, not all perfect children are quite so perfect and some, alas, are going to end up rubbing shoulders with the great unwashed in the public schools).

The sky (isn’t) falling!
The New York Times reported over the weekend the sad story of a supposedly rich young thing from Wall Street who applied for a $1.5 million mortgage and was quoted rates as high as 13%. Leaving aside that a someone buying a piddling house under $2 million hardly qualifies as rich, in Greenwich, is it true that the pool for large mortgages is drying up? I called Marcos Zavattaro, Vice President of Patriot Bank and one of the most experienced mortgage guys I know (252-5922, if you want to talk to him yourself) to get the scoop. “One of the most ridiculous stories I’ve ever read”, was his response. According to Marcus, the so-called “jumbo mortgages” – loans over $1.0 million that can’t be sold to FannyMae, have indeed been hit by the recent credit panic, but not to the extent reported by the New York Times. Last Monday, he had a quote of 6 3/8 for one such loan; the next day, that same loan was 8%, because no one is willing to buy loans until they know what’s happening. Still, 8% is not 13%. Marcus’s advice – I think it’s his advice, but call him personally, in case I blew this - is to wait and let the panic subside over the next 60-90 days, when, he thinks, rates will retreat. If you want to buy a house before then, he suggests that you go interest only and pay the loan off when that bonus rolls in. If that bonus rolls in, of course. If not, we in the real estate industry stand ready to help you unload your unfortunate purchase at only a slight discount. Ah, just kidding – all my smart friends on Wall Street seem to have already figured out how to profit from the present scenario and if you haven’t, maybe you should be here with me on the other side of the trenches.

Change your broker, lose your buyers
I’ve been busy recently showing houses in the $5-$9 million range and rarely have I seen so many over-priced homes. I marked a number of them as ripe for realistic offers but saw this week that the owners of several of them have switched brokers and retained original price. That’s a sign of serious derangement – it’s not your agent’s fault that your house hasn’t sold, buddy, it’s your price – compared to others in your price range, you’re out of whack. So, when I see an owner refusing to acknowledge this truth, I cross the house off my list for future consideration. I’ll come back to it next spring when it will probably be in a free-fall and be a real bargain.

Pomerance Property
Did you see the interesting quote from Dianne Fox, our Town Planner, stating that there is nothing to prevent moderate income housing from being erected on the Pomerance park? I realize that many in town feel we need more moderate-income housing, but I suspect none of us who supported the town’s purchase of the parkland, for $20 million plus, did so with the intention that it be built over with housing. Bait and switch, or just another town official imposing her will over what the town wants? I don’t know, but it seems to me that we should fire our town planner and the current members of the RTM Land Use Committee. Time for a fresh start.

Old Greenwich bargain?
I think so, at least. Cathy Adams, of Country Living Associates, has listed a completely renovated four bedroom house at 54 Highview Avenue for $1,695,000. Highview is a deservedly popular street, within walking distance of Old Greenwich School and the village and a pretty easy walk/jog/ride to Tod’s Point. I think, comparing this house to what else is out there in its price range, this one’s the best by far (a comment that will surely solicit a dozen emails from other agents asking, “what about my listing?”, but what the heck).

Pool safety, continued
I never did hear back from my pool safety expert but from what I could learn there are a number of ways to address the suction pump peril (I’d think that a simple grill would do the job but apparently not). One device is a vacuum breaker that, installed, shuts down the pump when it senses a blockage. My advice, if you have young children or grandchildren, is to make an appointment with whoever services your pool and arrange for a thorough, careful safety inspection. And make the recommended changes.

Multiple Listing Service
I heard from a reader who pointed out that I often say it’s impossible to price a house too low in Greenwich because the marketplace will bid it to its proper price. So why, he asks, should he spend the money hiring a broker? He himself has sold three properties on his own and did just fine to which I say, good for you. But my point about the marketplace effect assumes, of course, that the property is fully exposed to every potential buyer and I know of no better mechanism to achieve that than the MLS. A “For Sale by Owner” sign stuck on the front yard won’t do it. Here’s an example: several years ago, an older acquaintance of mine decided to sell his waterfront property but shuddered at the thought of strangers wandering through his house. He approached a local agent and asked him to find a buyer. This was done, the house traded hands for somewhere around $4.0 million and both sides were happy. Those of us who heard about the sale thought the seller had left at least $1.5 million on the table and in fact it sold for more than twice the original selling price a few years later. That usually doesn’t happen when your house is on the MLS, although there are exceptions, especially when a house has been over-priced originally and then grown stale.

Besides, a source of objective advice and tactics can be invaluable. As a former NASD arbitrator I felt sorry for the poor deluded fools who came before our panels without benefit of counsel. Stock broker fraud and selling a house are different things, of course, in that, in the latter case, someone actually wants to give you (some) money while in the former Wall Street, having taken your money away, has a fierce determination to keep it. I’ve never strong-armed anyone into using my services as a lawyer or Realtor but if I had legal difficulties, I’d hire a lawyer and if I wanted to sell a house, I’d use the services of my fellow Realtors and the MLS. But feel free to ignore my advice; some folks succeed at the going-it-alone route and others have created an entire subspecialty in my business: turning FISBO’s (for sale by owner) into listings. If there weren’t a lot of failed FISBOs out there, that market niche wouldn’t exist.

