Two more contracts reported

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81 Hendrie Avenue, Riverside, $4.1 million. Nine days, which suggests that it will be selling for more.

And this will come as a relief to its builder: 543 Stanwich Road, currently priced at $17.495 million, is finally reported pending. It began in April ‘21 at $17.5 million, had dropped to $16.995 by the time in expired in August 2023, and has been languishing at $17.495 since it came back on the market last June.

Eggsperts and Democrats (UPDATED)

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The Media Discovers Higher Prices, And Guess Who They’re Blaming!

Egs! What about eggs!

I was puzzled to receive a text on Saturday the 25th from someone dear to me but whose politics are diametrically opposed to mine, berating me for voting for Trump and asking whether I was embarrassed by his failure to lower the price of eggs. Eggs? What does the price of eggs have to do with anything? It turns out, my friend had just received the latest talking point of the Democrats and their slavish idiots, and the message had to be dutifully disseminated. Sad.

If you’d like to read an article written by a real reporter, check out this one from Taryn Phaneuf, writing for something called “NerdWallet”; an organization I’d never heard of, but will now check out from time to time. Phaneuf does what reporters were once routinely expected to, but no longer do: outline the issue, then present the facts behind the issue, all without injecting personal politics into the discussion.

The article was published, by the way, on January 15th, the day that the Decmber egg prices that have the Democrats so (supposedly) upset were published, and five days before Trump took office.

Egg Prices Are Rising Again. Here’s Why They’re So High

Why are eggs so expensive?

The pandemic and inflation play a role in rising egg prices, but the real culprit is an outbreak of H5N1, a highly transmissible and fatal strain of avian influenza, or bird flu. The outbreak started in early 2022 and quickly grew into the largest bird flu outbreak in U.S. history. As of Jan. 14, the virus has affected more than 134 million birds in the U.S. since January 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More specifically, it has affected more than 102.6 million egg-laying hens, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. When an outbreak occurs, egg producers are forced to cull their flocks, which impacts the supply of eggs headed for grocery stores.

Generally, as supplies tighten, egg prices rise. That’s for at least two reasons: First, consumer demand for eggs has held steady despite persistently high prices. The mismatch between supply and demand tends to drive prices up.

Second, the tight supply of eggs has led grocery stores to change the way they price eggs altogether. Previously, it was common for retailers to keep egg prices low — sometimes even pricing them below what the store paid for them wholesale — because eggs effectively draw shoppers into the store. They’d come for cheap eggs and leave with a cart full of groceries.

But now, pricing eggs too low could mean selling out, which would increase the chances that shoppers encounter empty shelves and abandon their carts. Retailers will keep prices at levels that help them avoid that situation as much as possible.

When will egg prices settle down?

Prices will remain volatile until producers can rebuild their flocks and recover egg production levels. But that’s hard to do when the virus remains out of control. Major U.S. egg producers continue to report new bird flu cases affecting flocks around the country.

Since October, when the latest spate of outbreaks began, reports of bird flu spanning eight states, including Arizona, California, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Utah and Washington, have affected more than 25 million egg-laying hens. There are roughly 312 million egg-laying hens in the U.S. population, according to the USDA. That means nearly 8% of all U.S. egg layers were lost in the past four months.

[I was particularly struck by this bit: the crunchies who mandated cage-free eggs are especially suffering]

Why you might be seeing cage-free egg shortages

In 2025, eight states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — have laws in place that ban the production and sale of conventional eggs for animal welfare reasons. National retailers like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have made similar commitments.

Many of those states recently experienced major outbreaks of bird flu. In fact, bird flu had a disproportionate impact on cage-free egg layers in 2024. About a third of U.S. egg layers are cage-free hens, but they contributed nearly 60% of all bird flu cases for the year.

Not only does that mean the supply of cage-free eggs is down everywhere — which, as explained above, leads to higher prices — but it also has implications for how quickly supplies can recover, which are unique to cage-free eggs.

Already there are fewer sources for cage-free eggs. On top of that, in places where cage-free egg rules are in place, it can be tricky for retailers to find new suppliers that comply with whatever regulations the stores are required to follow.

As a result, grocery shoppers living in states or shopping in stores that restrict the sale of conventional eggs are especially likely to face higher prices, quantity restrictions and temporary egg shortages.

UPDATE: These people are such lackies; idiots repeating what their masters tell them to write, and palming it off as journalism. Remember “The adults are back in the room”? Kmalla’s Joy campaign? “JD Vance is weird?” All picked up by the flying monkey chorus and recited in unison, before events made each phrase/theme “no longer operable”. Here’s the latest:

Old Greenwich Contract

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137 Sound Beach Avenue, $1.950 million, 10 days. 1955 construction and just 1,724 sq. ft. with no central air, but that’s probably no matter if, as I suspect, the house is doomed to be replaced. That said, it’s a perfectly nice house and not so long ago it would have just continued to be an “affordable” home*; maybe it will, who knows?

