47 Indian Field Rd: You Wanna Bargain? Here’s Your Bargain

Too late!  It’s gone to contract, but I do think it was quite a deal.

What you have here is a nice old 1900 house, on .57 acres, that was turned into a 3-family home.  Perhaps the next owner will turn it back into single-family, who knows.

47 Indian Field Road, Greenwich, CT

This is the busy part of Indian Field Road, not the part with the guard house, called “Mead Point”.  In case you’re wondering, here are the 7 properties that have sold in the last 12 months with an Indian Field Road address.

3-family home at 47 Indian Field Road, now has contract.

153 West Mountain Road, Ridgefield, CT

This place started out last year at $18,000,000, a damned good price, if it were in Greenwich.  Eventually the sellers realized it was Ridgefield, so the price has now been slashed to $11,750,000.

For all that, you get a truly grand house on…are you sitting down?…87.64 acres! 

That’s woods, fields, meandering brook, riding trails, meadows, lawns, pool, tennis court, stables, kennel, guest house, 12-car garage (!), country store (just kidding, no store). And all within a minute or two of “downtown” Ridgefield (actually a charming little hamlet).

I really want this, or at least want to sell it*.

*Note to selling broker: commission is only 2%.  You may want to negotiate that before showing.

Here’s the listing:  153 West Mountain Road

153 West Mountain Road, in Ridgefield. The driveway looks to be about a quarter mile long, so if you’e looking on GoogleMaps or Birdseye, look quite a distance from the road.

47 Doubling Road Under Contract: Chris Fountain Again!

Great Scott! Did I read that headline correctly? Yes friends, it is true, broker Chris Fountain has done still another deal as his streak continues uninterupted. This time it’s

47 Doubling Road.

Lately it’s beginning to feel like he’s the only one selling stuff!

Chris’s latest triumph, 47 Doubling. Started at $3.395M, reduced to $2.995M, now has contract. Pictured: maid’s quarters, lower level (this is one FANCY place!)

The Market Explained

Ha! Don’t I wish…

No, what puzzled a reader and I this week was the sale of two different Riverside properties

8 Indian Point Lane

9 Miltiades Avenue

at roughly equivalent prices (give’r’take a couple hundred thou). 

Judging by the average prices on the two streets, Indian Point Lane is clearly “superior”, but is it really a better place to live?  As one of my brothers reminded me, my parents, back in the early 1960’s, decided not to move from Gilliam Lane to way down Indian Head Road because it would have added a mile each way to my Dad’s daily walk to and from the train station (and the little Fountain brats would have had to be driven to Riverside School!)

So “convenience” can be a factor in determining where someone chooses to live in sprawling Riverside, but in the case of these two houses, I think the buyers of Miltiades wanted something they could move into right now. What they didn’t want was a house that needed months of updating, hiring the builder, the architect, the painter, and all the rest. “Ready -to-move-in” is worth a lot.

9 Miltiades Avenue, Riverside (rear-view), gets $2.650M this week. 6,000 square feet, move right in, close to everything ,including the train tracks!

8 Indian Point Lane, Riverside. Last ask: $2.495M, on the water (kinda), among the mansions, no train tracks! But needs updating, lots of updating.

 

CVS world headquarters?

Yep, now we have FIVE CVS branches. Add that to our 56 banks, and I’d say we’re a town ready for anything.
This latest CVS is at 644 West Putnam Avenue, corner of West Put and Weaver Street. The building was clearly designed for something more significant than a drug store, but landlords take what they can get these days. Very odd, driving up to this grand, modern building, only to see that it’s just another &@%#-ing CVS!

8 Indian Point Lane Gets A Deal

See, now this shows how “out of it” I can be, even for my home territory of Riverside…I just loved this house and it’s location, but the market? The market said “Ehh..”

Well, they said that to its first asking price of $4,795,000, but by the time it got down to $3,495,000, I thought a deal would happen.  When it didn’t, the owners finally threw in the towel and cut to $2,495,000, and now, finally, praise be to Allah, a contract!

So what was the problem?  This is certainly one of the prime-of-the-prime Riverside addresses where someone (my client) once paid $22,000,000 just for land! But the challenge here was that despite its 1.5 acres, only about .5 was useable, the rest being wetlands.  That meant a buyer would have to work with the existing house, a perfectly nice, 1940’s colonial with dated updating.  That’s what drove the price down.

To see the listing, click on the address link below the photo.

8 Indian Point Lane, Riverside. To Gideon Fountain? A perfect place to live. But the market disagreed, all the way down to $2.495M.

How To Sell Real Estate: Lesson 26

Great Scott, have I posted 25 of these little lessons already?? (No, but I liked the sound of that “lesson 26 ” )

So here I go again, passing on pearls of salesmanship wisdom, otherwise known as painfully obvious conclusions…

A client of mine has been actively looking for a couple of months in the $3M-$4M range. He’s bid on a few, never enough to make the deal. Meanwhile, eight of the properties he’s looked at have gone to contract! That fact should be significant to a buyer, yes? If eight out of ten things you’ve visited sell soon afterwards, you can safely conclude the following:

• The properties you’re looking at are desirable.

• There really is a market going on out there, you are not alone!

• You should probably bid higher if your goal is to own something.

Again, all obvious stuff, but if your client is the busy sort, he may not be putting it all together. So the smart broker does it for him, sends an e-mail with the eight listings and says LOOK WHAT’S HAPPENING.

Now you’ll have an educated, up-to-speed client who is ready to pounce on the next one. Class dismissed.

2 Parsonage Road, started at $4.295M, reduced to $3.975M, now has a deal. This is one of the eight that a client of mine was considering for purchase.

Christopher Fountain’s Business Model: What Can We Learn?

Since blogger Chris Fountain is safely out of town bear(ly) hunting, now might be a good time to discuss the “business-model” he seemingly represents.

The subject occurred to me recently when a broker remarked on Chris’s selling streak. I’ve linked to just three recent ones that I’m aware of, but there are at least three more heading to contract, all within a very short period.

The broker observed that Chris is a really good writer, which we can all agree with. Only trouble was, he wasn’t making a living at it. Oh, sure, John le Carré, James Patterson, J K Rowling, people like that certainly do make a living at it, but for most writers? Fuggetaboutit.

So Chris, real estate broker/writer starts a real estate blog and, after a few years, builds up a daily following of tens of thousands of readers. And guess what, a number of those readers get turned into Chris Fountain real estate clients. He earns commissions and gets to write for a large audience!

Is there a parallel to this in another field? Maybe a frustrated song-writer who ends up making piles of money composing TV commercial jingles? Not quite the same thing. Maybe there is no parallel.

7 Wynn Lane, “mid-country” Greenwich, another Chris Fountain deal (I showed it plenty of times, I get nothing!). Ask was $4.495M.

For The Week Nov. 12 – Nov. 16: 17 “Accepted Offers”

17 accepted offers, including…

651 Steamboat Road has a deal! I call Steamboat Road “downtown waterfront”, and this was a perfect example. Ask was $3.695M.

For The Week Nov. 12 – Nov. 16: 14 “Executed Contracts”

And, by golly, here they are….

14 “executed contracts” reported this past week.  These are the real deal, as opposed to mere “accepted offers” (up next).

505 Indian Field Road (“Mead Point”), aerial view, reports executed contract this week; bought by (surprise!) the adjoining neighbor. Ask was $8.750M for tear-down contemp on 3.7 acres of tidal waterfront.