Interest rates
Very much not an area I know much about (so perhaps I should start a hedge fund?) but I hear from my financial sources that there are an awful lot of people with bad credit in Connecticut and even here in Greenwich and the borrowing market has pretty much dried up for them. It’s killing deals and I assume that will create a ripple effect because, if someone with excellent credit can’t find a buyer for his existing house, he probably can’t afford to buy yours. Greenwich has always had a solid real estate base and I can’t imagine that collapsing but it’s not inconceivable that things may slow down, for awhile. It’s not quite the cop’s “nothing to see here, move along, move along”, but I wouldn’t panic. Yet.

Drop that price, now
I checked up on some numbers: in the second and third week of July 74 single family homes were placed on the market while only 31 moved off to contract. That’s not awfully astonishing, or alarming, because the holiday slowed momentum and besides, like forest fires out west, this happens every year. But a month from now, all sorts of new inventory will be coming on and your poor listing, tired and stale, will be buried amid the new ones. It’s your money, but if you’ve been resisting a price reduction, you might want to make one now and sell your house to some nice family that needs a house before school starts.

Old Greenwich traffic
Have you noticed the traffic buildup in Old Greenwich these days, especially between the hours of 11:30 am to 1:30 pm? Some days, the cars are bumper-to-bumper from Mackey’s Mobile to Binney Park. I suspect it’s a mixture of beach, lunch and ordinary business traffic and I have absolutely no solution to propose; we’re a one traffic light town down here, but it’s simply awful. I try to avoid coming into town during that period and, with due apologies to Tomac Road residents, just bypass the business district. Must be hard on merchants, though.

Trusty service
I mentioned Mackey’s, and I have always had a great relationship with, first, John Mackey himself and then later with Peter, his son in law and his associates Paul and Kenny. That said, I happened to bring my car into Soundview Service Center, across from the Post Office on Arcadia Road, for the cheapest gas in town and, while I was at it, a question about my air conditioning. My Honda’s four years old and on really hot days the A/C seemed to have lost its punch. I left it to be serviced and an hour later received the scariest words you can hear from a mechanic, or a cancer surgeon: “Mr. Fountain, could you come down here? I want to show you something.” Well, the “something” turned out to be nothing more (or nothing less?) serious than my own inability to set the A/C controls properly and, once they straightened out this moron, everything was fine. I mention all this because the proprietors could so easily have taken advantage of my ignorance and run all sorts of tests, added whatever has replaced Freon these days, etc. I thanked one of the owners, Pete Parente (it’s a family business with a bunch of adopted kids so whoever you meet there is probably a Parente) for his honesty and he said simply, “that’s not how we operate.” Indeed they don’t, so SoundviewService Center (637-2033) has now been added to my list of recommended service providers.

Swimming Pool Safety
Nancy and I came very close to losing our boy John, now a strapping 24-year-old, when he was three and playing in our friend’s lake. So the tragic death of six-year-old this past weekend in his parents’ pool struck an awful chord. I have many clients with small children who insist on a swimming pool and, while I suppose a sale’s a sale, I always point out the statistic in that great book, “Freakonomics” that a child is 100 times more likely to die in a family swimming pool than from a gun in the household. Deadline pressure prevents me from including advice from local pool safety experts (next week, I promise) but do be aware of the danger of pools. This from someone who raised three kids on a tidal creek without losing one of them (I think so – Nancy, is that right?)

630 Lake Avenue
A loyal reader has emailed, informing me that this property is going to auction in the near future. He asks why the Multiple Listing Service, touted by me as the best method of exposing a house to the market, so obviously failed. My answer is, … I dunno. I liked the house very much when it was first listed on the MLS and still liked it, a year later, when it reappeared with a new broker and a lower price. But it’s a quirky house and even the MLS can’t move a house when its price is wrong and, in this case, the market says the price is wrong. Minimum bid, according to my reader, is now $500,000. Now that would be a bargain.

Lowther Point
My friend and colleague here at Raveis, George Lowther, has had his waterfront property in Riverside listed for sale (at $25,000,000) for a long time, and I've been laughing at him for just as long. But I recently was back on the property and I confessed to George that I think the market may have caught up with him. This is a spectacular piece of property, with unparalleled views down the Sound to Manhattan, a deep water dock, high bluffs, four plus acres etc. etc. I don't think its equal exists in Greenwich and if not, then it may very well be worth every penny that George is asking. I know he's not budging from his price and, if my family had owned this land for 125 years, as George's has, I'd be just as stubborn. The present house is an 1880 charmer that may well be headed for the dustbin of history but it certainly be updated if desired. It's the land and its views that provide the real value here, however, and, based on recent sales of inferior waterfront, I wouldn't be surprised if, at long last, someone recognizes this parcel's uniqueness.

Internet mortgage loans
Buyers sometimes shun our suggestions about local mortgage brokers and insist on going online to find the cheapest rate. I've always thought that was a false economy because rates are pretty much equal all over; it's about service, not a $5 difference in monthly payments. When something goes wrong, the day before closing, it's awfully nice to have a local person on hand to straighten things out and, because so much of a local mortgage broker's business is steered to them by agents (we always recommend at least three, so don't get the wrong idea here) they have a real incentive to make things right – not so with someone you found on line. And now, I'm hearing about a new problem, involving online brokers lining up financing with banks that aren't licensed in Connecticut. This little flaw usually surfaces a day or two before the scheduled closing which makes things, …interesting. If you really fell it necessary to use an online service, check with the lender (not the broker, who is probably clueless) and make certain they can lend money in our fair state.

