New listings

1 Turner Drive

Nothing much as of Friday noon. This one acre on Turner Drive (in Calhoun Association, off Glenville Road) was purchased for $2.1 million in 2007 and the owner has brought it back on for $1.995. The listing says it’s “opportunity priced” but I dunno – seems to me the opportunity was back in 2007, when it was first sold. Opporknockity only tunes once. Assessed value, $1.3 million.

190 Clapboard Ridge, on the nicer part of that street between Lake Avenue and Round Hill, is priced at $3.895, assessed value is $2.999. I’ll be curious to see where it sells.

Pricing decisions

718 North Street

This is a nice house, in need of renovation, perhaps, that was bought for $3.583 million in 2001, relisted for $4.350 in ’04 and slowly whittled down to $3.2 before being yanked today and put back on at $3.3 million. Okay by me, what the hell – nothing else seems to be working.

 

 

43 Doubling

This optimist on Doubling Road paid $5.155 in April 2008 and has got it back on for $5.2. Nice house, if you like that front-loader-garage sort of look – I don’t, but that’s just my taste. I’m thinking that the market has declined since last year but again, no one says you can’t try. Perhaps the owner drove a shrewd bargain back last year.

 

Finally, another property that had dropped below half its original asking price suddenly jumped $4 million today. Why? Perhaps the owner has come into cash and can now afford to wait for a good price. Or, possibly, he’s setting up a short sale and is receiving too much traffic to convince a bank that he’s cooked. If the latter is the case, and if it works, look for massive price increases to appear all over town. Wouldn’t that be amusing?

Isn’t it adorable? The children still believe in Santa Claus!*

A house came on today – 1966, redone (beautifully, I’ll add, but still with a 1966 exterior) in 2004, and priced at $4.3 million. It sold in a flash for full asking price of $3.9 million in 2006 so I guess I can understand the pricing reasoning here, but it’s my experience that house prices have declined since 2006, not increased, and with an appraised value of $1.9, it seems almost quaint to think that someone paid just about $4 million for this house just three years ago.

* Morticia to Gomez as Puglsey and his sister build a bonfire in the fireplace

Here are some high end new listings

62 Vineyard Lane

This is a gorgeous old Twachtman house on 5 acres on one of the prettier streets in town. A similar house, same era, sold for something close to this one’s asking price of $11.1 million, but that was in a stronger market. Will someone who still has money (and there are plenty of such people) ignore the market, pay asking price and throw in an additional – oh, I don’t know, $5 million? – to bring it up to date? Maybe.

And not quite new – it was originally listed in February but is coming back now as another brokerage’s listing after the demise of Country Living – is land at 471 Lake Avenue, 3 acres at $5.6 million. I know other land owners in that general area who also think their building sites are worth that much, but I don’t know any buyers who agree. Perhaps other agents do.

1964 2000 sq.ft. split-level: $3 million

4 acres on Hunting Ridge, comes with pool, tennis court and (attention, Walt!) horse stalls. I will refrain from adding, “cheap at twice the price”.

Open houses

Back from the Tuesday tour. It almost seems like a waste of time these days with so many houses grievously overpriced (an exception: 5 Kenilworth Terrace, asking $1.495. I did not see it but my brother Gideon, a good judge of these things, emailed me that it was “a good deal”. I’ll make an effort to see it). But otherwise, I saw houses for $3 that I thought might go for $1.75, maybe, and $4 million tear-downs sitting on land worth perhaps $1 million, if you can find a buyer for land these days. Painful.

A noteable exception to all this was, surprisingly, Bill Gardiner’s $25 million masterpiece at 253 Round Hill Road. The exterior’s of hand-hewn field stone, every proportion is exquisite, inside and out, and the detail work is phenomenal. The banister alone, hand carved, is reason enough to buy this house. It would be a wonderful thing to start my day coming down the stairs with my hand on this piece of art and just admire its beauty. The basement is huge – my form of entertainment growing up was hunting rats with a barbecue fork and a pellet rifle in my parents’ crawlspace. If your recreational tastes are more conventional, this is the place for you: 12′ ceilings, exercise room, sauna, theatre, etc. etc.

I have some quibbles. I might have made the master bedroom ten feet longer, but I understand the architect’s idea, I think, which is that the bedroom should be a protective space, not an airplane hangar, and besides, there’s a huge sitting room if you insist on space. The land itself, while beautifully landscaped, backs up to those two failed spec houses which were carved out of this property and built on S. Baldwin Farms. Eventually they will be finished and occupied or torn down, I suppose, but until then, you have a question mark as a neighbor.

So what’s the proper price for this place? I have no idea. There are still billionaires around and what’s $25 million to them? Lesser folks might blanch at that price but somewhere there’s a value here, whether that’s at $12.5, $15 million or full price I’ll leave to the rich folks. But a grand house, all in all.

New Listings?

A reader asked if people were still putting their houses up for sale or waiting out the current market. Good question, so I pulled some statistics. To my surprise, we seem to be adding new listings even faster than we did before. For instance, this month saw 104 new single family listings, compared to just 75 in 2007. For the year so far, 275 new listings, compared to 204 in 2007.

What we aren’t duplicating is the speed with which houses are moving off the market, so our inventory is soaring: 650 houses now, vs. 552 in ’07 and just 443 in ’06.