Price war in Old Greenwich

If you want to see an active market at work, look in the low $1 range. 100 Wesskum Wood Road, Old Greenwich (on the corner of Sound Beach Avenue) listed for $1.195 million and buyers fought for it immediately. Closed today for $1.277 million. A 1975 house, nothing special, but right on Binney Park, and at very much the right price.

I almost always discourage clients from engaging in bidding wars, but in this case, I think the buyers did okay.

UPDATE. Funny story; we bought the original owners of this home’s Steinway A piano back in 1975, loaded it into a rented U-Haul and brought it to the Brighton/Alston student slum where I and my brother Anthony, a student at BU’s music school, shared an apartment. We were met there, as pre-arranged, by “Turtle Truckers”, a hippy outfit that advertised on the local Boston free-form radio station, but despite my telling them exactly what was involved: moving a grand piano up to our third-floor apartment, the stoners were shocked when we slid open the gate: “wow, man, that’s a piano!” So they fled, leaving me stranded on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, with a piano in a rented truck, due to be returned that day.

Using the Yellow Pages — remember them? — I found “Black Movers” in, I think, Roxbury, and they agreed to let me store the piano with them over the holiday and deliver it the following Tuesday. Which they did: Tuesday morning, a trio of movers appeared, all living up to the name “Black Movers”. The largest of them, who could have been a linebacker in the NFL, dismissed his helpers, strapped a belt around his head and the piano and carried the damn thing on his back all the way upstairs. A huge, generous tip was awarded, gratefully, but I also got a memory that, obviously, I’ve never forgotten.

The fringe areas cringe

15 Mountain Laurel Drive dropped $300,000 today, and now asks $3.2 million. I don’t think this will do it, but it sold for $3.7 million in 2004 ($4.930 in current dollars), so there’s a hammering going on here.

The owners have been trying to sell this 1996 house since 2013, when they started at $4.595, without success, which only illustrates how illiquid real estate “investments” can be. It’s always informative to hit the Tuesday-Thursday broker open house tours, and see the historical waves of development. A paleontologist would have field day, surveying each boom and bust of the Greenwich real estate market, starting with the earliest years, through the Rockefeller days of Deer Park and Khakum Wood,and then through the decades thereafter. When the market’s been hot, builders stretch out, seeking cheaper land. They prosper, for a while, then retreat when the market retracts — picture a tidal action.

Mountain Laurel Drive is a product of the 90s, and now finds itself stranded, like many other developments on our outskirts. In the past, the market has always rebounded, and these areas have recovered, but with our increasingly perilous state budget woes and the change in tastes of buyers, I’m not so sanguine today.

39 years ago today, USA hockey team beat the U.S.S.R.

Do you believe in miracles?!!!

Fabulous memory. I’m not a huge hockey fan (I went to my first game this past Christmas holiday with Pal Nancy and the girls, and enjoyed it, but that was probably due more to the company), but this was one special game. No one thought a group of college-kid amateurs could beat professional Russians, but they did.

Amazing.

And therein lies the difference between the Democratic Party of old and today's

Wouldn’t stand a chance

Bernie Sanders: Watching Kennedy attack communism made me want to puke.

Today, the only complaint his party has about Bernie is that he’s a white male; period.

There is a God, and his name is Allah

see ya

Idiot terrorist takes selfie, forgetting that it’s triggered.

Smollett — it's all over except the plea bargain

Proving he’s as good — or as bad — an actor as his adopted victim, here’s don lemon’s shocked face

District Attorney’d “proffer” here. Nothing that we (blogger and guests) hadn’t already guessed, but the details are interesting.

I think it will take a couple of years to see whether this is a tend

House inventory soars in Fairfield County. But Greenwich listings drop 15%, so …..

Is the $10,000 federal cap on property tax deductions causing homeowners to bail? Maybe long term, as residents look with alarm towards Hartford and its plans, but I’d guess, completely without evidence, that, while prices will drop to reflect the new tax burden, buyers who want to, or need to, live near NYC will still come to Greenwich, and those already here will remain out of employment necessity.

But I’ll be watching our inventory with interest in the coming years.

I blame Trump

Oh, the humanity!

Jusse Smollett was dissatisfied with his $1.8 million salary, so staged his attack, all because of the culture of greed inspired by Trump and his MAGA-hat followers

I’m sure that explanation will show up sooner, rather than later.

So long as it's conducted in a tent in Syria's sweltering desert and lasts 50 years, then maybe

How could I know?

Muslim terrorist Hoda Muthana suggests therapy as a suitable punishment for her treason. That’s not harsh enough, but if she were assigned Andrew McCabe as her tent mate, I suppose it’d be okay.

On a happier note, a grand home on Keofferam has a buyer

39 Keofferam, Old Greenwich, $3.150 million, is reported as pending. I wrote about this property two weeks ago, praising it, but noting that it sold for $3. 250 million in 2007, and wondering how such a great house could drop in value after extensive renovations and an addition of 1,000 sq.ft. I still don’t have the answer for that, but I’m glad to see that someone else saw the merits of this home,