Stinky houses
We all get used to the particular odors of our homes and stop noticing anything unusual but some houses present quite an olfactory challenge to an agent and her clients when first encountered. Stale cigarette smoke is a real deal killer, as are cat pee and mildew. Your listing agent may not tell you for fear of hurting your feelings but try to get an honest opinion and, if there's a problem, address it, even if it involves ripping out carpets or curing the moisture problem. I know of one house with pet stain odors so bad that the floors had to be completely sanded down and refinished. It was worth it, though: the original odor was so bad I had to conduct the agent open house outdoors. Ugh.

But well priced houses are still selling
Ann Simpson, one of my favorite colleagues even if she does work with Prudential, listed 30 Dawn Harbor Lane for $3,295,000 in March. The house was decent enough but, no offense to the owners, nothing too special. So Ann, wise woman that she is, priced it a few hundred thousand dollars less than a somewhat comparable house down the street had recently sold for. Result? A bidding war, and a final selling price of $3,906,000. As I keep mentioning here, you can't under-price a house in this market, but you can certainly over-price it.

Savage Kindom
A great new book on the founding of Jamestown by Benjamin Wooley. Very entertaining. And because Old Greenwich was settled almost around the same time, its events and characters seem connected to us up here, hundreds of miles away. A terrific summer history read, if Harry Potter lets you down.

No truth to the rumor
Greenwich's best referee, Tom Mahoney, has not been indicted for throwing Greenwich Academy girls basketball games nor has he retired on his ill-gotten gains. Instead, the poor guy injured his Achilles' tendon, which demonstrates the foolishness of playing kids games as an adult.

Is the bloom off the rose?
In March 2005 my brother Gideon’s listing, asking price of $1,199,000, sold in a bidding war for $1,305,000. The builder/buyer tore it down and cleared the lot, then changed his mind and put it back on the market for $1,395,000. It finally sold last week for $1,215,000, or $90,000 than was originally paid. One transaction does not make a trend, of course, but I do notice builders getting more cautious with what they’ll pay.

Calling all hedge fund managers!
Joe Barberi has just listed an incredible old mansion on 77 acres of land for $39,000,000. Out of respect for their privacy, I never disclose sellers’ identities in this column, but it’s safe to assume that the owner is one of our town’s more noted celebrities. This place has everything, including a dungeon. Built in 1926, it was a bit shopworn when the current owner bought it in 1994. He’s brought it back to its original condition and wisely left it at that. The grounds are spectacular, with room, far away, for donkeys and even a flock of chickens but the best feature is the great hall which, with its soaring (40’) vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows gives real meaning to the term, “cathedral ceiling”. 17th Century English paneling abounds, as do fireplaces, including a walk-in fireplace in the great hall with a 6’ claymore sword hanging above the mantle (you’ve probably seen the sword before). The only scary thing about all this is that the listing information includes a copy of a four-lot subdivision plan. I’m a little short of funds this week so cannot personally save one of the last of the “Great Estates” but surely someone on Wall Street has a bit of spare change; I hope so, anyway.

New Construction
Not every teardown need be mourned, especially if the house is replaced by something far nicer. In my entirely subjective opinion, two new homes illustrate this: Mark Van Hoesen ‘s project at 27 Grove Street, in Cos Cob, and Mark O’Brien’s at 9 Binney Lane in Old Greenwich. 27 Grove is a great house on a quiet street in a close-knit, friendly neighborhood. It backs up to a town park, has five bedrooms, is very well built and is priced at $1,999,000 – I think it’s the best value in this price range that I’ve seen in a long time. Mark O’Brien also builds a great house and I think his new one on Binney is his best effort yet. A terrific limestone entrance opens to a five bedroom, airy house with what the trade refers to as “good flow”. Top quality construction, to this eye, with Mark’s usual quirky taste showing up in unexpected places: his choice of color for the onyx flooring in the mudroom, for instance, certainly caught my attention but I finally decided that I liked it. One of the things I admire about Mark is that he’s not afraid to depart from the plain vanilla, build it to sell philosophy that most builders have. I don’t mean to imply that this house is some kind of weird creation, it isn’t; it’s beautiful. The house he built next door sold last month in a bidding war and I wouldn’t be surprised if this one did, too. $4,900,000, asking.

John Bird, R.I.P.
I was sorry to see that my old principal, John Bird has died at 80. Mr. Bird was principal at Eastern when I was causing trouble there and moved to the High School just in time for me to continue to plague him. He was a kind, wise, teacher who even tolerated our shutting down the school during the Kent State protests in 1970 (I don’t remember the date but my pal Mike Horton does and sends me a reminder note each anniversary – May?). His assistant (and my House Master), Doug Mertz, told me in 1971, after he’d miraculously shepherded me to graduation, “Fountain, you’ve done what no other student could do: you’ve driven me out of education - I’m moving to Idaho to grow cherries on my father-in-law’s farm.” I always thought I did Mertz a favor but Mr. Bird was made of sterner stuff and stayed at the school long after I left. Those were turbulent times and I admired Mr. Bird for dealing with us rowdies in a firm but fair manner and allowing us to at least pretend to be intelligent young adults. Great guy.

Dog Days of Summer
With the Fourth falling on a Wednesday, not a heck of a lot went on last week by way of new listings or broker open houses. But I’m sure I wasn’t the only agent busy with clients looking at houses so if you’re a seller, don’t despair: there are plenty of interested buyers still out there and still in town.

Which reminds me
August is coming and will bring with it a great buyer’s opportunity. Everyone flees town (which is why I stay – it’s like Greenwich in the old days, quiet and uncrowded) and so if you hang around, you’ll find that there very few other buyers and agents prowling the very property you’re interested in. If you move quickly, before Labor Day, you can often grab a decent deal. But see the very next paragraph for the obligatory caveat.

