And yet another chart

What? Obama lied?

Chris Murphy loves sailors, of any country

And we love you too, young man!

Connecticut Democrat senate candidate Chris Murphy is out with an ad extolling his support for submarines and the men who drive them, but chose a Ula Class Norwegian sub to illustrate that affection. No better, no worse, than the DNC proudly presenting a video of Soviet-era ships that the Democrats assumed were ours.

One sale, two accepted offers, one price reduction

Cross Lane: Byram’s got nothing on Cos Cob swimmers.

39 Cross Lane (Cos Cob, if the above-ground pool didn’t already give that away), sold for $960,000. This was a decent house on a good street.

28 Oval Avenue, Riverside, asking $1.275 has (another) accepted offer. Another very decent house, I thought, dated and in need of updates but a reasonable amount of money spent here would make sense.

23 Dorchester, also in Riverside, asking $1.295, also reports an accepted offer. This is plain vanilla structure housing but it’s also, like Oval, about what you should expect to pay for this level house in Riverside. Walk to schools, trains, but forget playing polo in the backyard.

28 Thunder Mountain

The owners of 28 Thunder Mountain Road, so named because of the roar of the nearby Merritt, bought it new from its builder for $5.650 million back in 2008,  after he’d marked it down from its 2006 price of $6.495. That doesn’t look like such a bargain today (but what 2008 price does?) as they’ve cut its price from $5.9 to $5.295. Less than they paid for it, but this road and a number beginning with a “5” don’t feel as though they belong together. At least, not to me.

Long suffering broker

 

6 Meadowbank

6 Meadowbank Road in Old Greenwich has sold for $1.305 million, 1,253 days after it was first listed at $1.699. The owner was obviously not ready to sell back in 2009 or she’d have priced her 0.19 acre appropriately, but I’m sure her broker was ready to move this house long ago.

Tough choice

A friend loaned me an NRA cap when we were at the range the other day (he thinks he loaned it; I kept it) and I’m torn. I already have a cap, a Greenwich Shellfish Warden one, nicely sun-faded with a pretty gold scallop on the front, but what says “F*** You” to regressives better than one sporting the NRA logo? I think I’ll wear the latter until after the election and depending on who wins, maybe the next four years after that.

When in doubt, offend

This could be really nice land

201 Clapboard Ridge, 5.3 acres in the 2-acre zone and just off Round Hill Road, is new to the market and asking $3.295. It’s a back lot and some of that acreage is devoted to an access strip but there’s a lot of usable land here and this price seems to be in line with recent land sales in the neighborhood. The open house is next week, and I look forward to checking it out.

In Shorelands: Buy this house, now.

11 Grimes Rd

11 Grimes Road has reduced its price again and is now asking $2.495 million for five bedrooms, newish (2003) construction and a stroll down the lane to the Shorelands beach and docks. They sellers paid $2.775 for it in 2005 so the hit’s been taken and this place is now, in my opinion, below current market value. I’ve got clients above and below this price range but I’m still going to send it to each category because maybe someone wants to save money, or spend more to get into Shorelands. You don’t know if you don’t ask.

Aw, this is sad news: George McGovern, 90, is in a hospice

 

They put the wrong guy into the looney bin, but what the heck

Even those who disagreed with his politics liked the man himself. I’ve always been grateful to him because when he ran for president in 1972 I, at the callow age of 18, realized that if the man was supposed to represent everything I believed in, I had to rethink my beliefs – the man’s policies were just crazy. That’s when I found libertarianism.

Wonderful story of his trying to run a bed and breakfast in Stratford and being driven out of business by our state’s and the federal government’s regulations. He had one of those “if I’d known then what I know now” moments and became a champion of fewer, if not no, regulations on people and businesses.  He had a good long life, served his country during the war and was still capable of learning in his advanced years. Pretty cool guy.

(Almost) in-town living, for a price

 

26 North Street (actual photo)

26 North Street, a 1904 house on 2.13 acres in the R-20 zone reports an accepted offer after just 42 days on market, which suggests that someone will be paying close to its asking price of $5.695 million. Gosh.

