Round Hill land sale?

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round hill.jpg

481 Round Hill Road, a 1959 house that looks as though it’s remained untouched for the past 60 years, has sold for $2 million.It sits on a beautiful, 4.5-acre lot, albeit one north of the Parkway, but the desperation of the house might scare off anyone thinking of renovating this: big job.

“Tennis court likely needs resurfacing. The pool has been closed for several years, the heater has been disconnected.” That doesn’t speak well of the condition of the actual house itself.

Give the broker credit though, because in the 10 months this property was listed, he held 20 public open houses and 14 agent-only tours. That’s a lot of scalping up the back country for a house that sold for just $2 million.

Yellow Formica is the new black granite

Yellow Formica is the new black granite


Mid Country Blues

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23 DUBLIN HILL DRIVE

23 DUBLIN HILL DRIVE

23 Dublin Hill Drive, 1994 construction, has dropped from its September, 2018 price of $4.8 million to $3.6 today. It’s a decent house, and Dublin is a nice street, but 25 Dublin, next store, was built in 2004 (by BSF), sold new that year for $6.725, and started off in March, 2018 at $5.995, without success. A year later, it’s been marked down to $4.2. The doesn’t bode well for 23, especially if 25 Dublin chases it down.

I’ve never know one of these see through double fireplaces to draw worth a damn; perhaps this is the exception

I’ve never know one of these see through double fireplaces to draw worth a damn; perhaps this is the exception

Would you buy a used house from this man?

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516 Round Hill Road

516 Round Hill Road

Well not necessarily the current owner, who finished the uncompleted project at 516 Round Hill Road, but the original builder, described back in 2008 in its original, $13.9 million listing as “Master Builder Dominick Devito”. Now, Dom is many things: funny, friendly, charming, but “Master Builder” is not a term that springs immediately to mind.

Dom’s also a convicted felon, and a repeated felon at that. In fact, in the middle of this construction Dom was convicted of mortgage fraud and sent back for a refresher course. Sadly for him, he was not returned to the relatively comfortable lodgings at Otisville, across the river, but was shipped instead to La Tuna federal prison, in the New Mexican desert on the Texas border, where conditions are harsher.

In any event, he’s back now, but no longer owns 516. Patriot Bank, which had loaned $6,000,000 ( cash, upfront, when only a hole in the ground existed. Draw your own conclusion about a loan officer who advanced such a large sum to a man with multiple criminal convictions on his record — the gentleman is no longer at Patriot, but he’s still in town, managing other people’s money – hmm), foreclosed, and finally resold it to the present owners for $3,000,000 in 2010. Patriot was lucky to get even that much: the building had sat empty, exposed to the weather ‚— no windows or doors, for instance — for several years, and more cautious builders might have shied away from such a potentially weakened house.

But these guys didn’t; they finished the place, eventually, and placed it on the market in 2013 at $8.9 million. No takers, so it’s been rented, on and off, ever since, with sporadic reappearances on the for sale lists. Today it was reduced to $6.7 million. Will that do it? Not close, in my opinion. Besides its iffy history of a house framed by a con man, and being left open to the weather for at least two (I remember 4) years, there’s the problem of the yard: despite its pictures, the yard is in fact a small scrap of land bulldozed together by Dom out of what were spolings from the foundation hole. After fifty feet or so, it falls off into the swamp below.

The location, a back lot waaay up Round Hill, doesn’t help, either.

I’d look for this place to still be on the market in late summer, and I’m not sure in what year that late summer will fall.

Pending off Round Hill

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28 French Road, $2.995 million, is reported as pending. Opening price back in February, 2017 (566 days ago) was $3.495, so while the wait was long, the owner seems to have gotten her price. I say “seems”, because we don’t know the final sales price yet.

Interesting, the town appraises this at just $2,264, 600, so if the sales price is close to $2.995, it will provide an exception to the near-accuracy of the town’s mid-country appraisals, just as its dated look runs counter to current tastes.

But it will all end on Inauguration Day, 2021

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Say goodbye to all that

Say goodbye to all that

Texas on track to surpass Saudi Arabia in oil exports by 2024.

YOU ALREADY KNOW IT’S TEXAS, RIGHT? This 1 State Is Turning America Into an Oil-Exporting Juggernaut.