You aren’t necessarily the only buyer
32 Meyer Place in Riverside priced in September at $1,995,000, eventually dropped to $1,795,000. But it recently sold for $1,807,500 in a bidding war. Two (or more) buyers showing up at the same time after a house has sat on the market for a long, long time is more common than many buyers think. It’s not a conspiracy, just a quirk of this business, so if you’re interested in a property and are told that someone else is, too, the listing agent (probably) isn’t lying. In short, if you want to make a bid, don’t assume that you have all the time in the world to do so.

Old Greenwich Sidewalk Sales this week
Not a big whoop for me but it affords the opportunity to comment on a simply awful traffic rule here down east: parking fines. The town permits you to park along those sidewalks for an hour, free. Signs say so. What those signs don’t mention is that the fine for over-staying your welcome is a whopping $55, far higher than the fine for staying too long in metered parking. If that high a fine is necessary to keep the streets clear for shoppers, okay, but where’s the deterrent value if it’s undisclosed? Parking in a handicapped space could cost you $75 and there’s a large notice informing you of that so most people don’t do it (I’m ignoring the moral issue here that you just shouldn’t take a space set aside for the lame). By not warning parkers how much it will cost to stay longer than an hour, the present setup serves only as a revenue gatherer and as a deterrent only to those who get stung. No, I didn’t just get a ticket, but I think the town’s being unfair.

More unfairness
I’m aware of a new house that, having been built exactly according to the plans submitted to and approved by the Building Department, was denied a certificate of occupancy because it’s roof was pitched too steeply, allowing possible use (gasp!) of its pull-down attic for storage. Why, that’s a violation of our floor area ratio rules! The builder had to weaken the rafters by cutting huge notches in each, then adding trusses to support the roof and then providing an engineer’s certificate attesting that the roof would collapse if the trusses came out. His before and will say it again but the purported purpose of our FAR rules is to preserve our streetscape and keep houses from appearing too large from the outside. This house remained exactly the same size after it was weakened – the only difference being that, with trusses added inside, the owner could no longer store things in his attic. I have used this column several times to ask the head of our RTM’s Land Use Committee for the rationale of this obsession with what people do inside their own homes and have received back a bit of angry outrage but no explanation. Maybe he should convene (another) public meeting: not to listen to our objections – that’s been tried, and we were ignored – but to explain why this rule exists. If, as I see it, there is no reason for it, it’s just policy, then perhaps the entire RTM will see the ridiculousness of the situation and tell the Land Use Committee to clean up their act.

Make way for ducklings
If only. Instead, Brunswick School has plowed under a beautiful playing field (and many huge, old trees) to accommodate a parking lot. It’s their property, and I’m sure Mahr Avenue residents will be glad to see their street cleared of parked cars but the project strikes me as an unfortunate allocation of resources. By the way, and this same observation can be made about Greenwich High School, with somewhat lesser accuracy, but do check out the students’ cars when school is next in session. The teachers drive beaters; the students seem to prefer Lexus SUVs, which seem to be about two years old, which I assume means they’re family cars coming off lease. The kids look so cool behind the wheels of these things, especially when they’re wearing their Che Gueverra T shirts and have gangsta rap pouring out the windows.

On the other hand
If my father had sprung for a Lexus and I had been able to attend Brunswick, I probably wouldn’t have placed Glendower and Hotspur in “The Tempest”, as I did in a recent column. Henry IV part I, of course, which I knew, at one point. Interesting lesson here: when writing the original column I Googled the lines and up came a very authoritative site attributing it to “The Tempest”. I ignored my own doubts in favor of the power of the Internet, which is obviously a dumb thing to do.

Whither diversity?
The Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision regarding school desegregation, bans, I think, considerations of race when assigning students to particular schools (I’m hedging here because I have not read the decision and the commentators are having a wonderful time trying to figure out what it all means). If so, what does that do to Greenwich’s efforts to move kids around town? Perhaps a continued expansion of the magnet schools which is okay, I suppose, but I’ve always wondered: if changing curricula or putting extra resources into a school makes it a “magnet”, why aren’t we doing that for all our schools, now?

Location is everything
Even for summer homes. My Realtor friends Marshall and Mary Ann Heaven recently bought “Sea Biscuit”, a six bedroom “cottage” in Kennebunkport, just down the street from The Colony and two blocks from the Bush family compound on Walker Point. Because of its siting, Sea Biscuit is ideally suited for President Putin to host a Russian-style dinner for his hosts so the Embassy rented the house for the weekend. As I write this, the Heavens are in The Colony while their house is filled with KGB and various security types, the refrigerators are sealed, filled with a planeload of Russian delicacies flown in from Moscow and an armoured stretch limousine is parked in the front yard. No sightings of Putin or Bush yet but Sunday night should be a memorable one. Beat that, Scott Frantz.

Oops
A house in central Greenwich just sold for $3.5 million, which struck me as a bit low for such a nice house on such a good road. But it came on the market two years ago asking $4.895 million and I think that just killed it. By the time a buyer finally showed up, the stench of a decaying listing badly affected its price. Do what you like; if you enjoy keeping your home in showing condition for two years and entertaining strangers at all hours of the day, seven days a week, then price your house at whatever you like and go at it. But the market will not reward you for your effort. My advice is, if you aren’t receiving offers, it’s time to dramatically downsize your expectations.

