Real friends don't let friend's letters go unanswered

Dear XXX - thank you for sharing the alarming news that Ms. Palin supports oil drilling and hunting mooses. I shall of course never ever vote for such a person and I intend to sell my rifles and contribute the proceeds to Mr. Obama as some small token of remorse.

Along those lines, and in view of your deep concern over global warming, I have decided that, rather than pay you back for the gasoline we consumed boating to Montauk this past week I will instead purchase a carbon offset from an Indian company that grows biomass for alternative energy projects. It will only cost me a few rupees but I'm sure that you'll agree that it's better to spend a few pennies saving our earth than encouraging the profligate use of our precious resources and the spewing of carbon out your 90-foot yacht's tailpipes.

Yours in peace, love and understanding,
Chris.

From The Volokh Conspiracy, everything the New York Times knew about war, peace and Iraq:

Surge of Ignorance The only real question about the planned "surge" in Iraq — which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional. -- Paul Krugman, NYT, 1/8/07

There is nothing ahead but even greater disaster in Iraq. -- NYT Editorial, 1/11/07

What anyone in Congress with half a brain knows is that the surge was sabotaged before it began. -- Frank Rich, NYT, 2/11/07

Keeping troops in Iraq has steadily increased the risk of a bloodbath. The best way to reduce that risk is, I think, to announce a timetable for withdrawal and to begin a different kind of surge: of diplomacy. -- Nicholas Kristof, NYT, 2/13/07

W. could have applied that to Iraq, where he has always done only enough to fail, including with the Surge -- Maureen Dowd, NYT, 2/17/07

The senator supported a war that didn't need to be fought and is a cheerleader for a surge that won't work. -- Maureen Dowd, NYT, 2/24/07

Now the ''surge'' that was supposed to show results by summer is creeping inexorably into an open-ended escalation, even as Moktada al-Sadr's militia ominously melts away, just as Iraq's army did after the invasion in 2003, lying in wait to spring a Tet-like surprise. -- Frank Rich, NYT, 3/11/07

Victory is no longer an option in Iraq, if it ever was. The only rational objective left is to responsibly organize America’s inevitable exit. That is exactly what Mr. Bush is not doing and what the House and Senate bills try to do. -- NYT Editorial, 3/29/07

There is no possible triumph in Iraq and very little hope left. -- NYT Editorial, 4/12/07

... the empty hope of the "surge" ... -- Frank Rich, NYT, 4/22/07

Three months into Mr. Bush’s troop escalation, there is no real security in Baghdad and no measurable progress toward reconciliation, while American public support for this folly has all but run out. -- NYT Editorial, 5/11/07

Now the Bush administration finds itself at that same hour of shame. It knows the surge is not working. -- Maureen Down, NYT, 5/27/07

Mr. Bush does have a choice and a clear obligation to re-evaluate strategy when everything, but his own illusions, tells him that it is failing. -- NYT Editorial, 7/25/07

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. -- Paul Krugman, NYT, 9/14/07

U.S. Hands Off Pacified Anbar, Once Heart of Iraq Insurgency. -- NYT, 9/1/08

Testing the Water (again)
The land at 264 Riverside Avenue was originally going to hold a fairly large house priced at $4.390 million. That didn't work out so the builder tried selling the land itself for $1.995 and (after, rumor has it, rejecting an offer or two that might have been close to that) sold it off last Fall for $1.350. Now a new builder is trying again, offering a "6,400 sq.ft." house "set among parklike grounds" for, again, $4.390 million. It could work, although I note that, 0.33 acres hardly conjures up images of "park-like grounds" to me, and the applicable FAR limits the above-ground house to 4,528 sq.ft., so there's a big chunk of basement presumably being included here. The builder/designer has done excellent work in the past so this promises to be a nice house regardless of its size and, with a planned completion date of Spring 2009, perhaps the market will have recovered enough to support its price. Riverside has always been a strong market and houses in this price range on this street have sold before so there's room for optimism. There's also room for skepticism, which I suppose is the point of this post.

Here's a whack upside the head
Courtesy of John Cooke, some self-explanatory sales statistics.
Click to enlarge

The only sales increase is at the bottom of the market which is no doubt due to prices falling rather than any sudden surge of interest. The only average price increase can be found above $5 million but that's probably due to new construction pushing things up. With a 38% decrease in volume, it's reasonable (to me) to expect a decline in this range later this year.

Where's that dunce cap now?
Greenwich Time reports, but not on line, that the Antares boys have ceded control of their Stamford redevelopment project to their Norwalk partner. Just two weeks ago Joe Beninati, co-founder of Antares, denied to The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten that any such thing was possible. Things have obviously changed and Beninati professes to be delighted: "This frees Jim and me up for future acquisitions in the land assemblage [business]". That freedom is rapidly expanding, with the failure of their Putnam Green condo conversion project, the collapse of their Taconic Road residential spec development and the fire sale price supposedly fetched by their 35,000 sq. ft. disaster on Langhorne Lane. Just wait until their own houses around the corner from that mess are foreclosed - they'll have even more spare time to work their magic.

(From the New Yorker article)"By June, a developer from Norwalk named Carl Kuehner and his firm Building and Land Technology had joined the project. People around town wondered whether Antares had lost control of Harbor Point, but Beninati dismissed this: 'Carl’s going to lead the vertical development. He’s a superstar. It’s like trading for a Derek Jeter. We’re not about ego.' (A spokesman for Lubert-Adler said that the firm would have no comment.)"
Oops.

Update:
Greenwich Time has now posted the article

I don't see nuttin'
25 Birchwood started at $4.188 million back in May, 2007 and didn't sell, even though its price was eventually dropped to $3.685 million. It was withdrawn from the market last month but it reappeared today, now asking $3.995 million.

136 Cat Rock has a somewhat cheerier story, I suppose. Originally listed in January 2006 for $3,750 million it dropped to $1.995 last January and finally went to contract last week for what I presume was a deep discount from its final asking price.

My advice, as always; try to price it right to begin with and if it doesn't move, drop your price severely. Don't increase it - buyers aren't that dumb.

Another moment of
brilliance
21 Topping Road, 27 acres in the Back Country just east of the Helmsley place, has been offered for sale since August 2003 for $37.5 million. No one seemed impressed with that price so the sellers have switched brokers and brought it back on the market for $49.5 million. If that doesn't work, perhaps they'll raise it to $125 million so they can be just like Leona (her place hasn't sold either).

Famous Last Words
Joe Beninati, one of two co-founders of Antares Development Group (or whatever they call themselves) is quoted in the New Yorker article I mentioned earlier as being delighted to be renting to hedge fund companies in Greenwich and is remarkably sanguine about his continuing prospects of renting out office space at $150 a foot. Speaking of his tenants he says, “rent is as insignificant to these guys as the lunch bill.”
He may be right but I've heard those same rosy sentiments about Greenwichites' indifference to cost before, usually just before the latest group of pigeons goes broke and no one else is willing to step in to take their place. I'm not accusing Mr. Beninati of being stupid or anything, but I did notice, in reading the New Yorker article, that he and his partner met while each was doing "post-graduate work" at Choate. I thought that sort of educational detour was reserved for football players who flunked their SATs.

I didn't say it, Barrons did.
Realogy, parent company of Coldwell Banker and Sotheby's, continues to scare the financial press. In Barron's words, Look out Below!

Update 8/02/08
Bloomberg isn't impressed with their prospects either. "87% chance of default on their bonds" doesn't sound encouraging.

