Another ho-hummer on Clapboard Ridge

Reminds me of Idle-a-while airport

65 Clapboard Ridge Road is back today with yet another broker but the same price it expired at last month, $7.995 million. The owner paid $10 million for it back in 2007, —more fool he — and has been trying to get rid of it since 2015, when he priced it at $12.995, apparently under the mistaken impression that he’d scored a coup with that 2010 purchase. Wrong, so very wrong.

The demand for 15,000 sq.ft homes is limited these days and, to this eye, they all seem pretty much the same: big, swooping entrance halls, kitchens with spaghetti faucets and Viking ranges that will never be used, unless the caterer forgets to bring her hot plates, dated master bathrooms, high taxes, and land that has to be maintained, never mind that the family and their guests won’t venture past the fencing that keeps deer and their ticks at a safe distance. If these houses aren’t exactly a dime a dozen, there are certainly dozens of them searching for buyers.

I wish the new agent luck; he’s a friend of mine, and sells a bunch of these things, but I’m not convinced that substituting brokers while retaining a failed price will accomplish much. What’s that (falsely attributed) '“Einstein” quote, now reduced to a cliche? “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”. It’s a cliche because it’s true. Get out an eraser, call the accountant, and work out the benefits, if any, of a long-term capital loss.

genius kitchen design: fill a pot with 8 pounds of cold water at the stove, add a pound of SPAGHETTI, bring to a boil and then manhandle the whole steaming thing over to the sink to drain it. Unwieldy, but at least you got to pay a plumber to provide a cold water line above the range. Trickle down economics, in a way.