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."