Lawyer’s revenge
The favorite legal case that I ever read involved a New York City landlord who refused to rent to a lawyer because, he reasoned, she’d end up suing him. She promptly proved him right (“you won’t rent to me!”) and a judge eventually ruled that lawyers were not a protected class and could thus be discriminated against. Made sense to me – As a real estate lawyer, I always cautioned my real estate clients to be wary of offers from lawyer/buyers especially, worst case, two married lawyers moving from the city – but I was saddened to learn from the New York Times this week that “occupation” has been added to the list of protected classes for housing discrimination cases in New York City. That category was referred to in the article as a “lawyer’s protection clause” and obviously my former colleagues, after failing to win in court, went off to the City Counsel and got what they wanted there. So far as I know, we can still discriminate against lawyers here in the Nutmeg state and, while some of my best friends are lawyers, if I were a renter or seller and a lawyer wanted my property, I’d be cautious.

Is the sky falling?
I think not, but I have noticed several houses that recently sold for less than was paid a few years ago. Average sale price is still climbing nicely, especially in Riverside and Old Greenwich, but seeing a $50,000 markdown from a three-year-old sales price does concentrate the mind a bit.

On the other hand
Maria Ruggerberg, of this office, had a listing a month or so ago on Owenoke in Riverside. She convinced her sellers to let her place it into the multi-list system (a lot of people just hate having tons of strangers wander through their house) and, just as important, priced it at $2.595 million, a tad below what you might otherwise reach for. Result? It came on the market on a Thursday, it received four full-price offers by Friday and on Monday the sellers’ lawyer had in hand a non-contingent contract for $2,743,000. The deal closed last week, showing that there’s nothing wrong with this market when the price is right and also, the power of exposing your house to the largest number of buyers possible. It didn’t hurt that the house was in great condition and showed beautifully.

Greenwich Schools
I was a bit taken aback recently when I learned that a friend’s kid had been dragooned into “translating” for two classmates who allegedly suffer from “selective mutism”. I’d never heard of such a disability and, struck by the odd coincidence that two unfortunate children in one small class should have the same affliction, I Googled the term.It’s the new PC term for what we called “shy”. Greenwich already has one of the highest percentage of “special ed” students in the country because sophisticated parents have figured out how to game the system and get their kids untimed SATs, tax-payer-provided tutors, and the like, but I wonder if any real good is going on here. I remember my first Moot Court experience, where, faced with arguing a hypothetical legal argument before six robed judges, my mouth dried up and my brain turned to mush. The solution turned out to be not relying on a brighter student to speak for me but to repeat the process a number of times until I could think and speak on my feet. At some point, every kid will have to do the same thing and I’d suggest that process start early.

Has it really come to this?
An ad for a 15,000 sq.ft. McMansion describes it as “an aspirational compound for today’s lifestyle”. Geeze, how insecure are you if, having scraped together the wherewithal to buy this whopper, you still have unmet aspirations?

Shakespeare in Greenwich
From The Tempest: Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
This quote struck me as apt when I read that Eric Clapton will be performing at a private soiree at Belle Haven this summer. He’ll be paid $1.5 million for an hour’s work, which is probably far less per hour than his employer, hedge fund owner Raymond Dalio makes but you never want to over-pay the help; like over-tipping in poor countries, it spoils the natives. So why would anyone pay that kind of money for a once- famous singer? I wouldn’t presume to plumb the motives of a particular person, especially when, as here, lots of money will be raised for charity, but as a general observation of this social phenomenon, I’d say it’s because one can. And what’s really cool is that, unlike poor Glendower, the spirits will indeed come when a Greenwich millionaire summons. Top Greenwich social life is about showing your friends up – you can do what they can’t. Own a Gulfstream II? Heck, even the mud-soiled builders in this town have those. Helicopter skiing in Banff? Swap tales with your gardener – he was there last April. But pull Clapton into town for your charity event and you’ll have topped your peers, at least until one of them manages a Beatles reunion. I’m sure someone’s working on that now.

19 Andrews Road
This is a beautiful 1928 five bedroom brick Georgian completely renovated and located close to town on an acre. Marc Robinson (New England Land) has listed it at $4,900,000 which I think is a fair price. It remains unsold because, I would guess, at just under 5,000, sq.ft., it’s smaller than today’s young customers feel they must have. Too bad, because it’s an absolute classic, with five bedrooms and a pool, that even the most upwardly mobile couple should be proud to live in. I realize I’m getting grumpy here, but the best quote I overheard at this showing was one agent to another: “If my clients had any taste, I’d tell them about this place.”

Cops at Greenwich High?
I was all set to blast the idea of posting a policeman at the high school because, I reasoned, today’s kids couldn’t possibly be any worse-behaved than we were in 1971. We didn’t need a cop to keep order back then so why should a police presence be necessary now? But speaking with people who actually know something about the situation, it turns out that our current crop of young folks is quite a bit nastier than they were in my day. Really? In Greenwich? Why? (I hate when facts interfere with my opinions).

Price it, sell it
A house came on the market a year ago at a price that, given the house’s tired condition, seemed a bit steep to me (okay, really steep). The listing expired and the owners have now re-listed it with another broker for even more money. Yeah, that’s the ticket: it’s not the price that’s wrong, it’s the marketing!

Welcome to the digital age
The Greenwich Board of Realtors has elected to give Realtors a choice to drop their subscriptions to the bi-weekly multi-list book, which I think is a mistake. The cost of printing will now be split between just the few of us who still want the book and, I suspect, that cost will soon be unaffordable. I’ve found the book invaluable with clients because we can sit down and flip slowly through the entire inventory rather than be restricted to a computer search with arbitrarily imposed search parameters. But that’s how the world’s moving, so on we go.

