Price reduction on Indian Head
I thought this house was priced well when it came on two weeks ago at $3.895 but the market being what it is, it's already dropped $300K. For its Indian Head Road location, that's pretty good. Disclosure: it is my brother Gideon's listing, and I can't say mean things about it or our Sunday family dinners will be awkward, but I really do like the house. As an aside, know that I will always disclose any personal interest I might have in a listing I discuss, so if I make no such mention, you can be certain that none exists. 23 Byram Terrace, for instance,mentioned below, is listed by Diane Dutcher, who is with Coldwell Banker in Old Greenwich.

23 Byram Terrace
Here's a nice house
At $1.495 million, this new house built by Dave Tilly is an excellent value. I hope that the address will support this price level because, if it does, it will encourage more builders to build like this. The house is super-insulated with soy-based foam, has a computerized HVAC system that should save the owner a pile of money in heating and cooling bills and is, all in all, a very attractive project. You can check out more photos here.

The fix is in?
It's not sexy and I suspect no one really cares,especially on this dismal anniversary of 9/11, but this Wall Street Journal editorial complains that certain investors are getting a free ride on the Fannie Mae bailout, courtesy, as usual, of us taxpayers.

With the weekend bailout, however, those investors can buy another vacation home, or three. On Monday, yield spread premiums on Fannie Mae subordinated debt maturing in 2011 plunged by three full percentage points to a bid of 3.50 points. Investing rarely gets better than this: Buy paper you know carries a higher risk but also a higher return, and then have Uncle Sugar eliminate that risk so you also make a windfall profit.

44 Riverside Avenue
This is a very nice house but you can reach out the back window and pat the roofs of trucks wizzing past on I-95. It last sold for $890 in 2005 (after initially asking $1.249) so the new sellers aren't asking for the moon here ($1.075) but, unless the highway has shifted north since they bought it, the problem remains.

Going for broke?
The same builder who brought new price records to East Elm Street for condominiums has listed a single family home at 110 E. Elm at $8.5 million. I'm dubious but if I had his business acumen I wouldn't be working at my advanced old age, so I wish him well and good luck.

10 Andrews Road
A reader inquired about the status of this listing and despite my vow to engage in nothing but happy talk for the next few days, I looked it up. Ooops! It came on asking $6.495 last year and sold this year for $4.850. Even at that, I think the builder was lucky, given the lack of yard and the odd layout of the place. But as I've said before, a lot of these drastic price reductions are not a reflection of a bad market but instead, a voice of reason answering ridiculously optimistic sellers' dreams.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Someone just posted the following comment regarding the house on Sheephill Road:

Terrible location/neighborhood? Are you kidding? Convenient an close to everything, and quite a few houses around the corner on Riverside Lane were listed and/or have sold in this very same price range.

In five years, the whole street and neighborhood will look just like this house. Why beat up the owner for being first and smartest for having the vision to tear down an obsolete house?

I don't disagree, nor do I think that the Havemeyer Lane house I mentioned is a terrible buy. But the historical fact is that houses north of the Post Road in Riverside and Old Greenwich have never sold for what their neighbors to the south have. "Pioneers get arrows" one builder told me when he refused to buy property on the then-undeveloped Dialstone Lane. He saved his money but lost a great deal because the guy I did sell it to renovated and sold the first property on the street to exceed $1 million.

But if you're going to go where no one else dares to tread, be prepared to wait awhile before your judgment is confirmed.

Why are these men laughing?
Guess who took in the most money from Fannie Mae?
Top Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008

Name
Office
Party/State
Total

1. Dodd, Christopher J
S
D-CT
$133,900

2. Kerry, John
S
D-MA
$111,000

3. Obama, Barack
S
D-IL
$105,849

4. Clinton, Hillary
S
D-NY
$75,550

According to our daily paper,
town lobstermen will be targeting terrorists. Great idea, if it gives the guys a place to moor their boats under the Mianus bridge but I seem to recall that the last time that bridge fell it was due to home-grown terrorists: a negligent state government and slip-shod inspection techniques.

