Getting there

Ole Amundsen’s place at 350 Riverside Avenue has dropped to $1.250 million, down from $2.650 back in 2009 when Eric Amundsen still thought he was selling a marina. He isn’t, thanks to the DEP and its crazy ass new regulations, so what Eric has is a single family home (which I mentioned to him ten years ago, but never mind). Pay a million bucks, renovate to the tune of $300,00 or so and bingo! Riverside waterfront, with dock. Not bad.

It’s a Wonderful Life

BOA's gone into the crapper, darn it!

Business Insider posts 13 weird things you didn’t know about the movie. In fact, I did know most of them but I was delighted by the fact that the FBI, viewing “its obvious hostility toward bankers” figured it was part of a communist plot. These days, we’d probably all be considered part of that plot.

Another accepted offer

Mentioned this place at 172 Valley Road just recently when its price dropped to $740,000 from an original pie-in-the-sky ask of $1.495 million. 0.66 acres, run down house but an approved lot split, should that be desired, not bad. Rumor, and only rumor, is that the magic number was $650,000.

Why leave Greenwich to hunt when the beasties are here?

A neighbor’s chicken was just carried off by a fox – that’s right here in crowded Riverside. And a friend in Hillside Park reports two bucks with huge antlers wandering around the back yard. I wasn’t kidding about mounting rhinobars on my Honda.

Another interesting year coming up?

Shit!

I know a fair number of people in the financial world and they have begun learning what their bonuses will be for this past year and how much of it will be deferred. For some, the news is not so terrific; in fact, we’re revising house search criteria downwards to reflect a new reality.

This could, of course, exert pressure in the less expensive market as more buyers crowd in but I think it even more likely that house prices will have to follow these incomes down. In my experience, the taste for certain amenities doesn’t disappear and buyers don’t stop demanding them. Rather, they’ll expect to buy the same thing, for less. We’ll see who wins that standoff, buyers or sellers.

Mr. Bill’s dreamland

A world without energy

The two Koreas - compare and contrast in 500 words or less. Time limit, 5 seconds

Houses still selling

20 Pond Place in Cos Cob asking $875,000 has an accepted offer already. I wrote about this two weeks or so ago because I thought it was a decent value. Obviously, someone else thought so too. And when I called around this morning to see about two other houses, in a higher price range, I learned that they both had accepted offers. In these cases, the houses each started out much higher  but with price cuts of approximately 50% and now priced below the town’s assessment, people are buying them. Not a surprise.

Paying your fair share

See you suckers in three weeks!

Going to Hawaii this Christmas? Well the Obummer family is (Michele and the girls have already left for the sun, trailing carbon emissions from a flight of seven jets) and it’s costing us – not them, us – $4 million. At that price, the only folks who can afford to head down there to protest this profligacy are those idle Occupy kids, and that’s only if their parents fork over the dough.

Friends don’t let friends buy in Byram

40 High Street sold Friday for $691,000, down from its 2005 purchase price of $799,500 (which was itself a big reduction from its original price that year of $959,000). Records indicate two mortgages on the property totalling $763,000.

Book burning in Egypt

They blame an Israeli plot, naturally. Couldn’t be religious fundamentalists.

“I TOLD you I was il!”

Kim Jong Il drops dead.