Pricing
I recently prowled through that very same MLS book and was gratified to see that most of the houses I had originally pegged as over-priced, some as long as a year ago, are still out there, begging for buyers. I am not always right, of course: one house that was priced well over $10,000,000 should have, in my opinion, sold for about half its asking price but went for 75% and in just a few months. There’s no accounting for taste but, leaving the clueless, tasteless freaks aside, it’s usually pretty obvious when a house isn’t going anywhere.

A whiff of mortgage fraud?
It’s not too common here in Greenwich, but we occasionally encounter a listing that at least hints of nefarious things going on. Listings that, for instance, expire unsold and then sell immediately for more than their last asking price, suggesting that the seller is giving cash back and the buyer is gaining a mortgage far in excess of what the house is worth. I saw such a deal a few weeks ago and it certainly made me suspect that some out-of-town lender hadn’t bothered to check out the house’s location or its condition. The name “Greenwich” alone doesn’t justify a wild appraisal but I think some banks don’t know that, and don’t care. Or they won’t until they have to foreclose on the place.

26 Bramble Lane
I mentioned this new construction some time back, when it was just beginning to be built, and several readers took me to task for what they interpreted as a criticism of its construction technique, an innovative process using insulated concrete walls. In fact, I’m always interested in new construction methods and this one, with the potential for huge energy saving, struck me as particularly nifty. In any event, it’s almost finished so I stopped by the other day to meet the builder, (Rob?) Wahl, and offer him a chance to punch me in the nose in case he thought I’d said mean things about his house. Instead, he gave me a complete tour and I think the house lives up to its promise. Very efficient, draft-free, quiet and impervious to rot, plus very, very nice finishing details. Five bedrooms, four baths and a finished “lower level” (we don’t call them basements anymore). Pam Chiapetta and Fran Unrine have it listed for $3,850,000, thus supplying further evidence of Bramble’s ever-increasing appeal. If nothing else, keep an eye out for a public open house and stop by for an education on this insulated concrete business. To this non-builder, it seems quite promising.

What’s killing my marsh grass?
I have been trying, completely without success, to get someone in town interested in discovering why the marsh grass (we always called it eel grass but everyone assures me that that’s extinct) on Ole’s creek (betweenRiverside and Old Greenwich) is dying off. Something’s happening and the banks are eroding rapidly and dramatically but no one seems to care, other than the creek residents. I don’t know if there’s a solution but this devastation must be a symptom of something worse going on. I blame Bush, of course.

Attention dieters!
Darlene’s, that very tempting ice cream and chocolate shop has moved from Cos Cob to a far more visible location on Sound Beach Avenue in Old Greenwich. It’s very much a family business: wander in and you’ll probably meet Darlene’s mom, Darlene herself and often, Darlene’s husband, plus an assortment of friendly teenaged staff. Pretty nice way to finish off a trip to the beach, as it offers tons of flavors in both conventional and soft ice cream, plus a variety of good-looking chocolates. Because the store’s located right next door to our Raveis office, I fear for our waistlines.

Talk Radio
I haven’t had much opportunity to tune into Russ Pruner’s Friday real estate show (WGCH, 10-11:00 am) but did so last week and heard my good friend Jeremy Kaye being interviewed by Russ and his new side-kick, Bill Andruss. Great show. Jeremy, one of the very best real estate attorneys in town, gave an hour-long walk through of a typical real estate transaction, from Town Hall records, to contract negotiation to closing. You might think that’s a pretty dry subject to spend an hour on (in my first year of law school, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d open my property law case book and doze off in minutes) but Russ and Bill asked good questions and Jeremy is almost as funny as his brother Joel so the time flew. If Russ is smart, he’ll make this interview available as a download on his firm’s website so that you can load it on your iPod and learn while you jog. Or you can just call Jeremy (625-5300) and ask him to entertain you. My only regret: Russ refused to take calls from listeners, thereby shutting off my creative impulses for the morning.

Two Nice Houses – cheap! (for Riverside)
I live down the street from Valerie Bromley’s new listing at 62 Arch Street and as I passed it each morning I wondered at the wisdom of its owners as the spent a year renovating what, to my eye, was a dated contemporary destined for a dumpster. I was (as usual) wrong, they were right. The house and yard have been transformed and the result is a very nice, livable house with five bedrooms, three fireplaces and a great deck overlooking Binney Park – throw your own July 4th party and have the best seats in town. Good price, I think, at $2,250,000.
Barbie Jackson has listed 23 Pierce Road for $2,395,000 and I liked it, too, although it’s a completely different type of house. This one is a 1927 farmhouse, totally updated and renovated in the past few years. Nice yard and a great porch. Either one of these houses would be a good choice.

Decks
The Arch street house includes a deck made of composite (okay, plastic) material that looks really good. This is a very practical choice for decking – more expensive than pressure treated wood but maintenance-free. My pal Nancy, tired of replacing rotten boards on our old deck, hired Rick Crossman of Old Greenwich (Archadeck, 978 –9050 archadeck.com) to rebuild the entire structure using composite decking and it looks great. I’ve known Rick and the rest of the Crossman family for many decades – good people and Rick sells a good product. He’ll make a deck from whatever you want: pressure treated wood, Brazilian Ipe (great, beautiful wood that lasts forever and comes with a price tag to match its longevity) or, as noted, composite. It’s always nice to use local vendors because in the unlikely event that a problem develops later, you know where to find them and, with a local reputation to defend, these guys will always work to make it right.

