Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker
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So said Ogden Nash. Unrelated, mostly, 17 Dandy Drive in Cos Cob has dropped its price to $895,000 from $975,000. This 1950s split is a definite tear-down, eventually, and anyone who invested a huge amount of money into improving it would be a fool, but at the right price: $850, maybe? $750? — a hundred thou to make it livable for the next decade might be a decent decision. This is priced at just about land value now.
Back Country bargains
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571 Round Hill Road, priced at $2.675 million and surely selling for less, is reported as pending, The property ( on Aiken Road, actually, across the road from 68 Sumner Road, discussed below) sold for $2.415 in 2010. Adjusted for inflation ($2.8), the owner’s not smacking the ball out of the park here, but that’s why buyers in this price range might want to look north: large houses, large lots, and (relatively) small prices. The saving you’ll make on mortgage payments would easily pay for a nanny/chauffeur, should you need such assistance.
Got the “Zebra”
The owner’s gone back to kansas?
better an open gun cabinet than a pool outside the door; trust me, the statistics bear me out: 100-to-one.
A well deserved price cut
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68 Sumner Road, way, way up Rogue’s Hill, has dropped to $1.695 million. The seller paid $2.250 for it in 2005 and tried reselling it at the bottom of the crash in 2008 for $2.750. Glad I wasn’t the agent advising her on that price. Mid 70s contemporaries aren’t at peak demand right now, especially those nestled against Bedford’s border, so this new price seems closer to reality than the previous one.
My guess: you can grab a decent house here, with four acres and a pool, for around $1.5 million. Depending on the gas milage you can eke out of that Prius, it might be a deal.
Must be an end user
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19 Deerpark Meadow Road, which sold for $4 million in May, is reselling at $4.5. A great piece of land — 1.75 acres in the one-acre zone — but $4 million, in my opinion, was a high price to pay for a developer, and $4.5 would be worse. However, if someone wants to build a house for himself (or yes, herself), with no need to build in a 33% profit, this isn’t a crazy price.
I do find it amusing that the previous listing claimed that property was “within walking distance of town”. So is Banksville.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I'm friggin' blind
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Looks like this, and cheek-by-jowl with its neighbors. Hmmm.
248 Overlook Drive, in Milbrook, hit the market today at $5.495 million. I am underwhelmed. These things are a matter of taste, of course, and I admit to being a bit of an unsophisticated philistine, but to my eye, this is a perfect example of what I’ve mentioned to my own kids: there’s a difference, or there ought to be, between a civil engineer and an architect, and that difference is artistic talent. Most architects are civil engineers, period.
Only because they’re long dead and buried do I dare mention that my aunt and her husband, wonderful people, were architects who worked for the federal government. They had exquisite taste in art in their personal lives, and their own designs were marvels in engineering but aesthetically, those designs were … well, they were civil servants. Another aunt and uncle commissioned them to build them a house in Ashford, North Carolina, with regrettable results, and my uncle Gerard, a psychiatrist and former acting dean of Sarah Lawrence who removed himself from New York (“fifty years in Scarsdale is enough for any man”, said he) to New Hampshire, ordered up a design for a consulting room for his patients in his new New Hampshire house. The result was so hideous, and so expensive, that, trapped — he couldn’t hire another architect without destroying his relationship with his sister — he built nothing, and continued to meet with the lunatics in his living room until he quit private practice entirely and moved further north to teach at Dartmouth.
It wasn’t just that experience with my own relatives that produced such a jaundiced opinion of architects. I’ve dealt with others (don’t mention Yale) both personally and professionally, and my civil engineer vs artist theory has been developed and reinforced over the decades. Again, I’ll admit that my taste is personal, and somebody else may find this Overlook Drive house to be the epitome of refined taste, and worth every penny of five million-and-a- bunch of dollars; we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Of course, I’m always willing to be enlightened:
“I see, said the blindman, and he picked up his hammer and saw”.
Barn door motif?
The range hood doesn’t improve things, and is there really any need for a frying pan to have a view? Cleaning grease off that window is going to be a pane in the ass.
Real estate trend
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120 Hillcrest Park Road listed six days ago for $775,000 and has now reported as sold for $865,000. Almost certainly a tear-down, this property is located at the end of Hillcrest, next to River Road, and a few years ago would have been considered a non-starter for any new construction priced over, say, two million, and probably lower. But the entire area is being developed now, and $3+ houses are selling well.
Markets shift, and the Sheephill Road/Hillcrest neighborhood is shifting significantly upward.
Not related to anything much at all, but pretty damn funny
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A French (of course) bulldog loses it when he discovers that his trip to the dog park has been cancelled. The priceless part: his mistress’s rebuke.
What is it about this property that inspires such delusion and incompetence?
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Photoshopped sunsets and Thomas Kinkade window lights still can’t hide the ugliness within.
309 Taconic Road, a gross monstrosity of 23,000 square space that’s been seeking a buyer since 2005 has tried a variety of yo-yo pricing strategies over the years. The original owner started at $31 million, eventually dropped it to $23,750 in 2007 and $9.750 in 2012 before losing it to foreclosure. The new lender/owner raised its price to $13,750 in 2015, dropped it to $10.9 in 2016 and then to $9.399 in 2017. Since it wouldn’t sell at $9.4, the geniuses at the bank jumped it to $12 million earlier this year, and today dropped it to $10.750.
All of these strange price adjustments fail to acknowledge a basic fact: no one wants a huge, tasteless house that lacks a single livable room. The property’s 21 acres are comprised of a postage stamp of a side yard and a cliff that drops down to a swampy hollow across the driveway, far below. Did I mention that it lacks an outdoor pool and only offers an indoor lap wallow? The only “client” of mine who ever expressed avid interest in this place turned out to be — I kid you not — a penniless escapee from a lunatic asylum, come to Greenwich to wreak a fraud upon the owner of that institution. There’s a story there, but for now ….
The lender’s best bet here is to drop the price to its land value: maybe $3 million, maybe not, less a credit for the considerable cost of razing this horrible example of a failed financier’s megalomania. I’m betting that won’t happen for another five years.
The price, if not the house, is eye-catching
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Simple courtesy towards guests, let alone esthetics, would suggest some kind of sheltered entrance here.
New today, 55 Old Stone Bridge Road, asking $895,00. Old Stone Bridge was a mid-70s development built on the former Chimblo property, which was a great place to camp when the Chimblo brothers opened it to local Boy Scout troops, but not prime building land: rocky, hilly and in other sections, swampy. A number of contractors built houses there nonetheless, of varying quality, depending on which builder was involved.
Current sales tend to cluster around $1.5ish, so this price seems attractive, depending on both the quality of the land it’s perched on and its condition. Listing agent Steve Archino is very experienced, and not known, by me at least, for giving houses away, and has both set the price and described it as being sold “as is”, so as always, I’ll trust Steve’s opinion, sight unseen.
It certainly doesn’t look like much, but if salvageable, this might be an opportunity to get into town at an affordable price. It reminds me of Pal Nancy’s and my own first purchase, when we moved from Greenwich to Bangor, Maine, long ago. I was fresh out of law school, and living on a Bangor, Maine associate’s salary, we had limited means, but we were just-married then, without children, and could devote evenings and weekends to rehabbing an 1835 farmhouse to good effect, at low cost. But that was then; today, I’m not sure how many young people have the skill to perform such work or, and more important, the inclination to do it.
But it could work. Old Stone Bridge is a very decent area, and this house might be worth the effort, though I’d certainly recommend a thorough inspection.
No a/c, certainly needs a new hvac system, including furnace, and this master bath is … unfortunate.
spacious terrace for entertaining your three closest friends