Ignoring 100 years of fulsome editorials,
the NY Times fires 550 unionized workers

Because I think higher taxes will hurt the Greenwich real estate market
I'm reposting this from James Taranto's "Best of the Web column.

He'll Wreck the Economy Later

"Democrat Barack Obama says he would delay rescinding President Bush's tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy," the Associated Press reports:

So he's saying he wants to wait for any recession to pass, and then he'll hurt the economy?

Signs of life?
Not really - we're still woefully short on properties going to contract. yet there are some good buys out there. I've mentioned 26 Summit Road, at $2.195, and, now that it's come down $1.1 million (to $3.3), 74 Zaccheus Mead Lane is very attractive. One property that did go to contract today was 18 Orchard Hill Lane, for what I assume (because it went so quickly) was close to or at its asking price of $1.895. This was no doubt a land sale, with 2.75 acres in a 2 acre zone with a good location off Mayfair Lane, but it's nice to see any builder still active. Most are huddling on the sidelines, waiting to see what happens. Tomorrow, I'll try to post on more bargains. They really do exist and two years from now, you'll thank me for pointing them out.

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Fraud at Fannie Mae - who'd a thunk it?
Try this for a good discussion of what's going on at our newly acquired lending institution. It all reminds me of the Savings and Loan collapse. A friend of mine was hired by the government to examine the loan files of several failed banks. He found literally file cabinets full of fraudulent loans but was basically told, "forget it - prosecuting these guys is so yesterday". Our regulators just wanted to close things up and move on and that's what they did. The rotten bankers probably moved on to Fannie Mae.

39 Boulder Brook
What's a house worth?
You can't tell from this listing.It was priced at $8.595 million when first listed in April 2008 and today was reduced to $5.298. This kind of thing does not instill confidence in buyers, in either Realtors' acumen or the stability of the market.
As an aside, some other new construction on the same street, #33, was priced at $6.875 when it came on this past February and still sits unsold today at $6.575. At least someone's sticking to his guns but 33's failure to sell kind of hints at what I and the marketplace think of #39's original price.

So I was in a lovely house today and in one of the boy's bedrooms I saw this:

and this

and this:



I'm hardly the model for perfect parenthood but I'll bet that if this kid's parents had dumped the TV from his room and placed some books in that bookcase his SAT preparations would be easier. Just a suggestion.

Google Maps
How cool is this? I searched for 'adding Google maps to my blog" and got this:

Can I embed Google Maps into my website or blog?


Absolutely. You can embed a simple map, a set of driving directions, a local search, or maps created by other users. Here's how:

1. Ensure that the map you'd like to embed appears in the current map display.
2. Click "Link to this page" in the top-right corner of the map.
3. In the box that pops up, copy the HTML under "Paste HTML to embed in website," and paste it into the source code of your website or blog.

If you'd like to adjust the size of the map before you embed it, just click "Customize and preview embedded map," select your preferred size, and take a look at the preview map. Once you're happy with what you see, copy the HTML that appears in the box at the bottom of the window.

Once I figure out what "the source code of your blog" means, I'll try it.

View Larger Map

Well it works, sort of, except I lost the marker indicating 44 Locust Road and the size has to be smaller. Still, progress is being made.
Here's Grahampton/Meadowcroft. Let's see if this works.

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Sell your house
17 Mark's Road in Riverside was bought for $2.495 million in July '06. The new owner attempted to resell it this year and, I think wisely, kept the price right around where he'd come in and in fact had reduced it below that point, to $2.45 million when the listing expired at the end of August. Now it's back, asking $2.495, exactly where he bought it. My guess is that he is going to discover that the market has dropped. It's a very nice, somewhat quirky house on the same tidal creek I live on so naturally, I like the place. And as a neighbor, I naturally hope he'll get everything he's asking, and more. But ...