Attack Cat
My mother’s cat Henry, a 17 pound brute we adopted from the ASPCA, loves people but detests interlopers on his territory (which, sadly for my Nancy’s Miss Kitty, includes the house two doors up –poor Miss Kitty is terrified). But I watched with great amusement the other morning when Henry spied two geese on my neighbors’ yard. He crouched behind our hedge, then stalked the interlopers in a slow manner that caused them increasing concern and, when he finally charged they flew off, squawking in protest, landing in our creek, where the belong. Cheaper to maintain than a Border Collie, I may rent him out.

More on fluorescent bulbs
Interesting discussion on NPR the other day on the new fluorescent bulbs, soon to be mandated as the only light bulbs sold in America. Turns out that they don’t work in “cans’, the overhead lights so many people have in their houses. The trapped heat destroys them quickly and even while still working, their light is distorted. I don’t think this will be a popular law.

Memorial Day Parade this Monday, Old Greenwich
Best chance to revisit all those people for whom a once-a-year conversation is just about right. Besides, the kids on bicycles are cute and, although last year was a bit thin in this regard, you can usually count on some good marching bands. Don’t miss it. 10:00 AM.

Economists at work
The Greenwich Board of Realtors has commissioned a study by a UConn economist to measure the growth of Greenwich real estate. His conclusion: 600% over the past 20 years, outpacing all of the various stock indexes. That's reassuring, but should be taken with a large grain of salt. So far as I can tell (and a meeting to discuss these findings with its author won't be held until next week) the data don't reflect improvements made to the subject property. That's not necessarily fatal, because it's the land that is soaring in value, not the housing stock. My kids were horrified when I told them that their childhood home was destined for the dumpster when its sold, but there it is; Nancy and I put in over $150,000 to improve it (okay, that's a powder room for most readers but for this middle class family in the '80s, it was huge) but whoever buys it will be buying it for its location, not our improvements. All in all, I suppose the study demonstrates that Greenwich has been, and remains, a solid investment – just don't take the price you paid in 1986, multiply it by six and assume that that's your home's current value. Could be, but not necessarily.

Morons at the gate
I overheard two fellow agents (and friends, hence no names mentioned here) commenting at an open house the other day. The house we were in happened to be near the railroad tracks and some overhead power lines. "I'd never sell this place," said one, " those power lines kill". "Leukemia," confirmed the other, nodding with supreme confidence. Now, I know these two to be well educated, otherwise-intelligent people, so I was dismayed at their ignorant acceptance of junk science – if they're blundering around in a fog of ignorance, how are we supposed to calculate house prices? What (negative) value do we ascribe to bad Feng Shui, graveyards within 500 yards, nearby cell phone towers, a death down the street, etc? (I'll concede that Mr. Kissel's bloody, bound demise on Dairy Road significantly affected that house's resale value – by the way: another murder "solved" by our gendarmes, who declared it a suicide). If our otherwise well-educated sales force thinks these things matter, surely some customers do, too. I don't know how to adjust prices to accommodate superstitious nonsense but I sense that it's a skill I'd better develop, and soon – we're moving into over-drive in this country.

And in our laundries
Did you see Consumer Report's latest review of "energy efficient" washing machines, now mandated by Congressional edict? Turns out, your basic top-loader machine no longer cleans clothes. You'll now have to spend $1,000 to get something that will do the job. That's probably no hardship for the average Greenwich household but I suspect that consumers in most of the rest of the country won't be pleased. Just wait until they can no longer buy incandescent light bulbs. With luck, we'll have a revolution.

The Back Country
A recent newspaper article on the Back Country quoted another two friends of mine who claimed that the beauty of the area has not been diminished by all the recent construction. Phooey, says I. A 15,000 sq.ft. badly-designed mansion crammed onto a 4 acre lot looks just awful, especially compared to the graceful houses set on 100 acres that they replaced. I understand market forces and I can accept change, but don't try to pretend that nothing has been lost; the town has suffered greatly. North Street, once the grand, beautiful entrance to our town, is now cluttered with tasteless, over-sized collections of builder's kitsch (fortunately hidden behind towering stone walls) – the rest of the Back Country has suffered as badly.

Wanna be a landlord?
Dan Piotrowski has listed a five unit condominium complex at 9 Riversville Road for $5,350,000. I assume that's not quite the right price or it would have sold by now but these are pretty neat units, each renovated and each, I would think, capable of bringing in a decent rent. So at some capitalization rate, these ought to be a good buy.

Vile bodies
Speaking of corpses, did you see the news account of a Realtor and her clients discovering a three-week-old corpse moldering in bed? We just hate when that happens.

Local Produce
Some time back I wrote, in response to a silly politician claiming that only losers with no better opportunities joined the Army, of Old Greenwich’s own, 1st Lt. Stephanie Whittle, GHS 2000, who turned down Harvard in favor of attending West Point. I just received the following email from another of her fans and I thought I’d reprint it here:

“That (now) Captain Whittle you speak of is pretty darn incredible. I spent four years with her at West Point in awe of her brilliance and extraordinary world view. She has always been the one to go to for advice, encouragement, and help with anything. That is to say that Greenwich Connecticut sends some good ones out into the world, and I'm sure that's enough endorsement to help those multi-million dollar properties sell themselves. –CM”

In fact, Greenwich has always turned out some pretty accomplished kids. I’m still amazed that my small Humanities course at the high school produced at least five published authors, including a Pulitzer Prize winner. Artists, musicians, investment bankers, too many lawyers (that would be any more than one), we have a talented pool of young people here and CM is right: people ought to be willing to buy in Greenwich just so their children can matriculate with winners. I single out Stephanie because she’s sacrificing potential financial gain and her personal safety just to serve her country. At a time of war and with Memorial Day approaching, it seems appropriate to give her an honorable mention.

