Fireworks!
I wasn't going to attend the Binney Park fireworks Saturday night but I remembered that it's been Chip Kreuger's Greenwich Capital that's funded these shows for the past decade and Chip sold his company to a Scottish bank last year who, in turn, isn't having such a great year this year. It might be a long time before we see such corporate largess again, so off I went. Not a bad show and enhanced by the presence nearby of two small boys going "oooo, ahhhh!" after almost every explosion. I'm way too coll at my age to express such sentiments, but I was right there with them. The grand finale was the best in my memory so, all in all, a good 1/2 hour well spent. I just hope it can continue - the old funding model of volunteers with fishing nets soliciting contributions during the Memorial Day parade stopped working long ago, which is why Kreuger stepped in. Thanks are due.

Ada's
Ada Cantavero, who ran a little candy store in Riverside forever, has finally died at 88. Funny, but Ada seemed ancient in 1960, when I was just 7, and then seemed to stop aging. When my brother Gideon called with the sad news my first question was, "how old was she?" "104", he replied, and I actually believed him. But she was great.

When I was a kid, penny candy really cost a penny and there was nothing worse than being stuck behind some rich kid with a buck to spend, calling out his selections one by one. Most of us had a nickle or maybe a dime to spare, so the line usually moved quickly, but if I bear any resentment toward the rich, it probably originated here.

Ada would let us hang out on her front porch but any misbehavior risked at least a temporary banishment, a terrible threat that kept us in line. When kids had trouble at home - a divorce, drunken dad, whatever - she'd comfort them and cheer them up and provide a refuge. A heck of a woman and one who seemed to remember all of her kids, no matter how much time passed. I stopped by maybe five years ago to say hello 25-30 years since my last visit and she greeted me, "Hi, Bobby!". Bob is my older brother, but the fact that she could place me in the right family was amazing. Riverside has lost a wonderful institution.

More on moderate housing
Something many of us don't know (I certainly didn't, anyway) is that what used to be called an "elderly conversion unit" - a separate apartment with kitchen - and which could be built and occupied only if at least one of the occupants of either the main house or the apartment was over 62, was changed to the term "accessory housing" and now permits occupancy by tenants of "moderate income". I don't know what the income guidelines are for this exception (it's adjusted from time to time) nor whether it applies, as does the age requirement, to either the main house or just the apartment, but a call to the Zoning Board (call Town Hall at 622-7700 and ask for Zoning or go to the town's website and enter "accessory housing" into the search feature) will answer those questions. Yes, I'm still working on links here - a new project I'm involved with may soon provide an entire website entirely devoted to Greenwich news, opinion, neighborhood association news, etc., so if I'm going to be changing formats, ...) In any event, from what I'm told, teachers, firefighters or policemen would probably qualify as moderate income. Any one of those groups could provide a nice pool of good tenants. You could make some decent money, have live-in security and know that you're doing your small part to provide additional housing in Greenwich, all with the town's blessing. Not a bad deal.

Price Drop?
One of our commentators asks, "is a house that was worth $7,500,000 last year now worth $6,500,000? Certainly not in the case of the Thunder Mountain Road house I mentioned yesterday. In that case, the house was never worth $7,500,000, it was just an imaginary figure dreamed up and reported by a broker trying to protect its client's other project on the same road. Although, it must be said, the average price has dropped 14% this year and that would neatly place a $7,500,000 house at $6,450,000 so perhaps the argument can be made. My point about Thunder Mountain Road is that, since there never was a genuine sale at the reported price, it's impossible to tell. Certainly, if you bought a house last year and want to sell it today, brace yourself for some bad news. If you bought before 2000, relax and enjoy your sizeable gain. Anything in between, it's a guessing game, but it could get ugly out there.

580 Lake Avenue

This house came on the market in January 2006 asking $5,550,000. 2 1/2 years later, it sold yesterday for $2,685,000. I continue to be amazed at how wrong some prices can be.

Foreclosure in Greenwich
There's an interesting comment below on affordable housing, with several good ideas on how me might address the problem, if we must. One idea that probably won't work, however, is buying foreclosed houses. In Greenwich they're rare - perhaps two a year. But last Saturday, a house on Round Hill Road did pass via foreclosure. Seven plus acres, some wetlands but, all in all, beautiful land. According to a reporter friend of mine, almost no one showed up: two couples who were apparently under the delusion that they could pick up a Round Hill property for a couple of hundred thousand dollars and a representative of the bank, there to make sure that the lender's $3.9 debt was covered. So it sold for $3,900,000 to the bank, and will presumably be returned to the market soon. It wasn't that long ago that seven acres of Round Hill land (there is a house on the property but not for long, I suspect) for just under $4,000,000 would have drawn the interest of any number of spec builders. Not today.