7 Dwight Lane
Thanks to research by reader Cos Cobber,this IRS auction property story gets more interesting. The full misadventures of a fallen, crooked hedge funder can be found here.The IRS auction page, linked to below and repeated here shows pictures. Judging from the cluttered interior, the resident wasn't all that cooperative with the IRS appraiser, and I suspect exterior maintenance has been neglected too - the SEC froze this guy's assets way back in 2003. If so, it's more likely to be a land sale rather than the five acres and a live in house that I earlier speculated would be a good buy at $2.5 million. Number 10 Dwight, a pure land sale (plus the cost of removing the existing house, like this sale) didn't move in 8 years at $2.9 million, and there's no reason to believe this one is worth $2.5.

The IRS ad states $2.5 million as the minimum price. If no one buys at that price, I assume that the IRS will take title and try to sell it again under its own name. Now that might produce an interesting value.

Update, 8/02/08
Today's Greenwich Time has an article on the sale (beat them to the punch, eh?). It's not available on line but if you check your neighbor's recycling bin ....
One little flaw in the article: it states that the property is worth $4.3 million "according to town tax records", and leaves it at that. If you pay anything like that sum for this property, you deserve to be the next investor in the soon-to-be-former owner's hedge fund.

Hurricane Hype?
Not really. Here's a thoughtful discussion of the issue. I'm a bit of a storm buff so I tend to read about what's happening during storms, regardless of their proximity. By early yesterday evening it was pretty certain that Gustav was not going to slam into New Orleans and had not regained the momentum it lost passing over Cuba but televison news never reported that. If I can read current information, why can't these reporters? Ratings, of course.
Here's my favorite blogger, law professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com on the subject:

Better safe than sorry, but watching the TV folks doing the usual standup-in-the-wind routine this morning I just thought how stale that shtick has become. Stay in the studio and just tell us what's happening. We've all seen newscasters with the wind in their hair now.

One itsy bitsy bit of politics.

Upon returning and checking my email I was struck by the number of missives from my "liberal" friends who have been sent absolutely around the bend by this Palin VP announcement. Greenwich Diva, run by a (black, female) friend of mine, has been forwarding every misogynist, sexist piece of trash she and her Kos friends can dig up - one day it accuses the poor Governor of lying about the parentage of the latest addition to her family and trying to hide her own daughter's pregnancy, the next it's accusations that Palin is an unfit mother who caused the poor infant's Down Syndrome by neglecting prenatal care. I've now read attacks on her figure, her hairstyle and even her support of gay rights (the latter, interestingly enough, purports to be from a conservative organization but web sleuthers tracked it back to
defendobama.com).

I love liberals, especially those who are my friends, but why is it that they so readily resort to the very tactics they - inaccurately - accuse conservatives of using? Posting pictures of a 16-year-old girl that "prove" she was pregnant while her mother was not (the picture turned out to have been taken 2 years before the actual birth, but why let that get in the way of a good story?), dismissing a female candidate because of her hairstyle and taste in glasses, calling her a bimbo (see Maureen Dowd - I won't) and bashing gays, which I assume is supposed to work up conservatives, all just show that sexist, stereotypical hate lies just beneath the surface of these folks. Scratch them slightly and it all wells up. I don't pretend to know the female mind but if my pals on the left keep this up, they just might drive some women voters away from the Obama camp in disgust

I'm back from the great fishing expedition and so here are a few items that cropped up while I was gone.
Reader Cos Cobber alerts me to an ad in yesterday's NYT announcing an IRS foreclosure auction on Dwight Lane. I haven't dug that issue from the recyling bin so I can't confirm the address but No. 10 Dwight Lane, 5 + acres with a tired house, was listed for sale for years at $2.95 million. If that's the property, it would provide a very nice building lot. I wasn't shocked at its asking price but it didn't sell for that (it didn't sell at all) and there might be a bargain available here, depending on how much the IRS wants in taxes. If it's not #10 we're talking about, my apologies in advance. UPDATE: found ad - it's 7 Dwight Lane, not 10. Don't know the property but will check it out. Auction scheduled for September 28th at noon. Open house September 5 and 6, 11am -3pm.
Another update:
Here's the IRS Auction Page with photos. Minimum bid $2,500,000. For 5 acres and a live-in house, good deal.

35 Price reductions last week, neatly matching 35 new listings. The only price reduction of note may be 48 Parsonage Road, new construction that's sat unsold for $7.85 million, now reduced to $7.195. That might do the trick, who knows?

Under "new" we actually have another price reduction, it's just been brought back on at a lower price. 44 Grahampton didn't sell at $6.995 million so they've chopped $1.0 million and change ($5.950 million) and they're trying again.

On the other hand, 2 Parsonage didn't sell at $3.684 (?) million so it's been relisted with another broker and jacked up its price to $4.425. Go figure.

895 Lake Avenue, a nice contemporary that was once part of that complex a crook (Frankel?) maintained (one of his chippies hanged herself there, he fled to Europe with diamonds, was caught and convicted and that's about all I recall) sold for $3.1 million, down a bit (quite a bit, when you figure in commissions and taxes) from its 2006 purchase price of $3.187.

Word from agents who did stick around last week is that they were busy showing houses to potential buyers so that's encouraging, but just 3 houses went to contract last week - if that doesn't improve in the next two weeks, we're in trouble.

What is it about the "Dinnertime Bandit"
that inspires headline writers to go goofy? Greenwich Time had cops "relishing in" the poor guy's defeat, The Greenwich Citizen crows, "Dinnertime Bandit convicted, those responsible exult". I suppose I'd exult too if I'd committed a series of crimes and a jury found someone else responsible, but should one of our local papers share in their glee?

More effective than bribing the maitre d'
The man pictured above, "Eddy", was our fishing guide for a few days this week and Thursday night we invited Ed and his wife Paula to join us for a farewell dinner at Harvest, reputed to be Montauk's best restaurant. Great idea but when we arrived we learned that there was an hour-and-a-half wait for an outside table and inside? Forget it. We turned away, wondering whether Tony's Pancake House was open for dinner, when Paula spotted the restaurant's hostess and hailed her. She explained our party of five's dilemma, the hostess disappeared inside for a minute and returned to announce in a loud voice for the benefit of the soon-to-be disappointed diners ahead of us, "I found your reservation - it was filed under 'Eddy'." Sure.

Okay, I felt a little guilty brushing past the hoi polloi clustered at the entrance but Eddy and Paula are regulars all year 'round (inside they were greeted by every worker, from bus boy to waiters) and heck, I've always wondered what it was like to have the velvet rope opened for my dining party. Turns out, it's just grand. Food was excellent, by the way and, compared to Greenwich, a relative bargain.

Back to work (after the weekend)
The tuna and shark population remains unchanged, despite our best efforts, but a few striped bass are on their way to becoming dinners. That's Sean Mathews holding a bass (Sean's the one wearing sunglasses). Need the best roofer in Fairfield County? Sean's your man.

Gone Fishing

Back Friday - please check in then. Thanks!

So you're thinking of buying a house
Okay, perhaps you aren't, but maybe you should be. As I mention below, there are a lot of houses out there that have been on the market for a long time. Some of them have come down enough to represent decent values (for instance, a house on lower Lake Avenue originally listed in June, 2006 at $1.585 million is now asking $1.099 million. Offer $995 and grab it), others still have some room to drop but their owners might be willing to listen to, and accept, a low price - I know of one that has been on for 18 months and has dropped from $3.5 million to $2.9 million. I'd want to see it at, say $2.45 before I called it a good deal, but maybe ....