173 Stanwich has also seen some price reduction, dropping in the past 18 months from $3.595 all the way to $2.495 today. The mistake here, if I may be so bold as to offer my opinion, is that the owner tarted the place up with all sorts of high-tech wizardry and thought that would justify a wacky price. It obviously didn't.

And finally, there's 48 Locust, way up in our Northwest corner (a reader has suggested I link to Google maps, which is an excellent idea - I'll see what I can do right after posting this). The seller bought it for $2.398 back in October 2005 and re-listed it for $2.950 in March 2007. No improvements that I'm aware of. He dropped the price to $2.750 a month later and has stuck at that price ever since. If he really wants to sell it, I think the market has a message for him. Just saying ....

440 Round Hill
Marc Weill's house finally sold yesterday for $11 million. That's a big chunk of change but quite a comedown from its original asking price (5 years ago)of $21.5 million. I don't interpret this sale as evidence that the market is collapsing; the original price was just dumb.

1 Meadowcroft
Got the grand tour on 37 Grahampton/ 1 Meadowcroft today. Understand that I'm not a fan of houses this size so my comments are not purely objective. It's certainly big, and there's a huge cellar filled with all the wine racks, media rooms and toys that today's adults seem to want. Large kitchen with some kind of granite thing going on - it's too high to be a food preparation surface, and too wide to reach even to its middle, so I'm uncertain what purpose it serves. I asked the agent, "what's this?" and was told, "granite". That I already knew.
Lots of big bedrooms, thick doors, big baths, everything you'd expect, I suppose. Mariani builds a nice house and this one is no exception. I would quibble with its approach, however. You can't tell from the artist's rendering posted here but it's a very short jog from the street to the house; turn off Meadowcroft and bang! There's the house. If I had an ego large enough to accommodate buying this house I'd want a long winding drive so that my visitors would think, "wow, this guy's made it!". You'll have to find other ways to impress them. Nice flat back yard, if anyone still uses them. And a pool.
Are there buyers out there for this size house? We'll see.

Put on your tinfoil hats!
Okay, they're tired of dumb f***s like us who don't believe in global warming so now they're going to
use more persuasive methods.

Armed with new research into what makes some people environmentally conscious and others less so, the 148,000-member American Psychological Association is stepping up efforts to foster a broader sense of eco-sensitivity that the group believes will translate into more public action to protect the planet.

“We know how to change behavior and attitudes. That is what we do,” says Yale University psychologist Alan Kazdin, association president. “We know what messages will work and what will not.”

17 Meadowcroft
Old vs new?
A reader points out that this beautiful place on 8 acres didn't sell when priced at $16.8 million for the past two years and thus wonders whether Mr. Mariani's new venture will fare better. Good question and one only time will answer but there are definitely two different markets for huge houses: old and new, so this one's failure does not necessarily portend the same fate for #1.
But then again ....

74 Zaccheus Mead
Under "new listings" comes this reduction (albeit with a new broker). It didn't sell last year at $4.395 million so now it's back with a fresh new price of $3.3 million. Zaccheus is a good location and a $1.1 million dollar price chop isn't so bad, either.

Location, location
This house on Havemeyer tried breaking the $2 million price barrier ($2.1 million, in fact). It didn't and now is at $1.795. Getting there, but Havemeyer remains a busy road and the new development across the street won't help.

Master Baths
So far, most readers responding to the poll (that's over to your right, see it?) consider a tub in the master bedroom to be either "essential" or at least "nice to have". Builders take notice.

This might work
RealEstate.com is teaming up with AT&T so buyers can search for properties on their cellphones. A decent idea, but perhaps AT&T picked the wrong partner. I've never used the site but I just checked it now and it tells me that there are no properties for sale in Greenwich for $15 million or above. Mr. Mariani will be disappointed to learn that.