How Not To Sell a House
A house in "the Golden Triangle" of Greenwich came on the market just this spring asking $6,950,000, a ridiculous price for a house on 0.6 of an acre in a 1 acre zone - no room for expansion, among other problems. It didn't sell - there's a surprise - and there followed a rapid series of reductions all the way down to $3,695,000, still pretty strong for this neighborhood and this house, but at least some sort of reality seeped in. But that initial price killed it I think - we agents see it, dismiss it, and forget it exists. At that point, we don't follow its reductions, we just move on to another house with a more realistic owner. It's now been withdrawn from the market. We'll see what price it reappears at, if it does. I'm just speculating here, but this misadventure has the earmarks of an overly optimistic owner, rather than a deluded broker - a broker/agent would have kept the high price going for far longer, if only to justify his original opinion. But it points out the danger of taking over-priced listings just to get the listing (we're all tempted by the reasoning that "if I don't take it, someone else will"). It's just a waste of time and money and, since I stopped succumbing to that temptation, I now enjoy a certain amount of schadenfreude when passing houses I rejected sitting forlornly on the market, forever.

To tell the truth
I got in trouble last fall when I took on a local real estate firm for falsely reporting a house on Thunder Mountain as "sold" for $7,500,000 (or somehere close to that figure) when in fact it sold, unfinished, for less than half that sum. The agngry brokerage firm (Greenwich Fine Properties, in fact - isn't it fun not to have to worry about annoying advertisers anymore?) yanked all its advertising from my paper and explained that the larger price was what the builder estimated the value would have been had it actually been finished. Well his project next door, pretty much identical to the first one, just sold Friday for $6,495,000. Not a bad price at all, but if a selling broker had used the $7,500,000 price as a comp, she would have cost her buyer a million dollars. And wouldn't she have looked stupid?

Affordable Housing
It's back in the news again. Greewnich, under state law, must provide a certain number of affordable housing units for its population. Not surprisingly, in a town where a single building lot can easily cost $1,000,000, we're not in compliance. The latest plan to add a couple of hundred units (elderly and moderate income) in Byram has met fierce resistance from that neighborhood and, I suppose that if those same units were proposed for Riverside, I'd howl too. But where else can we build? Someone suggested highrise apartments in the back country which, while amusing to contemplate (perhaps just off Round Hill Club's 18th hole?) isn't going to fly. I'd suggest that we forget the whole thing but again, there's a state law in the way, which can basically override our zoning regulations and force construction anywhere a developer likes (again, wouldn't it be fun to see moderate income folks belly up to the bar at the Round Hill Club?) McKinney Terrace and Quarry Knoll, properties already owned by the town, have the space, if not the local good will, to accommodate a large number of additional units - I can't think of another area that does, withe possible exception of the idea being floated for building a high rise on stilts above the Island beach parking lot. Heck, they'd do that in New York, but I suspect that the cost would be way beyond our means. Intriguing idea, though.

But why is our housing so expensive?
There's not enough land, obviously, but we can also look to our restrictive zoning regulations. I recently read that an economics professor in Seattle examined the rise in average Seattle area house prices from $230,000 to $460,000 and concluded that $200,000 of that rise was directly attributable to the strict zoning rules imposed by the city - lot size, house size, etc. The professor happened to be a proponant of those regulations and wasn't advocating their repeal; he was just monetarizing their cost. Life is full of choices. I, for one, would prefer that Greenwich not become the next Riverdale, but I wonder how long we can insist on minimum lot sizes and low height restrictions before we run afoul of our friends in Hartford. Vote Republican, is my advice.

June 27th
Some houses are selling, even at (especially at) the higher price ranges, by which I mean $11,000,000 - $7,000,000. I notice though that of the 10 sales reported yesterday all but one had sat on the market for 12-18 months, and almost all sold for substantially less than their original asking price. Hmmm there may be a lesson there. One exception: 56 Rockwood Lane, a teardown on a nice street, was listed May 12 of this year for $2,250,000 and went to contract May 20th. It sold yesterday for $2,610,000, showing that (a) you can still generate a bidding war if you price things right and (b)you can't underprice your house, even in this market. If you undershoot the right price, there are still buyers out there willing to correct your "mistake" or your smart move. Forget Casey Kasin and don't reach for the stars.