In any event, this is a good time to pull the records (or have your realtor pull the records) and examine houses that have lingered through a falling market. Look above your price range - a $2.7 house might actually be a $1.8 house and if $2's your limit and the house suits your need, try it. Do some drive-bys, narrow down your search further by actually entering the house and, if you come up with a handful of picks, rank them in order of preference and put in a bid on one. If that doesn't work, move on to the next, and so on. It may all be an exercise in futility but you could end up with the house you want, for a very good price.

A letter from Nigeria
You loved their emails - relative lost in horrible plane crash, secret fund that can only be removed from the country with your assistance, please send all private banking information most hastily - now there's another chance to quintzupple your money in that wonderful country: real estate!. read the whole thing, of course, before you invest, but here's just a teaser:

A new report has predicted more buoyant time for operators in the real estate sector and urged investors seeking bountiful returns to look in that direction.

The report coming from the nation’s foremost credit rating and research agency, Agusto & Co, the report ranked real estate as one of the fastest growing sectors in the country.

It quoted the firm’s Analyst-in-Charge, Mr. Dolapo Oni, as saying, “The real estate market is one of the most viable alternatives to investing in the stock market that can give comparable returns.”

It also said, “Real estate tends to mostly appreciate. Prices of land and property rarely fall. In the last one-year alone, prices have appreciated in some areas of Lagos by over 200 per cent. On the average across all observed locations, prices appreciated by over 30 per cent.

“As such, investors are guaranteed to a large extent that their capital will appreciate significantly, if they invest in the right real estate properties.”

"Guaranteed to a large extent"? Who can resist that kind of opportunity? Please send your banking information directly to me - I'll pass it on.

Does the Back Country get a pass in the Police Blotter?

Greenwich Divaposes this question today because, while the blog's author knows of several instances of domestic abuse, with arrests, among her neighbors, she never sees the incidents reported in our fair paper. My experience has been the same; I know of drug busts and horrendous abuse cases yet they don't seem to see publishing daylight (except for George C. Scott and his wife - the Greenwich Time loved reporting on their spats when the unhappy couple lived in town).

So do our police keep certain incidents from the blotter or does the Greenwich Time protect wealthy criminals? Or neither - are people like the Diva and I just missing the news. One thing I'm sure of: bad things occur all over town, even in wealthy households.

The World's Smallest Violin
Our local daily reports that a young boy named Conor Holliday "has broken his ribs, wrist, ankle, shattered a bone in his left foot and fractured the Lisfranc joint in his foot - all in the name of the adrenaline rush that is skateboarding." Mr. Holliday now complains that he dislikes paying a $10 fee to use the town's skateboarding park, which costs taxpayers $40,000 annually to operate, and threatens to take his business elsewhere.

My question is, who's been paying this idiot's medical bills? If he's a ward of the state, then it's our tax dollars being used to patch him up and send him out to do it again. If it's private insurance, then it's our rising premiums achieving the same thing. Either way, maybe his parents should concede the obvious - the kid can't skate - and take away his board so he doesn't hurt himself, or our wallets, again. Failing that, make the kid pay the damn admission fee. Hrrmph!

They're back!

Okay, they may not be as welcome as the swallows of Capistrano (when I Googled that term to check spelling I was asked, "did you mean swallows of cappuccino?" - er, no)) but buyers are finally stirring, poking around after the storm to see what's still here. Before you sellers get your hopes up, you might want to know that the buyers I've been talking to are ready to buy and have cash but they're not planning on paying full asking price - quite the contrary. Their general consensus, if I can extrapolate from a small sample, is that the market is flattening out and probably will start recovering in the Spring, so perhaps now's a good time to buy. I won't disagree.

I'm also hearing rumors of a couple of very large pending deals that, if they come to fruition, should cheer up spec builders considerably. So don't despair but do be prepared to hear offers well below what you've been counting on. As of today there are 37 single family homes actively listed since at least August 2007 (and that's not counting listings that have expired and withdrawn with the intention of returning to the market in a few weeks). So if you won't listen to a low offer, there's probably somebody else out there who will.

Tiny Bubbles

Busted ones, anyway. Today's NY Times has a good article on the housing bust in California. We're not anything close to that bad here (in the area the Times writes about, 85% of the houses bought within the past three years are worth less than is owed on them) but there are lessons to be learned, especially the folly of blind optimism that assumes a never ending supply of young millionaires capable and willing to spend $5 million and more for a new house.

And if you missed yesterday's paper, check out Joe Nocera's column, also in the Times, on how Fannie Mae went off course, while enriching its officers. Nothing in here that the WSJ wasn't warning about a decade ago but it provides an ugly view of what happens when politicians and (other) crooks collude.

33 Crescent Road, Riverside

This new construction (my listing, so take comments with a grain of salt) sold last week for $3.175 million (asking price, $3.195). That should make the neighbors on Crescent happy because the builder, Greenwich Construction, has now sold two new houses on the street for more than $3 million - the other, 29 Crescent, was a bit larger and sold for around $3.4 million.

These both replaced older, much smaller homes and it's tempting to mourn the loss but, as listing agent for both, I can report that there was no - zero, nada-interest in either of the existing properties by end users. The market demands new, and bigger houses. We can complain but, when you go to sell your own house, perhaps you should feel grateful that there are still builders around willing to risk their money on speculative projects. If you don't feel that warm appreciation, don't worry - there are fewer spec builders every day so you may well have a chance to pass along your house to a deserving, if impoverished young family who will cherish your home as you did. And pay what you did, too.

$7.2 Million?
I recently gave a price opinion for some property in central Greenwich. My advice was rejected, which is fine, but the figure I gave was considered too low, I suspect because there's another new house nearby asking $7.2 million. Now, asking is not getting, but I'm pretty sure the seller of the house I advised on hasn't quite grasped this concept.

So here's a picture of what's available on Ridge Avenue for $7.2 million. I'll be curious to see how it does. If it sells for somewhere near that price then I'll be proved wrong, again. But I might be looking pretty smart a year or so from now.

Here's what MADD should be mad about
drunk, high, naked driver crashes into parked car while masturbating.

Instead, they have their knickers in a knot over the proposal by a group of college presidents and drinking experts (how does one apply for the latter job?) to lower the drinking age back to 18.

Drunk driving is a menace and should be vigorusly attacked. Turning 3/4 of the college kids in this country into criminals is not the way to do that. But, as others have pointed out, MADD has turned away from combatting drunk driving and into a rabid temperance movement. I don't drink so I don't particularly care what the angry mothers are up to but I do have three kids, all over 21 now, who, I suspect, imbibed a beer or two at school, just as most college kids have done for, say, the past 150 years. If educators think banning such behavior is a bad idea, maybe we should at least discuss it, rather than leave the decision to MADD.

Don't tell my peers here in Greenwich
But things are bad all over, even in Bulgaria




And Martha's Vineyard

Copy Editor!
The Greenwich Time, fresh from laying off half its editorial staff, announces today that Cops Relish in Golder Verdict. It seems to me that one may relish a verdict but, unless you're a hot dog, can you relish in anything? And if that's the intended meaning, shouldn't the headline have referred to the Goulden's verdict?

Havana, I hear you calling
The Wall Street Journal article I link to below mentions "Climate Crime Cards" that kids can use to spy on, and report environmental crimes committed by their parents, friends and relatives. I wondered if the editorialist was indulging in a bit of satirical stretching so I Googled the term and damned if he wasn't exactly right. Wow. This all seems eerily reminiscent of stories I've read about life in Nazi Germany and, later, communist paradises like Cuba where children are encouraged to spy on and rat out their parents for impure thoughts. In protest, I may just start tossing #3 plastics into my blue recycling bin.