The land was listed as two parcels but both are going to one buyer so I hope it’s being sold to a homeowner who plans on keeping them together.

Even Riverside gets the blues

 

26 Bramble Lane (representative photo)

26 Bramble Lane has hit the market today, asking $3.395 million. The owners bought it new in 2007 for $3.725 and this price seems a reasonable recognition that 2007 and its prices are no longer with us.

Attention homeowners: the fall market has been cancelled due to lack of interest

Only eleven (!) homes on the broker open house tour today; all are repeats except for a land sale on Winthrop in Riverside, which I won’t go see because (a) open houses on that side of town are supposed to be held on Thursday and it’s a bad thing to encourage agents to flout this schedule and (b) who needs to see the inside of a house being sold for land anyway?

Still, it’s pretty unusual for there to be essentially no open houses to view when it’s only mid-October. Our fall market never really commenced and what faint stirrings of life it may have shown ended the week after Labor Day. Time to lock in those oil rates, homeowners, because you’ll be buying it all winter.

UPDATE: Another agent writes to inform me that Wilson Alling’s memorial service was held this morning and so many agents didn’t schedule open houses. I didn’t mention Wilson’s death last week because I thought it would be presumptuous of me – I knew him as a very nice, really good agent, but we had no close personal relationship and didn’t want to give the impression that I did. But there were many in town who did know him very well, and their praise was universal.

179 Connecticut Ave. (representative photo)

There is one modest home reported as having an accepted offer, 179 Connecticut Avenue, asking $1.050. Price history on this is  $780,000, ’03, $1,037,500 ’06 and now $1,050,000 (after improvements in 2012). I like Connecticut Avenue’s location but the houses on this, the east side of the street, overlook the chicken coops and outhouses below them and that, to my mind, detracts from their value.

There’s a buyer for everything, however, and this sale proves it.

Time to lowball that weekend house of his on Pecksland?

144 Pecksland Rd (representative photo)

Vikram Pandit out at Citi. Don’t know what his plans are – he hasn’t called – but unlike its owner, his place at 144 Pecksland Road doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and maybe the timing’s right for him to unload it: fresh start and all that.

He paid $4.1 million in 2001 and after a bit of a false start, he’s now marked it down to $3.995. I’d toss $3.3, $3.4 at it and see what response you get. Probably nothing, but bids are free.

You can level down, but not up, a lesson “progressives” can’t learn.

Fresh from raising the capital gains tax to 75%, France now wants to ban homework. Not because homework is an ineffective pedagogical tool but because “some homes are unconducive for studying” and those that are give some children an unfair advantage over their peers. As one commenter describes it, it’s a “no child gets ahead program”.

This grand idea hasn’t hit Connecticut yet (although I’m sure Malloy’s teacher union would delight in  bringing all “learning” in-house), but eventually our own levelers will recognize that no matter how much of Fairfield County’s money is shifted to Hartford, a child of a sixteen-year-old illiterate crack mom will never achieve at the level of a student who goes home to a family that values education. Then what happens?

Economy dying, its largest city dead, Michigan voters have the opportunity to drive the final nail

Constitutional amendment on the ballot that would permanently require “renewable energy” for 25% of its electrical generation. But not to worry, through the magic of liberal wishful thinking, the amendment will also cap electrical rates at a 1% increase per year – no mention made as to how one quadruples the cost of producing a product yet keep its price where it is but as I said, it’s magic.

New studies show that in fact the earth stopped warming sixteen years ago, something that even the most ardent warmists now admit, while denying that this means Al Gore’s off the hook. Even if warming were to resume, those same critics admit that the figures show that their computer models used to predict drowned polar bears and all sorts of mean, nasty things are screwed up; in a normal world, people might wait before sending their economy down the rat hole because of some unproved theory and enshrining that requirement in its constitution, but neither Michigan nor California is part of a normal world.