Attention deficit disorder
I read that Sony is condensing a variety of truly awful 70’s shows like Charlie’s Angels to 3-4 minute episodes: the Angles meet, get instructions from Charlie, chase bad guy, catch bad guy, end of show. They intend to post these on the internet and expect to make a lot of money, which I’m sure they will. But besides illustrating just how little actual content was packed in the original 30 minute shows, I think this development has instructional value for homeowners: the younger generation buying homes has almost no patience; not for letting plots develop and not for renovation jobs. I’m speaking in broad generalities of course but I have noticed that “fixer-uppers” are increasingly a drag on the market. I recently listed a really charming cape in a great location. Although families have happily lived there since 1935, it could have used a new, expanded kitchen and a new master bedroom suite upstairs. Both those improvements could have been easily done but we received exactly zero expressions of interest from end-users and numerous bids from builders who were interested solely in the land it sat on. That’s an increasingly common phenomenon, I think. So, if you’re thinking about selling your older home, either consider doing needed renovations now, yourself, or resign yourself to selling for land value. The latter isn’t so bad, fortunately, because the price of good building lots keeps rising, while the value of a physically obsolete, dated house is falling.

But if you’re going to renovate …
Be careful – some houses just aren’t worth putting more money into. I’m aware of two houses, side by side on the same street that were priced within $200,000 of each other. One was a tear down, the other had a much better yard, a beautiful pool and a completely redone interior that, unfortunately, kept its original front-to-back split arrangement. The tear down was sold in days while the renovated house, at this writing, still sits because builders aren’t willing to pay extra for what they don’t need and, apparently, home buyers don’t want it either (their loss, in my opinion –it’s a nice house). So, before you commit to a big re-do job, you might want to pick the brains of a friendly Realtor.

Humor on the circuit
I thought I was being funny advertising a drawing for an Airbus 380 at my recent broker open house (no one wanted the rough sketch of a plane that I presented) but Andy Healy, of Surf &Turf Realty did me one better by requesting agents to “please remove shoes before entering”. Agents who showed up were confronted with a muddy, vacant lot. Well done, Andy.

Tod's Point wing ding this Sunday
The Greenwich Shellfish Commission (and I hope you knew that we have one) is sponsoring a pretty cool event this Sunday, from 1-4, at the Point. Besides a clam digging class, there will be an additional 25-30 exhibitors demonstrating or passing along information on just about every possible salt water recreation, from reading (Perrot Library), fishing (Sportsmen's Den), diving (Ski & Scuba), lobstering (Bill Fossum himself!) and on and on. The sloop Soundwaters will be moored off the Old Greenwich Yacht Club and available for inspection, Bruce Museum is doing something else which I can't recall so you'll have to go see for yourself, and so on. A map to the whole thing will be available at the gate but basically head down to the Yacht Club work your way past the windsurfing launching area, and you're there. Questions can be directed to either Roger Bowgen at 243-6364 or Sue Baker 637-4610. No rain date, so keep your Sou'wester handy.

Smart Renovation in Old Greenwich
Ginny Hamilton has just listed 27 Shore Road for $3,350,000. It's a house I liked a lot, an old (1894) Victorian that was intelligently expanded and renovated in 2004. I used to subscribe to "The Old House Journal" and each issue included a back-cover photograph of the "re-muddling of the month". Horrifying. The careful work on this house would qualify for a picture on the front cover. Of course, in Greenwich, we have less to fear from bad renovation jobs than from dumpsters swallowing old houses whole. It's true that some houses are simply obsolete, with low ceilings, failed basements and the like but I wish that people planning a tear-down would visit this house first to see what can be done to bring a great older house into the new century. Ginnie, perhaps you should hold a public open house.


Doing it on the cheap?
An agent who attended the broker open house for a very, very expensive house (if I gave its exact price I'd embarrass the builder, who probably deserves it but …) reports that its master bath was a cheap-looking plastic tub. I understand that weight considerations may dictate an acrylic, rather than cast iron spa but if the resulting product comes out looking cheesy and you're hoping to set a price record for you house, you might want to try a bit harder.

And speaking of trying harder …
I held a broker open house in Riverside the other day for a nice new house priced around $4,000,000 and only 47 agents showed up. The low turnout at open houses puzzles me. There are currently over 1,000 agents in town yet, as I've written here before, you see the same 150 faces at open houses – where are the others, doing lunch? Oddly enough, the largest turnouts come at the super mansions, when dozens of agents I've never seen before show up to tour. They have as little chance of selling a $15,000,000 mansion as they do of dying from the sudden loss of all the air in their living room but out they come, like groundhogs, before disappearing again. Riverside and Old Greenwich are still experiencing bidding wars over new construction so you'd think more of my competitors would be working the area but I'm grateful they don't. As it is, my listing is going to contract this week.

Floods
I have a great deal of sympathy for my fellow-residents who were flooded recently (by the way, I've heard nothing but praise for the firefighters and police officers who responded to calls) but I lump their complaints and demands that the town "do something" in with those of the citizens of New Jersey – don't build in flood plains if you don't want your feet wet. This isn't heartlessness but rather basic geology, taught me many years ago in college: rivers have channels and they have flood plains which, by definition, flood when it rains a lot. It's stupid for states like New Jersey to keep rebuilding on floodplains, as though re-setting ten pins, and Greenwich might want to reconsider its policies, too. "Flood control" is an oxymoron – just ask Noah.