Okay, so I've been remiss
I'm in the middle of what promises to be an exciting (to me, at any rate) new website with a number of webdesigners, columnists, reporters and editors (the free time of all of whom has been blessedly freed up by the ever-increasing rapidity of newspaper cut-backs, and blogging has been none-existent. Details forthcoming soon, but, if there are still any readers out there for this blog, here's some information you probably already knew: the market is in the tank.

A handful of houses have gone to contract in the past 21 days, some at impressive prices, but the trend is dismal. 215 house price reductions, some by millions of dolllars, vs. 44 contracts. Interestingly, and as a sign that sellers new to the market still don't get it, 205 new listings have come to market in that same period and, to my eye, the vast majority are grossly (which I define as in excess of 10% of their eventual selling price) over-priced. I've finally gotten smart and started refusing over-priced listings - why waste time and money marketing them when they aren't going anywhere? There are still agents out there who will take a listing, any listing, at any price. One house I turned down because I valued it at $1,495,000 to, in their dreams, $1,695,000, was just listed by another agent at $2,000,000. That's just crazy, and I want no part of it. A house I mentioned in an earlier column as insanely priced at $6,000,000 finally went to contract somewhere in the $3,000,000s. That agent spent over a year holding open houses, paying for full-sized ads and showing the damn thing when the only thing that was ever going to work was getting the price to its proper level. Buyers aren't stupid and in fact, they're growing more stubborn every day, no doubt because they go home each night and read more scary headlines about the housing market. We're not in a free fall, but if ever there was a time to aggressively price your house, this ain't it.

UBS Leaving Town?
That's the rumor that's reported in today's daily and if it's true (or even if the prediction of a 500 employee layoff s true), it doesn't bode well for our immediate future. Lots of the support staff for UBS probably lives in Shelton and points north, but a lot of the higher level folks bought homes in Greenwich. Just what we need: more inventory.

Thanks for your comments
lots of you have written in support and I appreciate your words greatly. My poor Internet guru is temporarily out of action due to a motorcycle accident ( I knew I made the right decision to sell mine in 1972) but I hope to have a real web site up and running in 2 weeks. In the meantime, here's my response to an inquiry about the weight to give to the town's assessment of a home's value: it depends. Some of these assessments are spot on; others miss by a mile. Some years ago, my own house was grossly over-assessed because the out-of-town appraisors considered all waterfront, tidal creeks to Belle Haven, to be of equal value. Don't tell them so, but I think they've over corrected and I'm now valued at less than a modest home on Perry Ridge. So use the assessment as one datum, not the sole determinative of value.

Memorial Day Parade in Old Greenwich
10: 00 am. Last vestige of small town America in this town, and a chance to thank our soldiers. Don't miss it.

We're on Mars!
pretty nifty. I stand in awe of people who can shoot a rocket 400 million miles into space, land it safely and begin exploring.

But as for another use of our tax dollars...
the New York Times reports today that states are chafing at having to spend anti-terrorism funds on, ah, anti-terrorism. Rhode Island, for instance, was outraged that the heavy truck it purchased to pull a horse trailor was initially denied funding (the state prevailed, naturally, after intervention by its pols). We taxpayers are paying $23 billion for this program-if the states don't need the money, why not end it? Silly question, I know.

More Market Blues, or, Apples to Apples
1 Brookside Park in Greenwich came on the market in May 2006 asking $4,895,000 and sold in November for $4,250,000. Whether because of buyer's remorse or a change in circumstances it was returned to the market by the new buyers in February, 2007, for $4,650,000 (nothing having been added or changed), lingered for 408 days and finally sold this past May 12th for $3,800,000. Rumor has it that the owners turned down an offer that would have brought them close to break-even and then ended up sitting on the place for another year. True or not, in this market, it probably pays to keep would-be-buyers talking.

We're back!
Just spent time in northern California attending my daughter Kate's graduation from Humbolt State University. Lots of redwoods, ocean breezes and aging hippies from my generation. Wonderful people, so long as you avoid talking politics, which I did. When I complete my fatherly duties and pay for all my kids' educations, I may very well retire out there, assuming they'll accept a Ronald reagan/libertarian - heck, I'm tired of arguing anyway.