Or buy fresh ammunition for my guns.

Update: reader Juan comments: Juan writes...
"Reminds me of the story of little Pavlik Morozov, who became a Soviet Hero and was adopted as patron saint of the Young Pioneers for denouncing his father. His life exemplified the duty of all good Soviet citizens to become informers, even at the expense of family ties.

http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biom6/moro1.html.

The back story is that the distressed mother, abandoned by her husband for another woman, instigated the child's denounciation. And in the end, most of the family and extended family, except the mother, were killed by the Soviets."

The New Yorker article
The Greenwich Time has discovered Nick Paumgarten's article on Greenwich. Paumgarten's tone may be a bit pessimistic on the current state of our real estate market (could be because he spent too much time talking with me) but I think he's right on, naturally. Leave it to our local paper, however, whose last revenue source is real estate advertising, to seek out and quote those Realtors still capable of whistling past the graveyard.

But local brokers say that explanation only gives part of the picture. While it's true Greenwich's upscale market is not as robust as it once was, it's certainly not bad enough to doom a well-planned project to failure, many said.
"I don't think Greenwich has been that hard hit," said Jackie Hammock, a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker. "There are still plenty of these houses that are selling."

[Coldwell Banker - isn't that the firm that got your column axed for saying mean things about real estate? Ed. Why yes, I believe it was]

While I'm delighted that there are still optimistic agents working the beat and while I don't believe that the market has died forever, I personally stopped whistling awhile ago.

Our Environmental friends on the lunatic fringe
I missed this opinion piece when it originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal but it's still available on the web and it's fun reading for people of all political persuasions. Well, perhaps not. Here's a quote:

But now the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in America. The most glaring example of course is the multitrillion-dollar cap-and-trade anti-global warming scheme that would mandate an entire restructuring of our industrial economy. This plan, endorsed by both presidential candidates, would empower climate-change cops to regulate the energy usage and carbon emissions of every industry in America. If we do this, the best estimates are that we could reduce global temperatures by 0.1 degrees by 2050 and save on average about one polar bear a year from early death. But no burden is too great when it comes to helping the planet -- even if the progress to be made is infinitesimal. To weigh costs and benefits is regarded as sacrilege -- the refuge of global warming "deniers."

There are also new federal and state proposals to snoop on citizens in our own homes. California is considering a plan to police the temperature settings on residents' thermostats. The feds are checking on the flush capacity of our toilets and the kinds of light bulbs we use. A new game called Climate Crime Cards urges kids to spy on and keep an online record of their family's environmental faux pas -- noting when their parents fail to turn off the TV, plug in too many appliances or use the clothes dryer on a sunny day. Sen. John Warner, a Republican from Virginia, wants to bring back the reviled 55-mile-per-hour federal speed limit law so that America can reduce gasoline consumption. Barack Obama believes that properly inflating the tires on our cars is the solution to our energy woes. Is the government going to start giving tickets for failure to inflate?

Are newspapers next?
Home Magazine shuts down

Parking ticket appeals
In my driving history I've probably accumulated 10 parking tickets over 39 years. Spread out over that time, that's not bad (no, I'm not counting the tickets I got when I attended college in Boston, when, in those blessed pre-computer days, you could ignore the tickets and switch to new license plates on visits home). And I've never appealed one until now but a cop recently ticketed me for parking too close to a hydrant and, when I questioned him, he said, "you were in my way." I don't think that a cop's pique is sufficient reason to get a ticket so I filed an appeal and went off to Town Hall today to argue it.

It was an almost painless process. I met a very nice guy named, I think, Bob Bishop who heard me out sympathetically, agreed with me that the cop was not behaving well but asked me how close I was to the hydrant. I confessed that I was certainly closer than the 10' demanded by law so he suggested cutting the $50 ticket to $25. Seemed fair to me and the matter was closed. Took 5 minutes.

So I got what could be perceived as an apology from the town for the peevishness of their officer and I paid for my sins. Here's a picture of the scene of the crime. You'll notice that the offensive policeman is a gentleman in his late 50's. Anyone that age still wearing shorts and directing traffic probably has suffered some career disappointments along life's path, but that's
no reason to be a jerk, in my opinion.

Soak the rich
A commentator below says, "Um, Chris, we live in Greenwich, CT - we ARE too rich and are [sic] fellow American [sic] absolutely need it.

A $2B relief package for Americans in financial crisis sounds like a good idea compared to $700B in appropriations for an unending war."

I don't know why these people feel justified in deciding that I have too much money (let alone why they think taking it forcibly from me and passing it along to someone else will bring Eden another step closer).

The funny thing is, it's always the middle class that gets stuck with the bill for these sensitive people's generosity. Some state - Virginia? - set up a program whereby anyone who felt under taxed could send in a voluntary extra payment. I believe that in the years the program ran, four taxpayers sent in a total of $5,000. I don't believe that Warren Buffet contributed.

The Demmerkrats are planning a real extravaganza at their convention next week that will showcase beggars - the Dems call them "real people" who want my money so they can spend it on themselves. Perhaps if I had not just fired off huge, account-emptying checks to the IRS and my daughter's college I'd feel more generous towards these grasping strangers but I did, so I don't. Less than 50% of us pay income tax now and I doubt a democracy based on majority rule is going to correct that soon. So the forecast for the productive members of society looks bleak. I wonder, when they finish us off, who will be left to fund the liberals' largess?

Pay me taxes!

Downtown houses
120 Milbank, a nicely renovated single family house, sold for $2,465,000 on January 4, 2007. It sold again yesterday, unchanged, for $2,500,000, or 1.4% more than originally paid. While that's technically a gain, it's a nasty bite out of someone's wallet when you deduct commissions, conveyance taxes and lawyers' fees. Despite what many folks believed until this year, real estate is not the same as money in a savings account. In fact, it's more like auction rate securities which our friends in the financial services industry said were like money in a savings account.

Why I won't be going out to open houses today
Because there's nothing to see, basically. One house says it's newly staged and offers a 3% commission. I hope I'm not stupid enough to be impressed by some rented furniture that will disappear with the seller and if I'm ever swayed to recommend a house to a buyer because I'll receive an fattener in my wallet then it will be time for me to quit.

Another house bills itself as "new construction" which would be true if this were 2004 but last time I checked, it isn't. It also doesn't help that the asking price is $400,000 more than what the sellers paid for it 4 1/2 years ago. I don't think the market is now where it was then.

So I'll save my gas. I'm going fishing next week because, if this week's dead, next week will be six feet under, so blogging will be a little sparce,
unless some large tuna cooperate.

Greenwich Landing, again
My post yesterday on this project's difficulties did mention my previous support for the development but it may bear repeating: certain factions in Byram fought the developers fiercely, causing lengthy delays that made the two Waba brothers miss the market and reductions in size that may prevent it from being profitable. For Byram's sake, these opponants might now want to pray for the project's success: this part of town needs all the help it can get.

As an aside, careful readers may have noticed that, if there are 20 units with 6 currently listed for sale, there would be 14, not 13 units still under construction. In my defense I'll just point out that there are three kinds of people in this world: those who can count and those who can't.

No kidding - he calls it the "BS-II"
OwlGore can disembark now
No need for this modern day Noah to fear rising water levels, at least for now. The WMO says that global temperatures are cooler than they've been in five years. Here's an astonishing concession, even if it is followed by the obligatory warning that we're all gonna die soon anyway:

"Global temperatures vary annually according to natural cycles. [emphasis added].For example, they are driven by shifting ocean currents, and dips do not undermine the case that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing long-term global warming, climate scientists say."

