Probably no need to rush on this one

Hunting-Lodgey places have never been big sellers in Greenwich, and are definitely a drag on the market now

2 Conyers Farm is back as a “new” listing (new broker; otherwise unchanged) at $4.795 million. It’s comprised of a beautifully redone guest cottage and a 10-acre building lot, with wetlands, and that hasn’t proved to be a winning combination during the years this has been on the market.

The owners paid $5.350 for it in 2012 — more fools they — and have been trying to unload it since 2014, when they started at $6.995.

Ironically, I attended a Romney fund-raiser up at Conyers in 2012 (as an invited, free-loading guest, I assure you, not one of $10,000 donors), the year these people bought 2 Conyers, and dined at a small table with some delightful people, including Ari Fleisher and his wife, and a couple who were neighbors of our host. Conversation eventually evolved from politics to real estate, focusing on the decline of Conyers Farm values, and those neighbors told me that at least half the homes up there were “quietly for sale”. I believed them then, and I imagine that that figure has only increased in the years since.

My best guess is that it would require at least ten, probably fifteen million to buy this land, landscape it, and build a mansion. Who on earth would do that, when he could pick up someone else’s $10 million mistake for half that number?

And what good is a ten-acre lot anyway? The owner spends weekdays in the City, comes home in darkness, heads out to his Montana condominium on weekends, and doesn’t play polo. That “Man in Full”, Charles Croker’s 29,000 acre Georgia quail hunting plantation “Turpimtime” offered some useful space, but what does one do with ten acres in Greenwich, except to maintain it and never use it? Times, and tastes have changed.

Developer John Fareri paid $1.050 for this land in 1994, and that may be exactly where this property is heading, however slowly.