The driveway exits onto Potter Drive, by the way, and that’s a good thing: makes egress onto busy Sound Beach much easier.

*I usually pay no attention to Zillow estimates because they’re so rarely close to actual value, but in this case, I think they have it about right:

What part of "illegal" fits into CT’s vow to protect illegal aliens “in full compliance with the law”?

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Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont to undocumented immigrants in state: 'You're welcome here'

And Lamont to CT taxpayers: “Screw you.”

"It is the policy of the state of Connecticut to respect, honor and protect immigrants and immigrant families in full compliance with the law," Attorney General William Tong said.

Tong's office this week distributed an extensive memo detailing the protections against deportation in Connecticut law, including through a bill known as the Trust Act — passed in 2013 and strengthened in 2019 — that bars state and local authorities from collaborating with federal immigration enforcement in most situations.

Republicans oppose the state’s sanctuary law:

At a news conference Thursday in Hartford, Republican lawmakers called for rolling back the law, to allow more cooperation between state and local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. Currently, the Trust Act allows for exceptions only in cases where an undocumented immigrant has been convicted of certain serious felonies.

But naturally …

“Members of the legislature's Judiciary Committee on Wednesday said they would draft a bill to strengthen the Trust Act so that it further protects undocumented immigrants.”

Why so little real estate news on the site recently? Because there's so little to report

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In the past, we’ve seen the “Spring Market” kick off after MLK Day, and that may happen next week; we’ll see. In the meantime, the market is dormant. During the past week, there have been:

7 New listings reported

1 Contract

4 Pending; and

1 Sale

Single family homes, that is; rentals and condos and out of town properties are not included

There's no "suggesting that the crisis may have been intentional”, it was.

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The 'Trump Effect' at the Border Is Already Amazing

In mere days, President Trump has shown that his no-nonsense approach to immigration works. The numbers don’t lie. All the White House needs to do is enforce immigration laws, and the Biden-Harris administration simply did not. 

Americans suffered for years because of skyrocketing illegal immigration, and there should be no doubt anymore that the Biden-Harris administration’s policies exacerbated the crisis by design.

…The reality is clear: Biden always had the power to safeguard American citizens but chose not to, with Democrats in Congress standing by his harmful leadership. ….

All this was obvious from the start of Biden’s reign. Here’s an article dated February 2, 2021:

Biden Signs Executive Orders Reversing Trump Immigration Policies

U.S. President Joe Biden signed executive orders Tuesday to start to dismantle former President Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, including an attempt to reunite families that had been separated at the U.S.-Mexican border.

“I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy,” Biden said while signing the orders.

In the first hours of his presidency two weeks ago, Biden acted to halt construction of Trump’s $16 billion wall along the border and sent a far-reaching immigration bill to Congress, where lawmakers have long been stalemated between liberals looking to ease the path to U.S. citizenship and conservatives seeking to stem unauthorized immigration.

Biden’s immediate focus is on the 3,100-kilometer southern border with Mexico, where Trump tried to keep thousands of migrants from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala from entering the U.S.

Trump led repair and expansion of a border wall and imposed tough detention and deportation policies for those who made it across the desolate border terrain and into the United States.

….

“President Biden’s strategy is centered on the basic premise that our country is safe and stronger and more prosperous with a safe, orderly and humane immigration system that welcomes immigrants, keeps families together and allows people — both newly arrived immigrants and people who have lived here for generations — to more fully contribute to our country,” the senior official told reporters.

The official said that Trump “was so focused on the wall that he did nothing to address the root cause of why people are coming to our southern border. It was a limited, wasteful and naive strategy, and it failed.”

By contrast, backers of the previous administration’s border initiatives said Biden’s orders will lead to chaos and lawlessness.

The president also is directing the U.S. Homeland Security agency to review a Trump policy that requires non-Mexican migrants to stay in Mexico until their immigration court date in the U.S. but not immediately dismantle the program.

The policy has left 60,000 asylum seekers waiting in dangerous border towns. Biden has already stopped new enrollments in the program but not disclosed how he intends to deal with those still waiting in Mexico.

The president also plans to restore a program from the last Democratic administration under President Barack Obama allowing children under the age of 18 to apply to legally reunite with their parents already living in the United States.

“The situation at the border will not transform overnight," the senior Biden official said. "This is in large part due to the damage done over the last four years, but we are committed to addressing it in full."

More than 70,000 migrants have been detained or arrested at the border in each of the past four months, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

Biden’s directives will also call for restoring the U.S. asylum system, which Trump had overhauled, making it exceedingly difficult for migrants to be granted asylum in the U.S.