Global temperatures can be affected by natural causes. Who'd have thunk it:?

Watch out below!
The Greenwich Post, my former paper and now not much more than a lightweight vehicle for advertising, has run a cheery article on those new condominiums on the Byram River (I'd give you a direct link to the story itself but the Post hasn't figured out permalinks yet or else they fired the guy who had). "Greenwich Landing Makes a Splash", cries the headline and I suppose that if that term brings to mind the noise accompanying a dead sailor being slid into the waves it's accurate enough; so far as I can tell, reviewing the Greenwich Multiple Listing Service records, out of the twenty proposed units none have sold or are under contract, six are actively listed for sale and thirteen are presumably still under construction.

I had high hopes for this project because I thought it would help revive Byram but so far, things are looking a little depressed.

For sale by owner
I was prowling around Overstock.com just to see what they have in the way of real estate listings and came across this listing for 9 Fitch Lane in Riverside . I don't know if its seller/owner has taken the wisest course of action here. This is a perfectly nice new house, cheek by jowl with the Post Road but with a decent view of Cos cob Harbor. I liked it, especially when its price dropped from $1,295,000 to $1,099,000. Apparently I was alone in that admiration because the listing expired unsold after a year on the market in November of last year. The owner pulled it from our multi-list system and relisted it himself on one of those for sale by owner sites at $1,175,000.

It seems to me, and I could be wrong, that if 1,000 agents couldn't move this place at $1.09 million the owner himself is unlikely to achieve that goal by pricing it for $85,000 more. If I were a buyer, I'd automatically discount the asking price 5%, figuring that the seller wasn't paying a commission, and then I'd want to look hard at that asking price. If the house didn't sell before, isn't that a sign that it's worth less, not more than $1,090,000? Just asking.

Trouble sign?
Applications for refinance and purchase money mortgages are dropping. Bad news for agents and real estate lawyers as well as sellers. Check the article for current interest rates (higher, duh) and all sorts of other useful information.

He forgot to say grace
The Greenwich Time reports that
the Dinner Time Bandit has been convicted.. Good. he was a scary guy in that he broke into people's homes while they were there,which is never a good indication of non-violent intentions. In fact, this man was previously involved in a botched break-in in New Jersey (?) where a homeowner was shot and killed.

Years ago there was another band of thieves operating in town, raiding waterfront homes that they reached by boat. They confronted a friend of mine and his wife and locked them in a closet while they ransacked the house. My friend's wife, an elderly woman, never recovered from the trauma and died a little while after. The crooks were caught and convicted but not of murder. They should have been.

Why I'm not watching the Olympics, cont.
These folks are sending old women to "re-education" prisons. Thank goodness the 2014 Winter Olympics are scheduled for Russia, where everyone will be able to breath the sweet air of freedom.

Buy my mistake, please!

A builder with a lot on Mary Lane, not one of our preeminent addresses, offered a new, to-be-built house for $2,950,000 back in February. No one bit so today he's re-listed it as a foundation with house plans for $1,375,000. You could probably finish it for a little under $1 million so it may be a good buy, but that's still a lot of money to plump into this neighborhood. And if the original builder doesn't want to do it, why should you?

Ballot Initiative?

There's a movement afoot in Massachusetts to repeal the state income tax. There's even a good chance it will pass, saving each taxpayer an average of $3,700 per year - compare that to Obama's stimulous plan of $1,000 (which, of course, won't go to actual taxpayers - we're too rich but instead to the "needy).

Could we get rid of the income tax here in Connecticut? We'll never know, unless we change our constitution, because ballot inititives aren't allowed. Nutmeg voters might support a repeal but it's a cinch our legislators won't because they're the ones controlling all the money it sucks in. There's a chance to amend our constitution on this November's ballot and guess who opposes it? the teachers union. Quelle surprise.

Another Job Killer

Thanks to Greenwich Roundup,I was steered to a story about states, including Connecticut, that are pushing for mandatory sick leave for hourly workers. It's a popular move (one that will almost certainly be preempted by Congress if Obama and his crowd wins this Fall) and the linked article really tugs at the heartstrings - a school bus driver who can't recover from his cold because he can't stay home - but, just like raising the minimum wage, it will kill jobs. Small businesses generate more new jobs in our economy than any other source, with the possible exception of the ever growing public service sector, yet, year after year, legislatures find new ways to torture them.

A higher minimum wage was passed by the federal government and Connecticut this year and unemployment rose. There's been no discussion that I've seen even exploring the question of cause and effect - instead, it's all blamed on that debbil' Bush (I actually heard a radio caller propose that the current economic woes are the product of Bush and his old money crowd deliberately setting out to push the new money types back to their proper place).

You can read Connecticut's proposed legislation here. Judging from the support it has, I do believe that our politicians won't rest until we're all on the government payroll.

New Yorker Article on Greenwich
There's a terrific article in the New Yorker this week by Nick Paumgarten that captures the town nicely - its Old money (which was new not so long ago) its new boors and their flashy houses and all of us middle class schnooks in between. The article is not available on line but, and I would almost never say this, the piece is worth the news stand price of the entire magazine. Read it.

Here's a real disappointment
The Big Foot found in Georgia (the state, not the country - my previous post on this subject was a lame joke turns out to be a cheap rubber suit. Who'd have guessed?

Why I prefer to have my teeth filled in Old Greenwich

From Exeter New Hampshire news: Core Dental first in state to use porous paving material

How not to sell your house
Buy a house for $4.25 million in the Spring of 2006, change your mind and put it back up for sale three months later and ask $5.2 million - no one will notice the difference. Except in this case, they did, so today, 2 1/4 years after first being put up for sale, the price dropped to $3.95 million. I don't know the particulars of the pricing decisions that went on here and it's possible that gold-plated fixtures were added during the three months it was off the market but apparently would-be buyers in 2006 failed to see the increased value and balked. And now, of course, we're in an entirely different market.

Slow day for real estate news
In fact, I can find no real estate news, so instead I offer this story of riots planned for the Democratic convention. I don't think this is going to help Obama - in fact, the Chicago riots in 1968 got Richard Nixon elected (or helped achieve that dubious result), but I suspect that the loonies planning all this don't care. "Bring on the Revolution, man" or some such rot. Should be fun.

Try this line out during your next traffic stop
I've been attempting to lighten the burden of a friend of mine who's homeless. That's a fruitless endeavor but I was struck by what he was told by a Greenwich cop last week while being rousted from a park bench: "Get a job, pay taxes and then you can be my boss." I have my issues with our police force so I don't dare use this but if you're feeling brave, be my guest. Let me know how it works out.

A view from the trenches

I just spent much of the morning listening to Nora King, owner and president of the appraisal company Nora King & Associates. She looks great but her news was ugly. 50% of her firm's Greenwich case load is now devoted to pre-foreclosure or work-out notes, compared to zero last year, and 34 homes in town are now in foreclosure with, as her caseload suggests, more on the way.

This isn't necessarily bad news for buyers, of course, because it means some sellers may finally get serious, and real, about their pricing, and your "low ball" offer might now be heard by a receptive ear. Or not, depending on the seller's state of delusion.

Other tidbits: condo sales are not only way down, underwriters hate lending on them (which may be the cause of the effect). As King explained it, an underwriter in, say, Ohio, sees that 1/2 of its troubled loans, nationally, are arising from condos, and they don't want to hear about what the condo market's doing in Greenwich; they just don't want anything to do with any of them. There are still loans available but King suggests, as I did here last week, that if you're putting your unit on the market you take the last comparable unit sale for your compplex and price yours 10%less than that. This is not the time to stretch for a new price - your buyer won't get a loan.