I wonder if we can get the Greenwich Board of Realtors to try this for our town?
In this slow real estate market, we need all the buyers we can get. If this Alabama group's offer of hard cash works Group offers Jews $50,000 to move to town we could try the same thing for lots of ethnic groups - French Huguenots, for instance (just in case, I'll be reverting back to "de la Fontaine" - it was the British who made us change it, anyway).

Barbarians at the Gates
I just tried emailing my friend David Ayres at Sotheby's and was informed that I'd been blocked by that firm's spam-buster. Should I take this personally? Must I stop saying mean things about Sotheby's parent, Realogy? Inquiring minds want to know.
(By the way, the image above was lifted from a good article on libertarianism - if you're tired of reading about Sarah Palin's eyeglasses,
try this.)

Hurricane Ike Slams into Cuba Dr. Jeff Masters reports:

Cuba is taking a terrible beating from Hurricane Ike, which crashed ashore in eastern Cuba last night as a Category 3 hurricane with 120 mph winds. Ike's winds have since weakened to Category 2 strength--100 mph--but are still strong enough to destroy the Cuba's electrical system and heavily damage the cities it encounters along the heavily populated east-central portion of the country. Damage will be heavy in Camaguey, which reported sustained winds of 49 mph at 8am EDT as Ike passed 20 miles to the south. Baracoa, on the coast to the southeast of where Ike made landfall, suffered a significant storm surge, topped by high battering waves, that damaged or destroyed 1,000 buildings. Ike's winds and rains of 6-12 inches will cause additional heavy losses to Cuban agriculture, and the storm should easily rank as one of the top-five most damaging storms in Cuban history. Ike is expected to track over Havana Tuesday morning, and the city's 2.2 million people can expect significant damage to the many poorly-built structures in the capital city. It will take Cuba a long time to recover from Ike.

Cuba, like Burma, doesn't want our help which is probably okay - Ike has now crossed Cuba and is again over (warm) water,picking up strength and headed for Texas, so we'll need the money.

You want a bargain? Here's a bargain.
I think so,anyway. 26 Summit Road in Riverside. New construction originally asking $2.495, which didn't seem at all a stupid price, is now down to $2.195 million. Decent house, decent yard and, for those who buy their houses like they buy their groceries, $510 per square foot.

If at first you don't succeed...
15 Sidney Lanier Lane first went on the market in May 2006 asking $7.8 million. It didn't sell even though it was eventually reduced to $6.2 million and was taken off the market a year later. Now it's back, asking $6.595. Good luck.

Testing the waters
Mark Mariani has just listed new construction at 37 Grahampton Lane for $15 million dollars. It's a good looking house (I'll post a picture tomorrow) and Mariani is a quality contractor so if anything should go in that price range, this one should. But what's the market for 15,000 sq. ft homes these days? I guess we'll see. I would never dare question this very successful builder's business sense but by my count this makes three spec houses he has on the market, each over $10 million. He obviously has nerves of steel.

Picture lifted w/o permission (because I don't know how to contact the photographer) from the very talented "Blonde Excuse"

Speaking of Business....
I was struck the other day by the sight of a shopper exiting the Old Greenwich Food Mart with a full cart of groceries. Not so long ago this was common,of course, so the fact that I thought it unusual seems evidence, to me, that more and more folks are using the new ShopRite for their main shopping and using Food Mart as a fill-in. I certainly have done no research to verify this but if my own experience is typical, we might look for a new tenant on Arcadia Road in the not-so-distant future. I hope not - small towns need places like this, or they used to.

It may be the future, but whose future?Zillow.com and 300 newspapers have joined forces to sell real estate advertising. I see the upside for Zillow here, but to this non-businessman, it seems as though the newspapers will be selling access to their last revenue base for 50 cents on the dollar.