That anticipated gusher of oil production growth in Texas has the industry planning to spend billions of dollars on building out the necessary infrastructure to move more barrels to global markets. Enterprise Products Partners is one of several companies working on oil pipelines in the region. The company is currently in the middle of converting an existing natural gas liquids line to oil service, which will help move additional Permian barrels toward the coast. Meanwhile, Canadian oil pipeline giant Enbridge (NYSE:ENB) is working with MLP Phillips 66 Partners (NYSE:PSXP) and refiner Marathon Petroleum (NYSE:MPC) to build the Gray Oak pipeline. That roughly $2 billion-system will move 900,000 BPD of crude from both the Permian as well as the Eagle Ford to refineries and export facilities along the coast of Texas.

As these and other export projects come online, they’ll enable the country to ship more oil overseas. According to Enterprise Products’ forecast, the U.S. is on track to exceed Saudi Arabia’s export capacity by 2024.

Tens of thousands of jobs, energy independence, nothing will matter when (if, I hope, though I’m pessimist about that) any of the Democrat candidates prevail; they have all vowed to stop production of fossil fuels.

WSJ catches up with For What it's Worth

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I’m outta here!

I’m outta here!

Wealthy Greenwich Home Sellers Give in to Market Realities

After four years on the market, and three price cuts, a stately Colonial-style home on Greenwich, Conn.’s tony Round Hill Road is being sold in a way that was once unthinkable in one of the country’s most affluent communities: It is getting auctioned off. Once asking $3.795 million, the four-bedroom property will be sold May 18 with Paramount Realty USA for a reserve price of just $1.8 million.

Seller Isaac Hakim, a real-estate investor, said it is time to move on. “We are ready to sell and I don’t want it to drag on,” he said. After raising their children there, he and his wife moved to Florida several years ago. 

While luxury home auctions are utilized in other parts of the country, they have rarely been seen in markets like Greenwich. Once a beacon for Wall Street’s top brass and still one of the richest towns in the U.S., Greenwich is facing a slew of issues.

Many wealthy New Yorkers are opting to live in the city, rather than in the suburbs. Some of the wealthiest, like Mr. Hakim, have decamped to Florida in search of more favorable tax rates. Banking executives who propped up the market with their yearly bonuses have also experienced cuts in compensation

The seemingly never-ending slump is leading some sellers to accept less—sometimes a lot less. Owners who paid top dollar for their homes in the Fairfield County town in the mid- to late-2000s are routinely selling for less than they paid. Dramatic price cuts are the order of the day. There were 45 properties in Greenwich priced at more than $5 million that had their price reduced by 10% or more in the 12-month period between April, 2018, and March, 2019, according to Realtor.com. Realtor.com is owned by Move, Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp .

Attorney Frank J. Gilbride II said one of his clients recently sold his home for $11.18 million, after buying it for $14.7 million in 2007. “We’re finding that the larger back country homes have not been selling recently, because the new buyers don’t want to maintain 10 acres of grass,” Mr. Gilbride said. “A lot of sellers are taking hair cuts of $1 million or more just to move on.”

The median price for a home in Greenwich dropped by 16.7% last year to $1.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2018, according to a recent report by brokerage Douglas Elliman. On the luxury end of the market, characterized by the top 10% of sales, prices dropped by 18.8%. Mr. Miller said that trend continued into the first quarter of 2019, estimating that the median price was down by more than 25%.

The average time a luxury home sits on the market in Greenwich is 357 days from its most recent price adjustment, Mr. Miller said. The only segment of the market performing well appears to be smaller, entry-level homes close to the train station, which are being snapped up by a new generation of buyers. The lowest priced condos currently on the market in that area start at around $330,000, according to Zillow.

Note that ““average time a luxury home sits on the market is 357 days from its most recent price adjustment; most of these homes have sat for far longer, taking price cuts all along. Thomas Peterffy’s Conyers Farm property at 25 Lower Cross Road, for instance, sold in 2017 for $21,000,000, 790 days after he put it up for sale at $65 million. He’d paid $45 million for the place in 2004 and, rumor has it, sunk at least an additional $20 million into renovations. His last “price adjustment” was to $29 million and even then, it turned out he had $8 million to go.