How Not To Price a House
I Toured a recent renovation with clients the other day that has been on the market since the beginning of the year. The clients liked the house but were worried that it hasn’t sold. “What’s wrong with it?” they wanted to know. When representing buyers, Realtors owe no duty to the seller, so I felt free to answer, “there’s nothing wrong with this house except its price.” Which is true, but to explain why the house didn’t merit its asking price, I had to point out all the cheap details that the builder had skimped on. For instance, there’s good vinyl siding: solid panels of shingle-look vinyl, and the cheap stuff: hollow, flimsy plastic. This builder chose the latter. There’s good molding, carefully installed, and cheap molding, slapped on by a butcher. Again, the builder went the meat market route. My clients weren’t deterred by all this and might even place a bid on the place but I was struck by the fact that, had the seller not tried to price his pig’s ear a silk purse, no explanations would have been necessary. “Hollow core doors? That’s what you get at this price.” End of story. So if you’re building with an eye toward resale, consider what price the location will support and build accordingly. And if you’re going for a substantial price, build a substantial house.
Riverside Lane
This street’s seeing an explosion of new construction, all priced near $2,000,000. Astonishing to me, having seen it for years as a nice little neighborhood of affordable capes. There are two houses going up right next to each other that are identical in every detail. I realize that the original veterans’ houses were also identical, so perhaps an argument can be made that the builder is simply respecting the area’s historical character but at these prices, I think he should have invested $40,000 or so and hired an architect to design two houses that didn’t jump out of the same cookie-cutter. You can get away with using a plan book when pumping out $100,000 houses but those days are over in this town, I hope.
Augustin Fund
Here’s the scoop on the fund established for John Augustin, the farmer on King Street who lost his leg last May: The First Church of Round Hill already has a charitable (meaning tax-deductible, if you care) trust established and, in the interest of efficiency, a fund to help Mr. Augistin pay his medical bills has been piggy-backed onto it. You can send checks, payable to Church of Round Hill with a notation, “John Augustin Fund” in the memo section, lower-left corner. Checks should be mailed to: June Marks, 33
Nutmeg Drive, Greenwich CT 06831.
Nice House, Gone
I meant to write about John Cooke’s (Prudential) listing at 4 Kinsman Lane when it came on the market this past February but it went to contract so quickly that I turned to something else. This was a 1910 house right off of Bruce Park. It needed some work (when you see the seller as “Estate of” you should expect that) and it had some road noise from I-95 but the house was well laid out and its location was pretty neat, assuming you like geese. In any event, the MLS reported it as sold last week. Sharon Kinney’s client won it in a bidding war at $1,361,000, a substantial increase over its asking price of $1,295,000. Smart pricing will yield that result.
Summer Doldrums?
Exactly three houses went to contract last week, signifying the start of the summer real estate market which is usually pretty slow. Of course, the week between school letting out and the Fourth of July is historically one of our slowest weeks (Christmas to New Years isn’t any more exciting) so you can relax a bit – the world is not ending. But if your own house is on the market and you’re wondering where the buyers are, here’s the answer: they’re away. But like the swallows of Capistrano, they’ll be back. Hang on.
But a slow market does make writing this column harder – maybe I’ll post the next one from New Mexico. Here are some numbers, though: 203 houses went to contract last quarter (through July 10th). That’s an 18% drop-off from last year, probably due at least in part to buyers being priced out of town (average prices keep climbing). Are we doomed? I think not, but I also wouldn’t count on seeing your house appreciate 25% this year. Which is ultimately a good thing; a dose of reality and common sense injected into the market never hurts.
Road noise on Kinsman Lane?
The house could have been used to collect tolls, it’s so close to the highway!
Very nice older house, but I thought the location was a disaster. Just goes to show that there’s a buyer for everything.
In this case, I’ll bet it was someone from NYC whose former apartment was overlooking the on-ramp to the Holland Tunnel. Kinsman Lane probably seemed quiet by comparison!