Nationally, 1/3 of all single family homes sold within the past few years are underwater, or worth less than their buyers paid for them. Greenwich hasn't reached that stage, but it sure makes lenders nervous.

Appraisals are taking at least 7-10 days now - they one day turn-around time is gone, so make sure your mortgage contingency (yes, they're back) is for at least 20 and preferably 30 days; you'll need the extra time. Sellers, be aware of this new reality and don't be inflexible.

Buyers, go out and get pre-qualified now if you're even thinking of buying this Fall.

Sellers, know that the comparable sales your buyer's lender wil look at are no older than 90 days (30 days in depressed and falling markets) instead of the 6 month window used before. So if your neighbor down the street sold his house for $X back in March, don't count on your own house appraising out for the same amount.

Oh - "fixtures": pools, new kitchens, great new master baths etc. are not considered to add value to your house these days. Your house will probably sell faster but, as far as the lenders are concerned, you might just as well have saved your money (that's a bit of an overstatement, but generally true).

There's more, but how depressed do you want to be? The upside is that buyers should start seeing some decent opportunities if they haven't already. Sellers should start adjusting mentally to a down market, and hope that things get better next year. According to King and some other pundits there are some faint signs of a recovering market but I don't anticipate much good news in the immediate future. Especially if, as rumored yesterday, Fannie Mae has to be bailed out by us taxpayers. Wall Street's gonna hate that.

They're kidding, right?
Today's Greenwich Time headline announces that the town will now more closely monitor the spending on the Hamilton Avenue School project. This after spending $31 million on an unfinished project that's over-budget and way, way overdue? Now they're going to watch how our money's spent? I'm no financial wizard but prudence suggests that the time for monitoring this project should have started before the contractor was selected and certainly should have continued while the dollars were flying out the window. I think we need someone watching the watchers.

Sounds like Greenwich: coddled princes. Except many families in town have the resources to pull it off.

Why I don't like the Olympics, especially when hosted by China.
There's bad sportsmanship in baseball;
cheating about girl gymnasts' ages;
cracking down on dissidents;
and
massive cheating in general, in all sports.

I'm pleased that Mr. Phelps won his eight gold medals and I'm sure NBC is delighted by the record size of viewership for these games, but I won't miss them when they end, notwithstanding the warm feelings and peace on earth that they are supposed to be engendering.

What's an ugly Greenwich woman to do?
Assuming there is one, she can move to Australia. No such invitation for me. alas.

Save your money?
44 Greenwich Hills Drive, a 3 bedroom condominium, was originally listed for $849,000 in October 2006. It didn't sell so it was pulled from the market in March of 2007 and renovated: new kitchen, new baths, hardwood floors, etc., and returned to the market in July, 2007 at a new asking price of $1,100,000. It sold last week for $835,000.

So did the sellers (heirs, in this case) waste their money performing all those renovations? On the one hand, it didn't sell in its original condition at $849,000, so perhaps renovations were called for. On the other hand, judging from the new price of $1.1 million, a lot of cash must have been poured into this place. My hunch is, and I have no personal knowledge to support it, is that the heirs would have been better off slashing the original price rather than throwing good money after bad.

For What it's Worth - ahead of the Wall Street Journal!

The link is to today's WSJ's editorial denouncing the Green's efforts to block any sort of transmission of energy whether produced by windpower, solar or cow farts. We said it earlier here, repeatedly, but perhaps the WSJ says it best: "The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have."

Nalgene update
I mentioned a week or so ago that my favorite plastic water bottle, manufactured by Nalgene, had been pulled from the market due to hysteria - "if it saves the life of just one baby" sort of stuff. Friday, the FDA concluded that the stuff is safe. Not soon enough to save my water bottles and, naturally, not sufficient to quell the hysteria. This country's in trouble.

Why didn't I think of this instead of real estate?

Some corporation (link above) is selling off the Macaroni Grill, a chain I've never heard of, for $132 million. Pretty impressive, considering that there's no macaroni on its menu!

Update
Here's a fascinating tidbit from a Phoenix, Arizona diner: "The calamari at Macaroni Grill was tender and fresh...." In Phoenix? Really? Why do I suspect that this poor benighted soul has eaten nothing but frozen seafood her whole life? Of course, my ancestor, Albert Fountain, who spent most of his adult life in New Mexico and Arizon fighting Indians (and who was murdered in the White Sands of New Mexico) would probably have been grateful for any seafood, fresh or frozen. But I'm holding out for macaroni.

Slowly, oh so slowly
44 Calhoun Drive sold Friday for $4,041,050. It was originally listed on the Ides of March back in 2006 for $6,200,000, so I suppose its sale was a relief to the sellers, even at 1/3 off.

For Sale by Owner

The city of Bozeman, Montana has put its city hall up for sale and isn't using a Realtor. This has the local real estate organization up in arms but what the heck, they can always try again with professional help if they need to. Bids are due this Friday. So far, no bids have been received so if you've always had a hankering for a municipal building in the shadow of the Rockies, now's your chance.

Nantucket blues?
A reader who's hiding up in Nantucket sent this link - to my eye, things don't look any worse (or better) up there than they do down here. Which makes sense, sort of, because the island is more or less just an adjunct to our town (which is why I rarely visit, but nevermind).

"Chris

Long time reader and vacationing up in Nantucket... Seems the real estate envirnoment is not so good here either... Thought you might find this link interesting...

Update:

Link was bad before - sorry

See what happens when you don't have Bush to kick around?

For some reason that eludes me the blogger at Greenwichroundup.com chooses to link to a story today about poverty in Fredericton, Canada. I'd never heard of the place but it turns out to be in the middle of nowhere in New Brunswick (redundant, I know) and is even the capital of that sorry province. All very educational, but the question that struck me as I read an interview with the director of some soup kitchen was who he would blame for the sorry plight of his clients. I figured it couldn't be Bush or those wicked Republicans so I guessed global warming. I was wrong - he said it was all due to globalization but that, as my college-educated daughter would have been happy to tell him, is all Bush's fault; so I was close.

Here's a map of Fredericton - don't you think the best way to end poverty there is to encourage the inhabitants to get the hell out of Dodge and move someplace where there are more jobs than peeling birch trees and turning moose antlers into coat racks?:
View Larger Map

Does this mean that A Rod's not buying Antares' white elephant?

Last year, in a rather transparent attempt to demonstrate buyer interest, any buyer interest, in its collossal (35,000 sq.ft) blunder on Langhorne Lane, Antares hired a publicist who "toured" the place with NY Yankee A Rod and made certain that the press learned of the visit. Most of us considered it to be nothing but hogwash at the time and the house did not sell. Still hasn't. Now, according to the NY Post, the man's buying an apartment in NYC. Well, at least he was interested in real estate, even if it wasn't in Greenwich.

Apples to Apples

97 East Elm Street, a nice old 1920's single family house that was renovated in 2004, sold for $1,612,000 back in December, 2004. It sold again Friday for $1,795,000, which was full asking price and after only 10 days on the market. The appreciation was no home run - by my bad math, roughly 2.5% per annum, straight, not compounded, but rent during that period would probably have been somewhere around $3,500 per month so that's $133,000 saved, plus tax benefits. Regardless, good investment or not, because the house was basically untouched during this latest period of ownership, it offers a good idea of what's happening in our downtown market. And I'm always delighted to see evidence of active buyers [just as exterminators drool over evidence of active termites? - Ed].