Dress for Success
I've been criticized for my informal dress at broker open houses - I'm even told that someone wanted to bar (male) agents from wearing flip flops on hot summer days, but that was before Obama made flip flops so fashionable - so I've decided to change my image. Here, from last week's NY Fashion Show, is the new look that I and no doubt many other agents will be sporting:
Pretty cool, eh?

Bonobos in Paradise
My friends at
Greenwich Roundup have been attacking our Board of Education for being a crowd of incompetent bunglers but that's missing the point: the Board of Ed's budget last year was $125,000,000 or $13,929 for each student. As test scores fall and our Board fumbles, we're seeing an increasing outflow of students to private schools, any private school. So let's keep the Board as it is, or even expand it; at $14,000 a pop, we can ditch our students and get our budget under control in no time.

Fannie Mae's new digs
We all have to work somewhere but as we taxpayers nationalize 70% of the mortgage market, perhaps we should examine the hubris and greed that produced buildings like this.

And then we can focus on the Department of Education whose 2007 budget was $54.4 billion. No waste there, I'm sure, but still...

Sally O'Brien
One of my favorite people, Sally O'Brien was seriously injured in a fall Saturday night when she lost her electrical power and went down to her basement to investigate. To this layman, her prognosis seems dire. Sally was an indomitable spirit who loved quirky old houses as much, if not more, than I do, and she championed them, fetching prices that justified their continued existence in this tear-down town. I'm praying for her.

Ok, this is pathetic
After reading so much about OwlGore's energy-hogging mansion it occurred to me to look it up. That's it on top. Sheesh, it would barely pass muster in our fair Greenwich. This is a mansion? I sure hope there's a lot more house hidden around back because otherwise, the guy's practically living in a hovel - pretty discouraging for someone who's making millions on his latest racket. And, if this is considered a mansion, what is the rest of America living in? I've got to get out more.
On the other hand, the house on the bottom is, I kid you not, our current President's Texas ranch. I have no idea what it says about anything, but I do note that it's heated geothermically and uses far, far less energy than the Whopper's home, at least according to
this report
Update: "A random internet looker-upper" said...
There is more hidden around the back, for what it's worth (linked below). Apparently it's 10,000 square feet, which is probably a Tier II mansion in Greenwich (versus the elite monstrosities in the 15,000-35,000 range).

Here it is; enjoy.

Another reader poll
The cost of new construction poll is done; average cost seems to be between $300 and $400 sq.ft., which is also the range quoted me by my builder client who also cautioned that the proper answer is, "how much does a dress cost?" Depending on what you want, the costs can go anywhere.
But here's another: I occasionally see master bathrooms with great showers but no bathtub. I don't remember taking a bath in 40 years so I'm not concerned by the lack of one personally, but I have a sense that no tub would be a turn-off for those who like to soak. Is it?

Let them eat cake?
But not any fish served by Robert De Niro
Or we could all relax and heed the wisdom of Northern Ireland's Environmental Minister, who calls the whole man-made global fuss an hysterical pseudo-religion. I like that guy.

How to get rich in real estate
Become a Senator. According to this story, it worked for Joe Biden. Nice work if you can get it but as an author, I'm just as impressed to learn in the same article that Fighting Joe received $225,000 in advances for his autobiography last year. I'm sure it was a best seller, especially if it carried a jacket blurb by Neil Kinnock

Uh oh!
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were cooking their books
. Of course, with so many friends in Washington, I'm sure the chief thieves will be allowed to keep their millions and leave town, no doubt to be rehired somewhere else in the banking industry.

Answer: "Hey Y'all, watch this!"
Question is, what are a redneck's last words?



2007 - Antares expands into luxury residential housing

Vixen!
Won't Somebody Stop Her?
Damn - Palin didn't have an affair with her husband's ex-business partner. It's back to the blogs for my liberal friends.

(Great Grandfather Caldwell decides to leave for America)
Bloomberg reports that
Foreclosures are up. There's some encouraging news buried way down in the article: foreclosed houses are beginning to sell, indicating that the glut's being reduced (a local real estate columnist reports the increase in existing house sales in July as great news but declines to mention that 1/3 of those sales were bank-owned properties; you'd think he was being paid to be cheerful or something).

