Every seller's nightmare: no one wants your house

33 Meeting House Road has cut its price again — eleven years on the market and counting — to $4.695 million, which is $900,000 below the town’s appraisal. It’s a gorgeous house, custom built for this owner in 2006, and though I thought its original 2008 price of $7.795 was a tad high, I never thought it would be stuck on the market for a decade plus.

Meeting House values have been hammered for years by the hulking wreck of Jimmy Licata’s abandoned building project a bit down the street from this property, but I’d thought the bankruptcy, foreclosure and suits-counter-suits were cleared up a couple of years ago, and that the gargantuan eyesore was on its way to erasure. I haven’t been down that road to check, and I suppose if it’s still there, then the failure of this house to sell is understandable.

But it is a large amount of beautifully constructed house for this price, seems to me. I’d say it was worth a gamble that the Licata stigma will eventually ease and that this one would increase in value, but I’m sure the builders of this residence never imagined that they’d own it eleven years after they decided to sell it, so Meeting House Road may continue to surprise and disappoint.