Why wait for the coronation when the Messiah has arrived?

Speaking at a fund raiser held among San Francisco pan-handlers desperate for change, Obama raised $7.2 million in just three hours while basking in Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's adoration, who called him "a leader that God has blessed us with at this time."

Weren't they supposed to pass out palm fronds? Where's mine?

More NY Times economic and mathematical illiteracy

I'm beginning to think that Times reporters simply don't know anything at all about what they write about, which is an improvement, I suppose, over my earlier thoughts that they were part of a vast conspiracy designed to feed off the stupidity of their readers. Here's the latest example, this time confusing just about everything, from the square footage of houses to the delinquency rate of second mortgages. Sure, it could be that the Times deliberately chooses not to give hard numbers of an actual increase in loans gone bad because readers would then realize what a non-story it was and perhaps hate Bush a little less, for just a few seconds, but I prefer to believe that these guys are just dumb as a sack of rocks and simply don't realize what they're saying.

The comments below the linked article are well worth reading, especially this one that quotes Michael Crichton:

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward, reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

New vs. renovate

A reader asks, "Sorry to be off topic, about the new construction per feet cost. What is a new addition to a house cost nowadays per feet. Also, was told the cost to build a second floor (above the existing house) was much cheaper than adding to first level. Any opinions?"

Well as you know if you stick around this blog, I've got lots of opinions and some of them are actually based on fact (but you'll have to figure out which those are). Anyway, addressing the last question first, I've been disappointed in the past to learn how little money can be saved by adding a second floor to a ranch. Building up, in other words, instead of starting anew.

You start off with a savings, of course, in that you already have a foundation and its infrastructure - water, sewer, etc. But then you have to look at what you're improving. It probably has 8' ceilings which are fine for you but a turn-off these days to buyers. You can add to the height of the first floor, but that's expensive. If you don't, while you won't exactly be putting lipstick on a pig, you will be building a house that lacks appeal to many buyers (unless heating costs stay high, in which case, low ceilings may come back in vogue).

How's your electrical service? It's probably outdated. Will your existing furnace be large enough to service twice the existing space? Are your windows original and hence obsolete? How much will it cost to extend your chimneys? If you're going to have new baths upstairs, do you want to leave the original baths untouched? Is your plumbing adequate? How much will a new kitchen cost?

Etc. So, in my experience, you're not going to achieve much of a cost saving. If other readers have had a better experience, please write in and educate us.

Plain old additions and re-dos are, or can be cheaper than adding on, but it's always cheaper to, say, frame out a nice, square window opening than it is to deal with a slanting old one (blending the outside trim can be a bear, for instance). Having worked on both - old and new, I have spent as long as a full day doing a window in an 1840 Maine farmhouse and perhaps 45 minutes framing and popping in a new window in an addition we put on. And of course, you never know what's behind a wall until you open it up - surprise!

Just remember that the most expensive words in a remodeling job are, "as long as we're doing that ...."

There's nothing wrong with taking an old clunker and bringing it up to date and, if you get the house for the right price you'll make money. Just not as much as you think, though.

If you want to know why we're in the current mortgage mess, read this puff piece from 1998. Money quote: "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac operate independently each with a preferred lender base, but both are in the business to make sure that as many consumers become homeowners as possible."

That they did, with the result that together, the two entities now hold 46% of the national debt or they did in 2003, when the linked article was written. No one listened back then and I wonder if anyone is really listening now.

Appraisal woes
Interesting article here on the difficulties in appraising houses in a falling market.

Lenders are more cautious and, because house prices are falling so rapidly in some areas, won't accept a "comparable" sale that's six months old.

"In San Francisco, neighborhoods are small, which compresses the number of comparable homes, making appraisals particularly complicated. 'Any time you have a reduction in volume, especially because that is when the underwriting criteria of lenders tends to become more stringent, it's difficult,' said Charles Warren, who runs a San Francisco appraisal business called Warren and Warren. 'Lenders want to see comparables from the last 30 days, and all of a sudden you are left without any valid data. That exacerbates the problem.' "

And this bit of sound advice: "Buyers should make sure to leave their financing contingencies in place until the lender has signed off on the appraisal. The down market means that lenders are reducing appraisal values more often."

On a brighter note, I heard an interview with a tri-state lender this morning (Hudson something or other - they're opening an office in Greenwich but have been lending in Fairfield County for some time)and he was surprisingly optimistic about the housing market in this area. His bank has always held on to its loans, rather than repackage them and sell them on the national market, and, while the bank has insisted on a minimum 20% down, on average, its borrowers put 39% down. "Our customers are people buying homes," he said, "not speculators." So far this year, its Fairfield County loans are up 1,700 over 2007, which was their best year. So, there are buyers still out there.

The bank president also pointed out that the housing collapse has hit hardest in just seven states: Michigan, Illinois and Ohio, which he attributes to the collapse of auto sales and its effect on the income streams of people who work for auto parts suppliers; and Florida, Nevada, California and Arizona, which all suffer from a glut of speculative building. He still likes the Northeast as a place to make housing loans. I hope his enthusiasm is justified by later events.

Update

The bank is Hudson City Savings Bank.According to its website, it's doing very well. They specialize in jumbo prime mortgages, so no wonder they like Greenwich.

White Elephants and such

Reader Juan asks, "Will you provide the link for article by the 'colleague who compared assessed value...'? "

I would be glad too, if Greenwich Citizen posted the guy's stuff on line, but it doesn't (they didn't post my column, either, which I always thought was kind of dumb). Police blotter? It's there. Real estate? Who's interested in real estate in Greenwich, Connecticut?

Wanna guess who's next on the bankruptcy rolls?. Here's the part I like best about this Florida entrepreneur's delusions:

Another current McKinney project is a $135 million spec home, The Manalapan Residence. This three-story 67,670 square foot home includes 14 bedrooms, 24 bathrooms, an 18 car garage, a 6,140 sq. ft. master bedroom suite, lavish Grand Rotunda room for entertaining, dual water walls, aquarium ceilings and walls, movie theatre, casino and club room with stunning aquarium wet bar, oceanfront gourmet family kitchen, catering kitchen, outdoor summer kitchen, his/her offices, 10 wet bars, two wine rooms (one for red, one for white), gymnasium with beauty salon, two swimming pools (classical lap and grotto waterfall/waterslide), shark tank, two elevators, bowling alley, tennis court with pavilion, archery range, 1/4 mile jogging/go cart track, butterfly gardens, Italian and Floridian gardens, sculpture gardens, citrus orchard, guest house, staff house, back-up generator, full home automation, and more.

One reader has suggested that Greenwich residents who want to build a dream house just wait a few months and take something off the hands of a failed builder for pennies on the dollar. If you're also thinking of a little vacation spot in Florida, you may want to apply that advice to our south, too.

Okay, land values are going up in some areas;Do you suppose we in Greenwich can develop a market for cute little blonde kids?

School construction delayed again

It's hardly a surprise that the Hamilton Avenue School project has again missed its latest completion deadline, as described above - use incompetent volunteers to oversee a construction firm with, to be generous, a dubious history involving numerous allegations of involvement with organized crime and you can probably predict the results. But now the same group of volunteers is about to undertake the reconstruction of Glenville School. Hmmm. We've witnessing dropping test results, an inability to bring school construction projects in on time or anywhere near budget and our response is to welcome back the Superintendent and set her and her minions off on another quest. I'm not sure that's the best way to run a railroad.