Hanna a bust?
In terms of high winds, probably so. Check out this great blog, Weather Nerd and all his links for a good picture of Hanna and, more worrisome for residents of the Florida Keys and the Gulf states, Hurricane Ike.
Rambling through the Internet, guys (for some reason, storm tracking seems to be a guy thing) blogging from the center of Hanna report a lot of rain but not much else and because of the storm's speed, even the rain is ending quickly. Of course, even 4" of rain could cause a mess up here - we'll find out tonight. In the meantime, keep your powder dry.

New York Times to condense paper

77 Sheephill
This house was listed back in January '07 for $1.995 million and still hasn't sold, despite a steady series of price cuts. It's now down to $1.695, perhaps where it should have started to begin with, but in this market, who knows what will happen?It's a good house, so its future will give a pretty good snapshot of this area of town's market. But regardless of how much the seller put into renovating this house, and it looks to be a substantial sum, he'll probably make out okay - he paid only $435,000 for it in 2001.

Freedom of the Press
Imagine that you had once worked as a real editor of a real newspaper, or that your father had founded a real newspaper and handed its reins over to you. Now imagine that you've ended your editing career with, or transformed your inheritance into, a light-weight vehicle for advertising and nothing more. Bummer, no?
With that in mind, I'm happy to announce that my former paper, The Greenwich Post, has bravely faced down the scorn and ire of its advertisers and will, beginning September 18th, begin running Susie Costaregni's gossip column, "The Dish", every week! The public be damned, we're going to print what must be told. Right on, guys.

Here's a taste of what the hard-hitting Dish will be serving up:

Greenwich residents Frank Gifford, the former NFL star and sports commentator, and Olympic gold medal swimmer Donna de Varona were seen having lunch at Valbella restaurant in Old Greenwich this past week; Regis Philbin and friends were spotted dining there Saturday, Jan. 20; and actor Jesse Bradford of "Swimfan" and "Flags of Our Fathers" fame ate there last week. And . . . at Valbella New York on West 13th Street, recent Golden Globe-winning actress and producer Salma Hayek of the popular sitcom "Ugly Betty" was seen having dinner.

And this:

Among the 300 friends, colleagues and dignitaries, including her favorite security guard, at the party were Randy Jones of the Village People; celebrity photographer James Edstrom; Fox News legal analyst Lis Wiehl and attorney Michael Sherman; MSNBC anchors Contessa Brewer, Alison Stewart and Chris Jansing; NBC anchor Carl Quintanilla; Lisa Bloom and Diane Dimond of Court TV; and actor Bobby Abid. Boyfriend and singer/songwriter Tomaczek Bednarek wrote a song for the occasion, "You Make the News."

Cosby isn't taking a break. This week, she hosted a two-hour radio show on Sirius satellite radio. She heads to her
alma mater, the University of South Carolina, next week to teach for a day. Then she travels to the Middle East,
where she will speak at a conference.

No need to worry about the future of this paper now, that's for sure.

Pricing (and building) to the neighborhood
This beautiful house on Loading Rock Road in Riverside was originally priced at $3.695 million in January and has now been reduced to $3.195. Why won't it sell? I suspect it's because the neighborhood won't support that price level. Pioneers sometimes do well -Dave Tilly, builder of beautiful homes,broke through the price barrier on Irvine Road in Old Greenwich - but they usually need an extraordinary feature to do so. If this house were directly on the Mianus, for instance, instead of across the street from it, I'm pretty sure it would have sold at its original price a long time ago. As it is, who knows?

95 Cognewaugh Road
The owners of this house paid $1.150 million for it in August 2003 and, after renovating it, tried to sell it 5 years later for $1.550. It sold yesterday for $1.245 which, while technically not a loss, sure isn't a home run. Moral is, buy your house as a place to live and possibly raise a family - any appreciation is a nice bonus. I used to say that five years ago, so I feel almost smug in these trying times.