State of the market -
Nothing encouraging. 217 Riverside Avenue came on nine months ago for $1,965,000. It closed yesterday for $1,588,000. Now, the owners bought it for a song a long time ago (I believe my daughter Sarah, now 21, was 3 then, and a friend of the owners' daughter) so no one lost money here, but that's still a big drop from hoped for to reality. Similarly, 808 North Street, purchased for $11,300,000 in 2000, has been returned to the market and, after a few price reductions,is now asking $11,750,000, 8 years later. We're in a flat market, folks, or even, God forbid, a declining one. I recently gave a price opinion on a house that I thought should be below $2,000,000, but when I pulled the town tax card, I saw that Greenwich is taxing it as though it's worth over $2,500,000. Tough to tell an owner that his house is worth half a million less than the town is taxing him, so, coward that I am, I didn't. But I anticipate a tough sell (and,whether I'm the broker or not, I suspect it will sell for less than $2,000,000).
Column News
I was in negotiations with my former publisher, Greenwich Post, about returning as a paying advertiser, rather than a paid columnist. They wanted far more (5X) what they paid me for my column and, frankly, I couldn't see why I should invest in what is essentially a dying business. I can pay a smart young college kid I know a fraction of that fee to design and maintain a website, with links, photos, etc, and make this a better column, so that's what I've decided to do. Check back in soon and see what we've done.

Simmons Lane
In one of my last printed columns, I mentioned this monstrosity and suggested that it seemed a tad large for the neighborhood. A number of writers told me that I'd understated its size: 35,000 sq.ft above ground, yes, but the Russian owners were also planning an additional 25,000 sq.ft of underground rooms. Considering that these Russians tend to dissappear to Siberia, thanks to Putin, leaving projects half-done, it was gratifying to lean that our P&Z turned the plans down. We'll see what they come back with, if they come back at all.

Must it always be Greenwich?
According to this article, a Greenwich man, one Michael Guite, is trying to move a family cemetary on property he's purchased in Springfield, Vermont so he can build a house. At lease one of the graves holds the remains of a veteran of the War of 1812 and, not surprisingly, the Vermonters aren't pleased. I'm sure Mr. Guite is a nice man; I just wished he came from some other town.

Bad times for all newspaper folks
I just heard that Joe Pisani, editor of Greenwich Time, has been fired by that paper's new owner. Sad, if true- the man did a yeoman's job producing a cleanly written story of our town, every day, for years. My banishment to the Internet is probably all for the best, and inevitable.
Update
Firing confirmed. New owners wanted more scandalous headlines, Mr. Pisani resisted, so off he went.god bless him, god bless the Internet.

Linens and Things declares bankruptcy
This was the story that got me fired. Apollo Group, owner of Linens and Things, was reported (by the NYT) to be ready to put the chain into bankruptcy, together with its real estate company, Realogy, which controls Coldwell Banker and Sotheby's. Friday, Linens and Things went down, confirming that part of the story. This is being posted via iPhone which, while loveable, is lousy for links. Come back later and you'll have them.

If you want to contact my publisher
It won't do any good, but if you'd like to send along your opinion to my former publisher about his firing me, : Mhersam@hersamacorn.com will reach him. I'm just about to email him myself to cancel my subscription.

Wall Street's latest Scam
That would be, "auction rated securities". These were financial instruments touted as " just like certificates of deposit", and carried as cash on the account statements of private investors. Turns out, of course, they aren't, and now people who stashed their money in the things waiting to pay their kids' college tuition or put a down payment on a house are discovering that they can't get at their money. A year and a half ago, when the whole thing started going down, Wall Street (UBS, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, name your favorite) alerted their institutional investors and concentrated their selling efforts on chumps. Only in February of this year did the whole structure freeze up. Now, if you need to pay your bills, your friendly banker will loan you up to half the money they've frozen, at a nice interest rate. I don't really blame the "financial advisors" who simply parroted what their bosses told them about these things - these people are nothing more than broo-pushing custodians granted a title and a desk in order to scam their customers- but the principals of the firms knew exactly what they were pushing and should be, but won't be, held accountable. Almost makes me want to dust off my legal degree and go chase someone.