The triumph of hope over experience

When price, and loss of that price, is no object

460 North Street, on the market for just about a year at $20,000,000, reports a pending sale.

1908 construction, 12,400 sq. feet (with another 3,000 in the basement. The previous owners paid $8.650 for it in 2004, poured several million dollars into renovations and put it back up for sale in 2008 priced at $11.950 million. After four years, they sold it to the current owners for $7.987 million. Ouch.

I personally would run like hell from a house that previously couldn't find a buyer for four years, and even then had to sell at a multi-million-dollar loss, regardless of how many millions were spent improving it this cycle. And that fright would only be increased by a price tag of $20 million: there's almost no market in that range, especially for non-waterfront property perched on Greenwich's busiest street north of Route 1. These buyers either prove that I'm wrong or that P.T. Barnum was right. They don't call it "chump change" for nothing.

Obviously, anyone capable of paying this much mad money on a losing proposition has the wealth to not worry about losing a small portion of it: say, $10 million?, but unless he intends to stay put for a decade or two, or three, I expect he'll have to add many years of carrying costs to whatever else he loses. 

Nice house, though, and God bless buyers like these. 

UPDATE: Puff-piece from July, 2016 Architectural Digest here. Pretty sure I supplied this link back when the house hit the market then, but here it is again.