44 Close Road
Built in 2003 for Tommy Hilfiger, neither he nor anyone else has ever lived in it and it's been on the market ever since. It started at $12.5 million, was raised to $13.995 million a year later in an attempt, I assume, to punish those buyers who were too stupid to buy it at the lower price and then gradually slipped down through the 12s and the 11s. Today it was reduced to $10.995 which might move it, or might not. It's a perfectly good house but unlike cheese, listings don't improve with age.

7 Dwight Lane
Here's the house on Dwight Lane that's being sold via court judgment later this month. If you enlarge the first photo you'll notice that the house, built in 1986, has suffered from malign neglect. The original builder was on site and the auctioneer says that the man will "fix everything" for $100,000. Considering that that would involve, at a minimum, new siding, new decks, new electrical, new pool and God knows what else, that sum sounds suspiciously optimistic to me.
As did the auctioneer himself, who told me that his only problem was that he "only has one of these to sell". I questioned him on that and he assured me that $2.5 million was only going to be the starting bid and that he already had numerous buyers chomping at the bit. If he does, they almost certainly aren't from Greenwich because I can't believe anyone familiar with our town and this street's location would share the auctioneer's fevered enthusiasm.
Of course, he could have been shucking and jiving me - you think?
The grounds are nice, though. By the way, I just remembered what else needs replacement: the tennis court.

View Larger Map

On second thought ...
A builder (I'm pretty sure it was a builder) paid $2.840 million for a building lot on 3 Quintard Ave (Old Greenwich) in July of this year. Today he's put it back on the market for $900K more. I understand why he might not want to proceed with a building project at this time but I'm at a loss to explain why the land is worth so much more now than it was six weeks ago. With that kind of creativity, you'd think this guy could have made a go of this project regardless of market conditions.

16 Ridge Brook
How about this one?
This house was listed April 15, 2008 for $6.950 million and immediately underwent seven price cuts until by June 30th it was priced at a mere $3.695 million. It then disappeared for two weeks and popped up in mid-July at a new, higher price: $3.995. Today that failed experiment was deleted and replaced by a new listing of $3.495. Make up your mind, will ya?

11 Winding Lane
Agents: Don't let this happen to you!
This house came on for sale last September at $9.975 and sat at that same price until July 2008 when the seller lopped $1.0 million off the top. Too late, I fear. There was an additional price drop of almost $300,000 two weeks ago, no doubt because the broker's listing was due to expire but expire it did and now it's with a new broker, but at the same last listing price of $8.695. The original listing agent is one of the most successful in town and her replacement is also excellent but I suspect neither was or will be enough to overcome what was obviously the wrong price.

Something for insurers and taxpayers to chew on
This site is always a helpful source of weather news, particularly Gulf hurricanes. It may be worth your while to scroll down his site for the discussion of wind shear, where you'll find this alarming quote: "Make no mistake about it, the levees didn't save New Orleans from a rare and powerful storm. Cuba and some slight wind shear did, ensuring that Gustav was barely a category 3 hurricane in the open Gulf of Mexico, as it was building its maximum storm surge."
By the way, hurricane Ike seems likely to be heading west, into the Gulf, but at least one model has it slamming full force into Miami. That's probably not going to happen with this storm but sooner, rather than later, some storm will and the results will be awesome: I've read predictions of $400 billion in damages. That would take care of the current housing glut down there, sure enough.

Free Cardboard
Is there a typo on this card or have moving boxes really risen in cost so much that they can cost $3,000? I used to work summers for a moving company (a long time ago) and I think we moved entire houses for what this guy's boxes cost. Of course, his use of the term "house removal" suggests that he's a Brit, so perhaps someone just took advantage of him: "How much is that in pounds? Really? Jolly good!"