The Boys are back!

Ever wonder where drake mallards got to during the summer? Turns out, they molt and don brown feathers like the hens - who knew? Now that fall is approaching, they're molting back and will soon be their colorful selves once again. I don't think my little iPhone camera can show those feathers but if you click to enlarge you might get a glimpse of the change. Otherwise, take my word for it - how much have you got to lose?

Correction!
I'm not the New York Times (no s..., Sherlock), so I put corrections in a prominent place or, at least, as prominent a place as a blog with 200 readers a day gets. Anyway, I was wrong about police overtime pay being included in the calculation of their pensions. Here's what someone I assume knows what he's talkingabout wrote:

"When the Greenwich Police Officers work overtime at a construction job it is NOT part of their pension. NO overtime, including patrol and private jobs, is included, their pension is based on just their yearly salary. Just wanted to clarify that."

I still don't like paying cops to direct traffic at construction sites but at least we're not paying twice for that "service" once when they're out on the street and again when they quit.

I've hit the big time!

First bit of spam has arrived in the comments box. No doubt computer generated by my mention of homeopathic "medicine" (it starts, "In 2003, my company came up with a way to treat most viruses, using already existing, safe drugs. It's the subject of patents pending....")I deleted it before i finished so, alas, if you want to invest in this sure-fire winner, you'll have to wait for it to appear in your own spam box.

The fellow who kept posting obnoxious comments seems to have faded away once I switched from automatic posting to moderated and I was considering going back to the unfettered format but if the computers have found me, I guess I'll keep things the way they are, at least for now.

Another myth bites the dust, no doubt to be replaced by five more

Airborne, a supposed cold-preventative mix concocted by a school teacher and adored by Oprah, has just agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by the government. Users are undeterred, of course, because the stuff works in their minds and presto. "It's hard to prove something doesn't work if you don't catch a cold" one regulator said, which brings to mind the old joke of the fellow who's found painting a long green line on a Vermont road. "Keeps elephants away", he explains to an inquirerer. "But there aren't any elephants around here", he's told. "Works pretty well, then, don't it?"

If you ever care to have your faith in the native intellegence of Greenwich residents shaken just a bit, stand by the counter at a CVS and watch presunably well-educated consumers pay big bucks for homeopathic remedies, all of which have been thoroughly debunked by the FDA, Consumer Reports and any scientist I ever heard of. Doesn't matter to these folks and it's not my money, so I don't care. Until I remember that they vote.

(White) elephant graveyard?
What's happening to the market for our mega-mansions? To no one's surprise but their spec builders, their prices are falling even as they remain unsold (well that's dumb - if they sold, their prices would stop falling, even if their value didn't, but you get the point). Today 40 Zaccheus Mead lane, originally listed in February 2007 for $11,200,000, dropped its price again, this time to $7,995,000, 30% below original ask. The real problem with this property is its yard - it doesn't have one - but that sky high price didn't help much.

Interestingly, this latest price drop places Zaccheus in direct competition with 8 Copper Beech, which does have a yard (but "only" 11,000 sq.ft vs 15,000). Which will sell first, and at what price? We'll see. Ten Copper Beech, built at the same time as #8 was, like #8, priced at about $9,500,000 last summer, but its builder accepted a bid of $8,050,000 last February and got rid of the place. Number 8's owner has now matched that price and in fact dipped a little below it at $7,995,000, but February was then and August is now. Different markets.

Finally, I see that my colleague and columnist for another paper has compared assessed value to selling price and concluded that all our homes increased in value the past year. That's comforting but I don't believe it - something is wrong with his methodology, I think. In any event, even he admits that sales have dropped a wee bit, like 30%. He says, don't worry, be happy. I'm less sanguine.

Does anyone at the New York Times know anything about business and how it operates?
This error in which the paper completely screws up the meaning of profit either reveals an abysmal lack of knowledge or an abiding faith in the economic stupidity of Time's readers. Or both. It must have hurt to correct it.

Even I don't want to see our oceans destroyed
Here's an alarming article that OwlGore and I can agree to worry about: according to this scientist, and he certainly seems to know what he's talking about, we face the extinction of life in our oceans and a sea of slime. Ugh.

Just want to let you know that I read all sorts of things, including articles from the other side of my usual thinking. Well reasoned arguments, good; hysterical rants from fat frauds on houseboats, bad.

Okay, we finally have a justification for the $500,000 Greenwich kitchen.
Humans got smarter because we cook. Of course in our town, that just means the staff is learning new tricks but in principle ....

One way out of a bad real estate decision

Investors.com has an informative article today on an alternative for troubled homeowners, giving the lender a deed in lieu of foreclosure. It's simpler (and cheaper, so less is wasted on attorney's fees or - and this hurts doubly - real estate agent fees), faster and, at least according to the article, protects your credit history. I don't know about this last feature, one way or the other, but I am aware of at least two instances in town where would-be builders are bailing out of their projects by exactly this procedure, so something must have appealed to them. You might want to check it out, if you find yourself in this situation.

I would think that, if it's your kids' home you're trying to protect, you'd want to fight to the bitter end but if you're involved with a failed spec project, reading the writing on the wall and turning the land, half-finished house, whathaveyou to the bank might make sense.

Russians using any and all weapons in their invasion, but brave folks are fighting back.
Two Georgians claim they have Big Foot's body.

Tom Friedman has been in the sun too long.
I assume that everyone reads James Taranto's "Best of the Web" column in the WSJ but just in case you missed it today, he does a wonderful job of deconstructing Mr. Friedman's claim that solar and wind power could be cost effective if only Congress would give them a jump start. Maybe, but only if Congress raises the price of all existing fuels sky high (scroll down to "Gas heads towards $19.84 a gallon") as Taranto proves with quotes from Friedman's own column. So really, Friedman isn't arguing that we can get affordable energy from these alternative sources but rather, if we jack up everything else, they might make the cut. Not an encouraging prospect for a healthy economy, I don't think.

Here's Taranto on Friedman:

Friedman fantasizes about a solution to the energy problem that "will take more than a Manhattan Project":

'It will require a fundamental reshaping by government of the prices and regulations and research-and-development budgets that shape the energy market. Without taxing fossil fuels so they become more expensive and giving subsidies to renewable fuels so they become more competitive--and changing regulations so more people and companies have an interest in energy efficiency--we will not get innovation in clean power at the scale we need.'

Such a massive exercise of government control over the economy is "cost effective" only in the sense that ignorance is strength and slavery is freedom.

Club Road, Riverside. Bad photo, decent house on a half acre. I stopped by today to review for a builder but, at just a bit more than $2.2 million, this wouldn't be a bad buy "as is" for someone who wants a bit of a renovation job. It needs updated baths and a new kitchen would be welcome, and central air couldn't hurt, but you could be on Club Road, among plenty of $4 million houses (and up) for under $3.

A reader sent me this link to an article on the end of our consumer culture as we know it. It's a tad depressing and I'm not as gloomy as its author but it's always useful to know what some investors are thinking. And besides, he might very well be right, which is a scary thought.

Olympics - who cares?
I haven't been watching the Olympics - not one minute of coverage - and I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one. I've never been a big fan of watching other people pound water and as for large Armenians sweating over dumb bells well heck, I'll give that a pass, too. And while I admire the Chinese people, I detest the dictators who run their country so there's that, too. Plus, there's the cheating by officials.I'll be curious to see what the final ratings are; for all I know, it's just a handful of kooks like me boycotting the damn things and the rest of the country's glued to the set. Fine with me - enjoy.