Good question

5 North Crossway

A reader inquires about 5 North Crossway, Lucas point:

I was just reading your post on 11 Cove and it made me wonder what happened to 5 N Crossway, so I looked at it on Zillow where it appears as a being listed for 26 days on Zillow, with no price history prior to the current one, while I know this property has been on the market for several years.  How do owners/agents wipe the history from Zillow?

This spec project has been on the market, $5.4 million, price unchanged, since July, 2015, which is 728 days. The reader is exactly right: Zillow, and our Greenwich Association of Realtors's listing sheets (from which Zillow draws its information) show a (now) 28-day stay on the market.

How does this happen? I don't know. I ran a long campaign against the resetting of the clock by agents who were cancelling a listing and relisting it the same day, and eventually the GAR conceded defeat and required a six-month-gap between cancellation and a return to active listing status before the day count (i.e., "days on market") could be restarted (I've also pressured them to distinguish between above-ground square footage and basement area, and lo, that distinction is now being made—have I mentioned that I'm the most unpopular agent in Greenwich?).

But I've been noticing a number of these deceptive day counts creeping into our data lately—not sure how, but I'd put nothing past the GAR Evil Princess; I'll have to stroll by GAR headquarters and see what kind of car she's driving  these days.

The "chair" only works if you have a view: here, you don't